i ain't an economist, but this is retarded.

an article written in april i ran across, written by an economist who suggested that shantytowns should be built in certain areas of new orleans. sure, okay, mr. junior chess champ of new jersey...

let's see some of his "arguments":

Since so many homes were destroyed, the natural inclination is to build safer or perhaps impregnable structures. But that is the wrong response. No one should or will rebuild or insure expensive homes on vulnerable ground, such as the devastated Ninth Ward. And it is impossible to make homes perfectly safe against every conceivable act of nature.

Instead, the city should help create cheap housing by reducing legal restrictions on building quality, building safety, and required insurance. This means the Ninth Ward need not remain empty. Once the current ruined structures are razed, governmental authorities should make it possible for entrepreneurs to put up less-expensive buildings. Many of these will be serviceable, but not all will be pretty. We could call them structures with expected lives of less than 50 years. Or we could call them shacks.

[snip]

To be sure, the shantytowns could bring socioeconomic costs. Yet crime, lack of safety, and racial tension were all features of New Orleans ex ante. The city has long thrived as more dangerous than average, more multicultural than average, and more precarious than average for the United States.

so, fuck it. safety? who needs it. after all, those non-caucasoids are used to crime. let's just put them in tin boxes with doors that don't lock.

another one of his reasons: poverty breeds creativity and art!

Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties. Low rents make it possible to live on a shoestring, while the population density blends cultural influences.

what backasswards thinking. he's looking at this from the wrong end, i.e. let's make people suffer, because poverty breeds art! when in reality, it's more like this: art thrives even in the worst conditions, because if people didn't have some fun, they'd go batshit crazy - so they make do with what they have. maybe i'm just unenglightened, but i always thought that people should have more opportunities, not less. more tools = greater possibilities.

and he even gives a brief shout-out to favela funk, the music of brazil's shantytowns. running water and heat? who needs that! it's all about the music! electricity? unnecessary! it's all about art, man. read: "imagine how my rekkid collection/iPod library will sound if we keep those people poor!"

incidentally, favela funk that hasn't been filtered through the production of the likes of dj diplo basically sounds like children screaming over primitive booty bass beats - the beats sound primitive because the people are too damn poor to get better equipment. (right click and download diplo's favela on blast here - keep in mind that this is a filtered mix that has been produced by an american dj - imagine what the uncut, unfiltered version sounds like). imagine the music that could be produced if they had timbaland's or the neptunes' equipment. furthermore, i seriously doubt mr. armchair shantytown culture-pusher would willingly go to a real baile in a brazilian favela. methinks he'd be too skurred.

anyway, this is just another fine example of the type of genetic drift of ideas found in non-natural science departments of institutions of higher learning. sorry to go on a tangent, but in the hard sciences, you have to produce a result, or else you're screwed. that's a classic example of natural selection. but in the liberal arts and the sort-of sciences, you get things like founder's effect and bottleneck, where bad ideas can keep being bounced around the ivory tower - without real world forces correcting the proliferation of bad alleles. (all right, let the flames begin...)

so yeah, go and tell the displaced new orleans residents to move into a shantytown for the sake of cultural richness and art. i'm sure they'll be ecstatic.