RALEIGH – Among the most egregious howlers in political discourse is the old claim that disasters are good for the economy.
How can smoking ruins, hospitals (and sometimes even morgues) full of victims, and piles of rubble be construed as signs of economic progress? Sometimes, politicians and politicized economists claim that the disaster has successfully cleared out undesirable, shoddily constructed buildings or infrastructure, so that they can be rebuilt using modern materials and know-how. It’s a wrecking crew no one had to hire, they argue.
And sometimes, following the perverse lead of John Maynard Keynes, they praise the disaster as creating “jobs” for rescuers and rebuilders.
This is one of those cases where that much-maligned title of that much-maligned book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten actually applies. Just about every five-year-old seethes with righteous fury if the tower of blocks he painstakingly builds is suddenly knocked down by an accidental swing of the door or an envious swing of the hand. On the other hand, if the builder decides to knock the structure down himself, he often approaches the job with gleeful enthusiasm.
In the grown-up world, there’s a big difference between intentional destruction, undertaken after careful structural and financial planning, and the wanton destruction that follows hurricanes, floods, fires, wars, or terrorist attacks. To recover after the latter is to consume resources that households and businesses would rather have devoted to higher-value investment or consumption.
It’s a net loss, not a gain.
That having been said, there are plenty of cases in history in which people affected by natural or man-made disasters have made the best of a bad situation, with positive long-term consequences. Postwar Germany and Japan were reorganized and reconstructed into modern economies with representative governments, for example.
Another example is emerging in Louisiana, where the victims of Hurricane Katrina included many of the public schools in New Orleans and surrounding communities. To rebuild the institutions of public education serving thousands of children, many poor and recently displaced, Louisiana officials moved almost all of the schools in New Orleans into a state-run recovery district – which, in turn, converted most of the schools into charter schools.
About 70 percent of the city’s kids now attend charter schools. Since 2007, passing scores on state English and math tests have soared in New Orleans, despite the fact that the public-school population is now substantially more disadvantaged than before the storm.
As Leslie Jacobs, a former member of the Louisiana state board of education, put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “From the flood waters, the most market-driven public school system in the country has emerged. Education reformers across America should take notice: The model is working.”
Here in North Carolina, the state still maintains an unnecessarily onerous set of policies that caps the number of charter schools and imposes other limits on parental choice and competition. It would be best if we didn’t.
It would also be best if it didn’t take a disaster, natural or educational, for North Carolina policymakers to recognize the error of their ways and embrace educational freedom in all forms.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.