voluntaryXchange

Chicago Got Hit by a Category 3 Hurricane

The huge winter storm that came through the upper midwest last week recorded the lowest inland barometric pressure ever: the equivalent of a category 3 hurricane (like Katrina at landfall).

In fact, this storm bottomed out at 956 millibars, 5 points lower than Hurricane Georges – the big one that forced us to flee New Orleans for Hattiesburg in 1998.

Gongol linked to this map.

Serendipity: I surfed to this fact this morning, and then saw it on a week-old Gongol post this evening. I’d started by listening to Gordon Lightfoot, which got me to look up the Edmund Fitzgerald on Wikipedia, which lead to the Great Storm of 1913 (who cares), and then to Great Storms of the North American Great Lakes, which listed Chiclone of 2010. When you see a word like that, you just have to know what it is.

Technorati Tags: chiclone,barometric,pressure

The Reason for New Orleans

As noted before at vX, New Orleans exists because it was a portage site.

The Mississippi is long and winding – it’s nearly 100 miles from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. Tough going for a sailing ship.

New Orleans is the point where the Gulf’s lagoons – Lake Ponchartrain and Lake Borgne – are closest to the river. In fact, small ships did sail right up Bayou St. John into what is now the heart of the city.

Now there’s a paper looking at how portage sites are still leading to local increasing returns to scale:

A new NBER paper got me thinking about the same thing in a surprising context: river portages. I think this stuff is riveting. [-]

Portage: Path Dependence and Increasing Returns in U.S. History

Hoyt Bleakley, Jeffrey Lin

We examine portage sites in the U.S. South, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, including those on the fall line, a geomorphologic feature in the southeastern U.S. marking the final rapids on rivers before the ocean. Historically, waterborne transport of goods required portage around the falls at these points, while some falls provided water power during early industrialization. These factors attracted commerce and manufacturing. Although these original advantages have long since been made obsolete, we document the continuing—and even increasing—importance of these portage sites over time. We interpret this finding in a model with path dependence arising from local increasing returns to scale.

Of course, I grew up in the Buffalo suburbs, and Buffalo is the end point of one of the biggest portage avoidances in the world: how to get from New York City to the Great Lakes.

Via Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed.

Technorati Tags: portage,new,orleans,buffalo

Katrina Retrospective

Two reporters for The New Orleans Times-Picayune rode bikes through the part of the city I used to live in on the afternoon of the day that Katrina hit.

They retraced the route for the 5th anniversary, and have posted the video below, as well as before and after photos (includine ones taken earlier in that day than any others I’ve ever seen).

Bicycling into the heart of the flood: A Hurricane Katrina remembrance

For me, the most interesting points are:

• 0:20  - these cars 6 blocks from where we used to live.
• 1:40 - this bridge is 2 blocks from where I used to live.
• 2:00 - the left hand turn of the cooler he describes is either down our old street, or one street to the north.
• 3:20 - mentions 5 feet of water on my old street.

Hat tip to MJ who saw this on John Topoleski’s Facebook page.

Technorati Tags: katrina,new,orleans,before,after

Decenratlization as a Foundation for “the West”

Don Boudreaux offers an opinion that I like, and had not heard before:

Democracy neither brings modernity nor is an essential element of it.  The fountainhead of the western freedoms and institutions that Mr. Stephens rightly admires was the fractured and overlapping jurisdictions that emerged in western Europe following the collapse of the Roman empire.  The happy, if unintended, result was an inability of any one authority (say, a prince or a pope) to exercise complete sovereignty over the populace.  From this fractured sovereignty the rights of man slowly sprung, and only much later did democracy as we know it develop.

I’ve always recognized that one of the beauties of America is the overlapping jurisdictions – they give the riff-raff in government fits.

In particular, large American cities – most of which don’t work well – are conglomerations of what should be separate entities, but which in fact are not.

For example, I used to live in New Orleans (Boudreaux’s home town). But, I lived in Lakeview – a little island of sanity in a place that isn’t much better than a third world city with better wallpaper. The longer I lived in Lakeview, the less I went to the other parts of New Orleans proper: it was largely self-contained. If so, what’s the point of keeping it in New Orleans; ah yes … it’s where most of the tax revenue that funded the rest of the city came from.

