ABSTRACT
On August 29, 2005, the nation watched as Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast. The scale of destruction was staggering. As a consequence of the immediate crisis alone, 1,600 people lost their lives.1 Property damage estimates across Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama range from $125 billion to $156 billion.2 In New Orleans alone, nearly 200,000 homes were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Along the Mississippi Gulf Coast another 70,000 homes were destroyed. The shock and trauma imposed by the physical destruction seemed only to be matched by the shock and trauma of a failed disaster response.3 When evacuation efforts were finally underway, many found themselves far from home without family or friendship ties that might otherwise lend support. When they returned, many residents of towns along the Mississippi Gulf Coast found that their homes literally had been washed away. Others faced the difficult process of gutting their homes to the studs and starting over. Because of the bowl-like topography of New Orleans, it wasn’t until October that the water could be completely pumped from the city. When the first residents returned to New Orleans, the circumstances were anything but hospitable. Storm debris blocked roads, there was no access to clean water, no electrical service, none of the area businesses were open, the contents of homes and businesses had been festering for weeks, and the mold was advancing by the day. Those who waited for a more hospitable moment to begin the rebuilding process often returned to an even worse set of circumstances, as looting and the damage caused by an extended period between flooding and gutting wreaked further havoc. As severe as the physical damage was, however, no description or accounting of it could fully capture the costs of recovery or the scope of the challenge. Residents did not just suffer the personal costs of a home that had been severely damaged or destroyed; frequently they also lost their entire neighborhood and the social systems that, under ordinary times, make their lives “work.” The businesses that provided employment and the goods and services necessary to daily life were destroyed. The schools, hospitals, churches, and non-profit organizations around which families had woven their lives were shut down. A successful return was not just about rebuilding one’s home (as daunting as that prospect was on its own). A successful return required residents to solve simultaneously
several problems, many of which were out of their immediate control. A returning resident needed a place to stay, a job, financial resources for rebuilding, schools for their children, transportation, and the services of utilities, area businesses, and local government. Businesses additionally needed clients and employees. Absent some orchestrated effort, the residents and business owners that moved back first took on disproportionate risk. But if everyone waited for everyone else to move back first, the community would fail to rebound. In short, the post-Katrina context presented a collective action problem of significant proportion.4 Though it was widely assumed that the major commercial and tourist areas would be rebuilt, it wasn’t at all clear whether and how any particular residential neighborhood might rebound. Given the level of destruction, many post-disaster communities posed a genuinely open question to which no academic or political leader could honestly provide an answer in the abstract: the question of whether recovery was possible. Would residents return and rebuild? Would businesses reopen? Would the social systems that made normal life possible rebound? The fact that New Orleans was among the poorest cities in the country dimmed the prospect of a robust recovery there even further.5 Particularly in the context of New Orleans, the paradigm that shaped the public policy discourse was that a large-scale government response was the obvious and only remedy to solve the problems presented by catastrophic disaster. Others went as far as to say that the recovery effort would offer the city of New Orleans an opportunity to reinvent and redesign itself. But as the months wore on, the city’s redevelopment planning efforts met with successive rounds of political resistance. Months of frustration and delay turned into years while the redevelopment planning process continued to flounder, and it became increasingly clear that there would be no swift and effective government solution. Yet, the weeks, months and early years following the storm also presented some interesting patterns in terms of community rebound. Some communities demonstrated robust signs of recovery right from the start; others appeared to be caught in a state of suspended animation, with residents and community leaders unable to gain significant momentum forward. This was not only true across different states affected by the storm, but across neighborhoods within New Orleans. This variation of experience presented further questions. Why does one neighborhood rebound, while another limps along? In communities that experienced a swift and robust recovery, how was their success achieved? In communities that experienced slower rates of return and rebound, what were the particular barriers they faced? What motivated those who did return and how did they carve out effective strategies of action? Singular explanations like floodlevels or median income, though important, leave a great deal to be explained when considering the varied experience of post-Katrina recovery across communities. For all the personal tragedy and devastation it wrought, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath had also offered social scientists an extraordinary opportunity
