Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Just finished A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. The book does not draw comparisons with the 2005 flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, but is made much more timely because of that event.

Here are a few interesting facts from the book:

• Los Angeles was a small town at the time of the earthquake, but afterwards investors were reluctant to put all of their eggs in the shaking basket of San Francisco. It was the 1906 quake that made LA the capital of the American West.
• Insurance companies were at least as badly behaved back then as they are now, coming up with all kinds of excuses for not paying. Most of the damage in San Francisco was caused by fire, which was insured. The insurers argued that the damage was caused by the shaking of the earth, which was not covered, and would try to pay between 0% and 90% of the value of the loss. German and Austrian insurance companies simply stopped answering the phone and their mail and didn’t bother to pay.
• The U.S. government very quickly mobilized all of its available resources, especially Army troops, tents, and rations, to fight the fires and shelter the homeless. There was virtually nothing more that the government could have done. The military began effective assistance within hours of the quake.
• The citizens of San Francisco, who were bright, creative, and energetic, were able to live in tent cities while rebuilding relatively quickly.
• A grand urban plan that would have made San Francisco into one of the most beautiful cities on the planet was chucked in favor of the most expedient rebuilding possible. A handful of roads were widened but no grand avenues were constructed.
• If you missed the 1906 event you may yet have your chance to experience a similar quake in a similar place. The San Andreas Fault has built up roughly as much unreleased stress as was released in the 1906 quake. It could happen tomorrow…

The book is kind of rambling and the author’s Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 is more interesting. Americans and Californians, however, will find plenty of food for thought in this book. Comparing the 1906 earthquake and Katrina, one is forced to draw the following conclusions:

• Americans have gotten less capable in the last 100 years
• The American government has gotten less capable in the last 100 years
• New Orleans will likely never regain its relative prominence among Gulf Coast cities.

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I met a woman the other day with a full-time job in the health care industry. She noted that her 14-year-old boy was just starting his first year of high school and that he had never been to school before. As she worked full-time, did her husband stay home to teach the kid? No. They couldn’t afford to give up his $10,000+/month income, plus great benefits and a pension. Had she been home-schooling the kid? “No! My husband doesn’t believe in home-schooling. Our son has been unschooled. He does whatever interests him and sometimes asks us questions. The only thing that we’ve done is work with him using some standard math textbooks starting at age 9.” How come the kid was going to high school now? “It was his decision. He really wants to try it out. We did not want him to go.”

What did her husband do that he was so adamantly opposed to sending his child to a traditional school? “He’s been a public school teacher for 15 years.”

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I’ve recently been asking folks “Where are the antiwar protesters now that we need them?” (i.e., now that our economy has collapsed and we can’t really afford to rebuild the U.S., much less Iraq and Afghanistan). One of my neighbors from Cambridge said that she for one was still against the war(s). She cited the cost and said that if we weren’t meddling overseas we would easily be able to fund health care for all U.S. residents. I asked her how that could be true given the enormous and growing percentage of the U.S. GDP consumed by health care. She said “military spending is much higher than health care spending.” My memory was that health care is consuming about 18 percent of GDP and the military between 4 and 5 percent. Even cutting military spending to zero would only just barely pay for universal insurance into the present system and a couple of years of inflation, or so I thought.

The picture turns out to be a little more complex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States says that budgeted military spending is in fact 4.7 percent of GDP. However, our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as some veterans benefits, are paid for separately. We are actually spending closer to 7 percent of GDP on our military.

It might be interesting to compare these numbers to productive investment in the U.S. Total research and development spending, for example, is about 2.7 percent of GDP (source). In other words, the non-budgeted costs of running the military are comparable to the total amount that we’re investing in the R&D that is supposed to maintain our competitive edge over China and other low-wage countries (without such an edge, as far as I can tell from freshman econ, there is no reason that an American worker should earn more than a Chinese worker, a salary that would not result in a very comfortable lifestyle here).

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The government just spent billions of dollars on Cash for Clunkers and the results have come in. People traded in 10-year-old American-made cars for brand new Japanese and Korean cars. According to newspapers, the White House is saying that this will save jobs here in the U.S. I’m not sure how this is possible. A consumer driving a 10-year-old American car periodically buys replacement parts, mostly likely still made here in the U.S., and pays a mechanic, almost certainly still working here in the U.S., to install the parts. A consumer driving a new Japanese or Korean car has surely saved some jobs in Japan or Korea. He has also enriched the owner of a car dealership. But wouldn’t the net number of U.S. jobs fall when the old car needing periodic service is replaced with a new imported car that won’t need significant service for 5-10 years?