Technorati Tags: decentralization,lakeview,new orleans,democracy,west,developed

10 Cities of the Noughties

Five years ago voluntaryXchange posted about how there wasn’t a yet an American city representative of the decade (and here too) that some are calling the noughties.

Think about it:

• 20’s = Chicago (organized crime)
• 30’s = Los Angeles (movies)
• 40’s = Washington (war)
• 50’s = New York (live TV)
• 60’s = San Francisco (counterculture)
• 70’s = Houston (oil money)
• 80’s = Miami (style)
• 90’s = Seattle (coffee, grunge and Frasier)
• 00’s = ???

I gave 3 initial candidates, and noted that if anything it is the decade of the southwest. Commenters added a few more, and later on a piece in The Wall Street Journal added a few more. I have two more additions for the last half of the decade.

It isn’t a positive thing, but many of us will identify the noughties with New Orleans because of Katrina, and New York because of 9/11, for many years to come.

And, it isn’t really a city at all, but we’re also going to remember the overpriced, overhyped, exurban subdivisions characteristic of the inland empire.

So, here’s the list of 10 cities we’ll associate in our minds with the noughties:

• Phoenix
• Las Vegas
• Salt Lake City
• Denver
• Austin
• Charlotte
• Riverside and the Inland Empire
• Dallas
• New Orleans
• New York

Technorati Tags: city,decade,noughties,oughts

Justice!

Former New Orleans Representative Bill Jefferson, was sentenced to 13 years in prison today.

Good riddance. Everyone knew this guy was dirty in the 90’s.

Technorati Tags: william,jefferson,bribery,new,orleans

Holt Cemetery Clean-Up

I just came across this photo essay from last year about a clean-up of Holt Cemetery in New Orleans.

Holt is a traditionally black cemetery, and was never many notches above a potter’s field.

Holt was a few short blocks from where we lived from 1995-2000. I posted about how it came through Katrina here.

This photo is from about 10 years ago.

Technorati Tags: holt,cemetery,new orleans

Al Copeland Has Died

Popeye's Chickent never needed performance bonds.

Excuse # 3: Videoconferenced Ph.D. Class

For the second summer in a row, I’ll be teaching Macroeconomic Theory I to the students in the Ph.D. program in financial economics at the University of New Orleans.

This is a class I taught there from 1993 to 2000, before leaving the Ph.D. program world for undergraduate and MBA pastures.

The whole thing is being done via videoconferencing.

New Orleans Isn't Coming Back

The Census Bureau reported that Orleans Parish (effectively, the city of New Orleans) led the nation in population growth in percentage terms in 2006-7.

The 14% growth sounds great. The raw number of 29K sounds good too ... but compared to what?

The report doesn't mention the tables on this page that you have to tunnel through links to get at. These show a drop in the population of the New Orleans metropolitan area of 286K since 2000.

Yes, some of that is coming from the surrounding parishes, but the bottom line is that from 10 to 22 months after Katrina (the time frame covered by the Census Bureau) only about 10% of the people who fled the storm moved back.

Non-statisticians may be inclined to extrapolate that and claim that in 10 years New Orleans we'll be back. Unfortunately, that isn't the way the growth works.

In order for growth to carry New Orleans population back to what it was before, it will have to follow an approach path that is asymptotic to (something like the) old population levels. That asymptotic behavior requires growth rates that start high and tale off towards zero. This means that next year the growth of Orleans Parish will probably be lower.

The size of that drop-off is the next big problem. If growth rates stay close to 10%, then New Orleans will recover quickly.

In fact if growth rates only decrease by a tenth every year, then it might recover the half of the population it lost to Katrina in about 12 years (assuming that growth rates bottom out at the replacement rate of 2%).

But, do we really expect growth rates to decline that slowly?

I'm speculating, but I think rates might drop more quickly.

The sad thing is because of the multiplicative aspects of the underlying math, it doesn't take much of a decline in growth rates in the 2nd year for New Orleans to never recover.

In terms of raw numbers, if population growth in New Orleans comes in a year from now at 25K, we're looking at 2 generations for New Orleans to recover. At 24K, a quarter of the people who left will never, ever, come back. At 22K it will be half.

Check back here in March 2009 for an update.