to address questions such as these and to draw attention to and examine social dynamics that under normal circumstances escape the notice of academics, political leaders, and ordinary citizens. A diverse array of scholars and disaster specialists were quick to seize the opportunity to learn from the challenges Katrina presented.6 My colleagues at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and I were among them. Shortly after the storm, the Mercatus Center launched a project under the name Crisis and Response in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina.7 The larger project sought to address the following question: What gives society the ability to respond and rebound in the aftermath of disaster (and what inhibits it from doing so)? The members of the research team addressed this question from the perspectives of political economy, entrepreneurial response, and civil society.8 The tools that would be brought to bear in addressing these questions included political economic theory and the standard quantitative tools of the economics discipline. But many of the issues that the post-Katrina environment posed and the questions the researchers involved in the project were raising required qualitative tools as well. This was particularly true when it came to understanding the role civil society was playing in the post-disaster environment. If we wanted to understand the ways in which people were relying on the resources embedded within their networks of friendship, or their faith communities, or their beliefs about their own capacity to rebound and rebuild, we would need to get on the ground and talk to people. If we wanted to understand how post-disaster policy was helping and/or frustrating communities in their effort to rebound, we needed to learn from those who were navigating this novel and difficult terrain. In the three years following the storm the qualitative research team interviewed 300 subjects in New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish, and Harrison and Hancock Counties, MS.9 We asked people about their experiences related to the storm and the rebuilding process, but we were also interested in understanding the routines of community life before Katrina, because it was often this context that set the stage for why and how people would endure (and perhaps overcome) the hardships of the recovery process. Because it was their perceptions, experiences, and discoveries (pre-and post-Katrina) that we were interested in hearing, we encouraged interview subjects to provide as much detail as they were willing to give. Some had a lot to say; others were more parsimonious. But typically, interviews lasted between seventy-five and ninety minutes. The recorded and transcribed interview data and the analysis that emerged from this “leg” of the project forms the basis of what is written here. Thus, this book contributes to the bourgeoning literature on the social, political and economic impact of Hurricane Katrina, but it does so from the perspective of people seeking solutions on the ground: residents, business owners and employees, school administrators and teachers, and those working within the context of religious and non-profit organizations. This book seeks to understand how people cultivate strategies for recovery when the answers are not obvious; when a genuine process of discovery is required; and at points when the social coordination problems a post-disaster environment presents are most pronounced.
The analysis presented in this book suggests that at its core, post-disaster community redevelopment is a process of complex social learning. By “social learning,” I am referring to the phenomenon whereby society achieves a level of coordination and cooperation that far exceeds our ability to intentionally design it. I argue that the recovery process depends crucially upon decentralized systems of experimentation, discovery, and exchange found within commercial and civil society. I also argue that government action can be critical in either supporting or undermining the redevelopment potential within private commercial and civil society. The analysis offered here suggests, however, that postdisaster recovery is a process that is driven largely by bottom-up discovery and action-discovery and action that is fundamentally embedded within a particular social, cultural and political context. This project is appropriately included in a book series dedicated to the advancement of heterodox economics, an intellectual movement that embraces both a spirit of pluralism within the discipline and a spirit of interdisciplinarity beyond it. The analysis presented here is informed by perspectives outside the mainstream of the economics discipline, particularly the work of Austrian economists such as F.A. Hayek. And though the work of Hayek and others within the Austrian school offer a useful starting point, their work and the particulars of this project point to the need to go beyond the narrower confines of economics and political economy to include cultural sociology and anthropology so as to build understanding of what I am calling a “cultural economy.” Further, as a heterodox project, this book is able to explore the intersection between cultural processes (for example, community norms and historical narratives that inform strategies for individual and community rebound) and political-economic processes (such as the political economy dynamics created through post-disaster redevelopment planning). In the chapters that follow I argue that the social learning that unfolds within commercial and civil society is critically dependent upon the institutional rules that emerge out of the political economy context. All that said, such a project only appears “heterodox” to the contemporary economist because our discipline has lost touch with its roots in classical social theory. The classical theorists such as Smith (2000 [1759], 1991 [1776]), Hume (1902 [1777]), Durkheim (1965 [1912], 1966 [1897]), and Weber (1978 [1922], 1992 [1930]) posed question like: What makes a complex social order possible? How can generalized beneficence arise from the individual pursuit of selfinterest? What is the relationship between sympathy, virtue, and reason in the social order? How does economic order emerge out of and in turn support the moral order? At their heart, these are all questions related to social learning. The cases examined in this book will provide some practical lessons for how we might think about post-disaster recovery. But the broader aim is to understand how healthy societies function and what, in contrast, inhibits the social learning process. By examining the post-disaster context in which much of the order we take for granted is (at least for a time) shattered, we have an extraordinary opportunity to learn about how the social order works (and what can inhibit it from working) more generally.