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Richard Egan, an MIT graduate and former Marine Corps helicopter pilot, died yesterday. With Roger Marino, he had founded EMC, the most successful technology company remaining in Massachusetts. Through creative design and problem-solving, he created tens of thousands of jobs worldwide and enabled the construction of information systems that save people a lot of time and effort. He was known in Massachusetts for giving friends and employees helicopter rides from the company parking lot.

Egan seems not to have been a saint. In 2006, the Bush Administration IRS forced him to pay a lot of taxes that the accounting firm KPMG had tried to shelter with an exotic Irish-based scheme. With or without that tax shelter, however, the guy paid tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes over his lifetime and the people that he employed were nicked for billions more.

We should mourn Egan if only because we will need another 5000 guys like him if we are ever to pay off the debt that our local, state, and federal governments are accumulating on our behalf.

More: AP story; local newspaper story; Boston Globe (note that the Globe reporters have not been as kind to Egan as they have been to Ted Kennedy; Egan being disciplined for being AWOL at age 18 gets a larger percentage of coverage than does Ted Kennedy’s killing of Mary Jo Kopechne when he was 37 years old, married with three children).

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Today’s New York Times has an article about New York City paying teachers not to teach, at a cost to taxpayers of $200 million per year. Note that this is separate from the “rubber room” where teachers who’ve been accused of wrongdoing or incompetence sit, often for years, costing taxpayers additional millions of dollars (story; Daily News story estimating cost at $65 million/year; full text of an August 31, 2009 New Yorker magazine article with detailed explanations of the city’s attempt to remove incompetent teachers).

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From Forbes: “Ted Kennedy’s Soviet Gambit”.

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With Ted Kennedy dominating the news and Boston’s airspace (closed to private aircraft until the Washington royalty have completed paying their respects), it seems like a good time to discuss the duty to rescue. Under traditional Common Law, a bystander who observed Ted Kennedy driving his car into the water would not have had any obligation to dive in and pull Mary Jo Kopechne out, nor to call the police or fire department. According to the Wikipedia page on the Chappaquiddick incident, Ted Kennedy was never charged with failure to carry out any duty to rescue, though a house with the lights on and a phone was just a few seconds’ walk from where Ted Kennedy emerged (source) and a rescue diver would have been able to reach the scene within 25 minutes (as he did the next morning).

An article by Peter Agulnick indicates that Ted Kennedy might have had some obligation under Common Law:

“A bystander is charged with a reasonable duty to rescue if he creates the risk or causes the dangerous situation that the victim faces. This is true whether the bystander’s endangering acts were intentional, negligent, or, as some courts have held, completely innocent.”

The article is interesting partly for its application to Ted Kennedy’s killing of Mary Jo Kopechne, but also for its discussion of why we might be better off without a strong obligation to rescue fellow citizens.

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I asked a woman recovering from surgery whether she was being given any painkillers. She replied that she was on ibuprofen. I said “That’s not a painkiller.” She demanded to know why not. I thought for a moment and then said “If Michael Jackson wasn’t taking it, it isn’t a painkiller.”

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Ted Kennedy became an American hero by working an air-conditioned desk job that millions of others would have been delighted to do. His votes in the Senate were always ones that could be expected to help him get reelected by Massachusetts Democrats (taking an anti-war position would be a risk for a senator representing Texas, but not for one from Massachusetts). He spent a lot of time with attractive young women.

A friend’s Samoyed recently asked himself how he could serve his country. Inspired by Ted Kennedy, this hero dog decided that he would not work directly with the poor, who can be both smelly and unsightly. Nor would he give more than one percent of his Milk Bones to charity (source). He tried to get his paws on some other folks’ money and then spend it to help the poor, but lacking the power to tax (or opposable thumbs), he was unable to get the $$. Sammy also decided against serving in the U.S. military in a war zone. Finding both Senatorships in Massachusetts occupied by unassailable incumbents (despite the terrible hardship of the job, some American heroes are willing to serve multiple terms in the U.S. Senate), Sammy the Samoyed had only one remaining option in order to become like his hero Ted Kennedy. With a little help from the New England Patriots cheerleaders, this photo shows Sammy enduring the kind of hardships that made Ted Kennedy Barack Obama’s hero.

[Note: this is the same dog that drove up from Norfolk, VA with me back in 2005 (old posting).]

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