[Leanan]

USA Today has an article about why we are not as eager to rebuild after 9/11 and Katrina as we were after previous disasters (the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, the Galveston hurricane, etc.).

The reasons the article gives - cities that were on the rise, but are now on the decline, the fact that there's so much more to rebuild now - reminds me of Tainter's work. He argues that's never a natural disaster that's the root cause of a society's collapse. It may be the final straw, but it's declining marginal returns on complexity that's the root cause. That is, not enough energy to support the increasing complexity needed to keep the society going.

[linlithgowoil]

Good point about complexity. Its definetly true that as things get more and more complex, it takes more and more resources/money simply to keep them from collapsing into less complex states.

Also, things are far more expensive today than they have ever been - I'm talking about basics like construction work and all that - not consumer junk from china.

Rebuilding nowadays is massively expensive and maybe not worth it. I certainly think that western societies have perhaps reached their peak of complexity - the tipping point where you cant really make things any more sophisticated or complex because of the prohibitive costs - i.e the law of diminishing returns which appears to be universally true and applicable to many different things in life.

[Wildwell]

I’m definitely a ‘fan’ of this complexity thing, mainly because you can see it all around.

- Increasing law, bureaucracy. Every time a new law is made, this means more paperwork, more money, more admin, and more education. With Health and Safety laws, things get ‘gold plated’ unnecessarily - Risk assessment and aversion costs huge amounts of money. Every time there is an industrial accident people cry, ‘We must spend more on X to ensure this never happens again’. In effect millions or even billion of dollars are spent on ‘guessing the future’ for no good reason.

- Increasing education. Does it actually make any sense to send so many people to university, when a large number leave to do jobs that don’t require such skills? With increasingly complexity more and more learning needs to take place just to keep a reasonable income. Persons working in sectors like IT, Law and Medicine spend countless hours just to stand still. As soon as you’ve mastered one software application, out comes another. This means companies have to spend huge amounts of money retraining just to stay competitive.

- Increasing specialisation means instead of one person doing 5 jobs, now 5 people need to do 5 jobs, as those posts get more specialised you need 10 people and so on. This all adds to the cost of the end product, producing more marginal returns. Communication gets more difficult between posts, needing more managements, more admin and more costs = less marginal return.

- More waste. Increasing competition creates waste overall, because by its nature you have excess capacity, although economists would argue competition creates efficiency, this is only true to a point.

- Increasing financial disasters. In the UK some 8/10 business go bust, increasing complexity adds to their problems.

- Financial and intellectual disparity. As the well connected and intelligent tend to get richer, the less gifted of society tend to be unable to complete in work and leisure. For example there’s an increasing underclass of people unable to keep up with the latest developments in technology. The result is more social services and more tax, this in order to prevent hardship to the poor. Historically the poor tend to rebel after a certain point, resulting in riots, strike, even revolution, which costs more money.

- All of the above is made worse by rising energy and resource costs and environmental disasters.


Collapse is certain, its not if but when. To date a lot of the problems have been got around by 'offshoring', but this will eventually mean a crunch in itself.

[Dreamtwister]

Even civilizations are slaves to thermodynamics. Cities are areas of low entropy, they require a massive input of energy to function.

Besides, rebuilding the big easy is going to cost lots of money. Nobody has any.

[Revi]

I have a friend who is down in New Orleans cleaning the place up. It is a huge task, and they aren't anywhere near done. He says it's like a ghost town. What is it going to take to rebuild it? He and I were both in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. We went to Tikal and saw a huge city that was abandoned by it's owners 1000 years ago. When a city gets impossible to live in its people abandon it. New Orleans is just the first of these abandoned cities in my humble opinion. There will be others.

[aahala]

I think part of the reason we are not more excited about rebuilding
New Orleans than we are, is that there is a general understanding,
both inside and outside government, of the nature of the problem.

Nobody really knows what the best thing to do is, and noone on the
face of the earth can accurately estimate the costs. Is it 50 billion,
500 billion, 5 trillion? How could we pay for this unknownable and
should we if we could?

[Eli]

Very interesting.

I think it is great that we are not rushing to rebuild either the World trade towers or New Orleans.

I do not think it is accurate to say we are not being told to rebuild by tptb. I think they have hopped up and down plenty and said we will rebuild but the public’s reaction has been apathetic.

The best argument to not rebuilding the Trade Towers is the fact that building seven which has been rebuilt only is going to be 30% occupied. There is no reason to rebuild the Towers so rebuilding them we would be done for mere pride, which is never a good reason.

New Orleans on the other hand will never be rebuilt like it was. The only reason it existed today was because of the French Quarter, which unfortunately was surrounded by a Black Ghetto that was in a bowl. That was always a liability for the City and the violence that it brought tarnished its image. It makes no financial or logical sense to build a 32 billion dollar dike so that a slum can be rebuilt.

Protect Bourbon Street and let the rest be plowed under and turned into a park.

