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As someone who has completed an economics minor, I can tell you little about the economy or economics or finance or international trade with much confidence. I can, however, say with complete confidence that economics is an odd discipline. It’s hyper-rationality embraces only empirical judgments of the economy while simultaneously validating people’s subjective values as determinant of welfare. In Kevin Rozario’s “What Comes Down Must Go Up: Why Disasters Have Been Good for American Capitalism,” we catch a glimpse of the strangeness of economics, and indeed of capitalism itself.
Rozario seeks to show how disasters, but especially the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, had positive economic impacts, among other effects. He makes the case that with a disaster, the destruction of existing capital draws in funds from elsewhere to rebuild an even more productive environment. Though this may be true, anyone can easily tell that a disaster is not good news in the broadest sense. Resources exist and can be destroyed; that loss does not disappear once the city is rebuilt. At the very least, readers can acknowledge that, economics aside, a disaster represents the loss of natural resources, and the person-hours that were put into the construction and development of that capital. Moreover, it often results in the loss of human life.
Most interestingly, Rozario draws parallels between disasters and capitalism. Both are destructive: disasters raze buildings and destroy the capital within, while capitalism encourages the constant renewal of technologies and spaces to better produce the newest and most effective widgets. He points out, as examples, the ability of Bostonians to widen their streets after one fire, or more prominently, the efforts of progressives to improve San Francisco’s urban space in the aftermath of the earthquake and related fire.
In examining the opportunity offered by a disaster to sculpt the urban landscape, we see that the desires of those sculptors was inherently opposed to the capitalist ethos: Haussmann and the progressives of San Francisco wanted to make permanent changes to the city, for a variety of purposes. They wanted to create cities which withstood the test of time and served to benefit the city (and the owning class). Yet, the vision of cityscape which endures the test of time stands in direct opposition to capitalism, which desires the continual renewal of technology, business, commerce, and therefore urban spaces.
It is also telling that the so-called progressives of San Francisco cared as little about the effect of their plans on the working class as did Haussmann, though at least they did not blast away their housing with cannon. Indeed, throughout his article, Rozario makes it clear that the poor suffered, even as the economy, the city, and the business class benefitted in the aftermath of the ravages of disasters.
I enjoyed CT’s analysis of the art on the spoons at the State of Emergency exhibit, and I think that he is apt in his analysis of the spoon and its role in the artwork: as a domestic item, it seems particularly at home depicting a tornado, perhaps because so much of the destruction of tornados, as CT points out, happens in the midwest, away from major bodies of water. Such areas tend to be less urban, and often symbolize the domestic of American society.