Destabilized Saturday Edition #48
Invisible post-disaster ripples, Marshall Law, "let's revisit in the new year", net-energy-positive fusion(!)
Climate change and extreme weather events are causing financial devastation, and low-income Americans, who are most likely to have little or no insurance, are being especially hard hit. Damage to an uninsured home from flooding, hurricanes, and wildfires often means foreclosure and bankruptcy. And that frequently causes financial ruin because, according to the St. Louis Fed, the median American home-owning household has 68 percent of their total wealth tied up in home equity.
Without insurance, home destroyed = wealth wiped out.
In a perfect world, therefore, home insurance would be treated as the sacred guardian of our material futures that it is. But whether due to cost or other factors, many homeowners don’t have adequate insurance. As the New York Times reported after Hurricane Ian hit southwest Florida in late September:
In the counties whose residents were told to evacuate, just 18.5 percent of homes have coverage through the National Flood Insurance Program, according to Milliman, an actuarial firm that works with the program.
Within those counties, homes inside the government-designated floodplain, the area most exposed to flooding, 47.3 percent of homes have flood insurance, Milliman found. In areas outside the floodplain — many of which are still likely to have been damaged by rain or storm surge from Ian — only an estimated 9.4 percent of homes have flood coverage.
The scale of the suffering embedded in that data is staggering. I shared this passage in the October 1st Destabilized Saturday Edition and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. Hurricane Ian, as we remember, was a highly destructive storm that included a 16-foot storm surge, and its collision with uninsured family homes was a human catastrophe many thousands of times over.
Significantly, it’s a catastrophe we mostly can’t see. That’s what I’ve found especially striking in the 11 weeks since Ian made landfall. We know this enormous human disaster occurred, but we have limited ability to measure it and, because of the collapse of local news, very little reporting on it. We can’t see it, we can only think about it – or, as is more often the case, not think about it.
Because of this post-climate disaster information vacuum, this tweet thread from Kentuckian @evelynhudson90, who lives in the part of the state that was hard hit by flooding in late July 2022, is revealing and important. She’s writing here 3-4 weeks after the storm:
She says more and the whole thread is worth a read. (It sounds like poverty exacerbated the after effects of the flooding in Kentucky. But poverty isn’t uncommon in climate vulnerable places, and it would be a mistake to consider it an extenuating or irrelevant factor. Also, places to live being scarce and unaffordable after a storm that destroys a lot of existing housing stock is the norm, not an exception.)
I was thinking about this – the significance of the unseen, brutal aftermath of climate-fueled weather disasters – last weekend when I read Nick Kristof’s column about the persistence of the enabling conditions of American social division and political extremism. This part in particular caught my eye:
Third and most fundamentally, our political dysfunction is driven in complex ways by a broader economic and social dysfunction and despair, one that we fail to grapple with effectively.
A few metrics of our national crisis:
We are now losing roughly 300,000 Americans a year to drugs, alcohol and suicide in “deaths of despair.” The social fabric of innumerable families and countless communities (including my own) has been unraveling.
About one-seventh of prime-age men (ages 25 to 54), historically the pillar of the American labor force, are not working today. We don’t fully understand why, but it’s not because jobs don’t exist — there are 1.7 job openings for each unemployed worker.
Life expectancy for a newborn boy in Mississippi appears to be shorter than for a newborn boy in Bangladesh.
When so many adults are struggling, the problems are transmitted to the next generation. Every 19 minutes, a child is born with a dependence on opioids, and one in eight American children is growing up with a parent with a substance use disorder.
We may not fully understand how socioeconomic crises build support for conspiracy theories and for authoritarian leaders, but the linkage isn’t new. That’s part of the story of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain between the world wars. The great social philosopher Erich Fromm described in his masterwork, “Escape from Freedom,” how a people buffeted by insecurity and social isolation may turn to authoritarianism, with the promise of greatness and a path of certainty.
We in journalism pay close attention to politics. But I don’t think we pay sufficient attention to the larger social problems that shape ideology or, as today, drive authoritarianism and extremism. …We can’t confidently heal America’s body politic unless we do a better job treating our nation’s broader social and economic dysfunction.
When untold thousands of people are being financially devastated by climate-fueled extreme weather events, that’s a meaningful and growing category of “economic dysfunction.” One that, like addiction, causes tremendous suffering. It’s also a long-lasting one, as wealth lost to uninsured property damage can’t be rapidly rebuilt. For many, not only won’t it be possible to earn enough money to reach the level of security and comfort they would have reached but for the disaster, it won’t even be possible to get back to the level they were at when the storm arrived. Younger people will have a better chance, but for many middle-aged and older folks, fully rebuilding their wealth will be somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible.
What effect will this small but steady stream of financially devastated people have on American society? What effect will it have on our politics? It’s hard to say with any precision, but the impact of climate change on human societies is a longer-tentacled beast than we think.
My Work
Climate migration in America (link)
Migrants often arrive from other countries, but they can also come from a different region of the same country. You might think national brotherhood would ease the social tensions large-scale migration can provoke, but history is full of examples where that wasn’t the case. The receptions given to migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl is one. From ProPublica:
From 1929 to 1934, crop yields across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri plunged by 60%, leaving farmers destitute and exposing the now-barren topsoil to dry winds and soaring temperatures. The resulting dust storms, some of them taller than skyscrapers, buried homes whole and blew as far east as Washington D.C. The disaster propelled an exodus of some 2.5 million people, mostly to the West, where newcomers — “Okies” not just from Oklahoma but also Texas, Arkansas and Missouri — unsettled communities and competed for jobs. Colorado tried to seal its border from the climate refugees; in California, they were funneled into squalid shanty towns.
Interesting Reads
The 80-year-old book that explains Elon Musk and tech’s new right-wing tilt (link)
Virtually all of The Managerial Revolution’s major predictions — the coming collapse of capitalism, an Axis victory in World War II, the superior efficiency of state-run enterprises — were all proven wrong. The power of the capitalist class has become more entrenched since the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and ’80s and attendant skyrocketing inequality. The rise of tech capitalism, with firms founded by individual innovators and technical experts, seems to disprove his theory that capitalists cannot themselves perform technical and management tasks at scale.
Yet Burnham’s early thought has in fact experienced a renaissance of late, including in unexpected quarters: the right-leaning titans of Silicon Valley and allied political thinkers. Why?
The answer, in brief, is the culture war. The right’s new Burnhamites have revived his theory of managers as a distinct social class — the one, in their view, most responsible for imposing the malign ideology of “wokeness” on the American public.
Note: Twitter has been going downhill under its new ownership (banning critical journalists most recently). Its future is unclear and the Saturday Edition of Destabilized is built in part on individual tweets. I haven’t yet figured out what to do, but I’m monitoring and mulling.
Tweets of the Week
Extreme Weather Watch
Creeping Fascism Watch
This is true for me, too:
Progress Joy and Hope
Oh I’m sorry I wasn’t reacting to you or your source at all but an earlier economist who first quoted the data and commented about incentivizing work for these people as if their unemployment was voluntary and not built into the economic system. I wish I had made that clear.
It’s interesting how no context is given for that number. Is it larger than in the past? If so by how much? Given a background population of mentally ill, disabled, sick or injured men how does this number measure up to past periods? There’s been a rise in injured and disabled men taking social security in their fifties and early sixties. Where does that number fit in? How has COVID affect this? Has there been an increase in disability? I heard it quoted before by a government official I don’t remember who. The implication being that these men are voluntarily sitting at home in a whim