But the Gulf coast is another story that will be rebuilt because people still want to go on vacation. We will have to wait until the collapse and for the discretionary money to dry up before people will stop doing that.

[cube]

It appears to be a dilemma at first. We now have robots that can produce pre-fabricated parts with laser precision. A good argument can be said a lot of what goes on in construction is merely the assembling of pre-fabricated pieces. With that said why does it take longer to build a skyscraper today then 80 years ago?

Tainter's theory explains why.

I forgot where I read this but one articles states New Orleans is destined to collapse. Why? Because it goes against nature. I forgot all the arguments but it gets pretty technically descriptive into topics like water flow and soil stabilization, etc... Basically Joe Sixpack would never read it.

In the end if you go against nature, you'll lose.....interesting thesis. Is it true? I'm not certain.

[Dreamtwister]

I'm not sure I'd so readily subscribe to that. Look at the Netherlands. They have been pushing back water sinice Roman times with little more than wind-powered Archimedes screws and mounds of dirt. Although this example does underscore my previous statement about entropy.

Maybe a better statement would be "The moment you *stop* fighting against nature, nature wins." Because you can clearly go against nature, but only for as long as you are willing or able to invest the energy to do so.

[TheTurtle]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Dreamtwister', '
')Maybe a better statement would be "The moment you *stop* fighting against nature, nature wins." Because you can clearly go against nature, but only for as long as you are willing or able to invest the energy to do so.

[backstop]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Dreamtwister', 'I')'m not sure I'd so readily subscribe to that. Look at the Netherlands. They have been pushing back water since Roman times with little more than wind-powered Archimedes screws and mounds of dirt. Although this example does underscore my previous statement about entropy.

Maybe a better statement would be "The moment you *stop* fighting against nature, nature wins." Because you can clearly go against nature, but only for as long as you are willing or able to invest the energy to do so.

[Revi]

You might not win, but to a certain extent fighting against nature is what we do all the time. If the odds are totally against you, you lose. All farming is a struggle. It's much easier to live as a hunter-gatherer, if there is the resource to support you. The Mayans struggled with their agriculture and eventually lost. Their cities were engulfed by jungle again for a thousand years. Why are we any different? We found fossil fuels, and were able to push the realities of nature back for a couple of hundred years. Now those realities are back. Nature always wins in the end.

[smallpoxgirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Leanan', 't')he fact that there's so much more to rebuild now - reminds me of Tainter's work.

[Leanan]

Yes, Greer's work is based on Tainter's. BTW, there's an HTML version of Greer's paper here:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~wtv/powerdown/greer.htm

I suspect Greer's "catabolic collapse" is our most likely fate. Which might be good for us right now, but really terrible in the long run.

[Dreamtwister]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('backstop', '[')b]"The moment we stopped respecting Nature, we started losing to Nature."

[smallpoxgirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Leanan', 'I') suspect Greer's "catabolic collapse" is our most likely fate.

[Leanan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') would say just the opposite. Living through any sort of collapse clearly sucks. In the end, living in a more sustainable society is much more desirable.

[Eli]

I think the question of rebuilding New Orleans and fighting against nature involves another aspect, the land you are fighting for has to be worth it.

It is one thing to rebuild a place like San Francisco or Chicago that are a centers of comerce and trade and very desirable places to live. New Orleans has some importance as a port but it generated most of its income from tourism but it had a large segmaent of the populace were drags on the local ecconomy. And the Areas of town that were the most desirable places to live saw the least damage which makes sense. People who have the money always eat higher up the hog as it were.

In New Orleans the storm damaged areas were 75% black and most were poor and did not own the property. In short they had nothing invested in the area and once displaced there is no real reason for them to return. The poor among them can be poor anywhere, also when you live at or below the poverty level who is going to pay for the move back. People living at that income level do not have the income to pay for a move back. It is a major exspense for people to come up with two months rent and enough cash to rent a van and put gas in it.

The Old New Orleans is dead the new one is going to be a lot smaller. They will end up bulldozing the slums and no one will build until they think there is cash in it for them to do so.

[TorrKing]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Leanan', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') would say just the opposite. Living through any sort of collapse clearly sucks. In the end, living in a more sustainable society is much more desirable.

[Revi]

I think countries and regions will start to wall themselves off from other areas that are having problems. Like Scandinavia could put up some barriers and fare relatively well. We are doing this now, unsuccessfully. Parts of Africa are failing and not many people are getting out of there. Some Haitians are reduced to eating flavored clay. It is over 99 percent deforested. Not many people make it to the US from Haiti. We are walling off the places that are failing already. New Orleans refugees spread far and wide. I met a fellow who has moved to Maine and is selling Real Estate. He is back in Acadia 250 years after the Cajun diaspora. He has an Acadian name, and is back on the east side of the Kennebec River, which is historically part of Acadia. Acadians shortened the name to Cajuns after being evicted by the English.