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Displacement of Persons
May. 24th, 2022 12:27 pmI saw something go by about how there are 100 million displaced persons globally, currently. And did that start a chain of thought and, thus, research.
Hurricane Season is about to start. I can’t say that I gave Hurricane Season all that much thought for the first thirty some odd years of my life, because I grew up worrying about a different The Big One — I lived in earthquake country, altho again, for most of my life, I’d never experienced one, and within state there had been a newly active volcano that attracted more attention than actual earthquakes. If you’ve lived in more than one place, or have distant loved ones, you’ve probably noticed that there is no place with no trouble at all. There’s always something to worry about somewhere.
I’m not here to necessarily worry about anything in particular, but I _have_ been thinking a lot about how to get people to respond in collectively helpful ways to a crisis, instead of doing things that maybe make a lot of sense personally, but collectively make things worse. So, for example, if there’s a beef shortage in the early 1970s, stocking up on beef makes sense personally (assuming you eat the stuff, and I do get that a lot of people do not), but collectively produces excess waste (3% before and after the shortage ; 9% during, according to research done by The Garbage Project’s Willem Rathje, and documented entertainingly in _Rubbish!_ from 1992/3 time frame and now available on kindle!).
Why was there a beef shortage? That’s complicated and there are competing theories. This takes an All of the Above, approach:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1973/06/1973b_bpea_schnittker.pdf
Careful when you read, that, tho, because the person who wrote it and the responses to it when the information was presented feel _now_ to be actually kind of heart-stoppingly callous. Oh, we _should not_ have subsidized the sale of wheat to Russia on that scale, it contributed to price rises. We thought it was to feed their animals; if we’d known it was to feed their people, we wouldn’t have subsidized it. It just honestly defies belief how horrifying economists can be _now_, but they appear to have been materially worse 50 years ago.
We’ve retired a lot of the farm programs which get blamed for the low soybean production, but it is interesting to see how ocean temperature off of Argentina was an issue in producing protein for animal feed back in the 1970s. I’m not sure I knew that was an issue? Also, no wonder fisheries collapsed. We were harvesting the ocean to feed to the cows. Bad judgment all around; I hope we are not still doing that, but I suspect we still are.
(ETA: https://law.lclark.edu/live/news/44283-from-fish-to-feed-our-broken-global-food-system
Now it’s Peru, and it goes to China to support aquaculture, and to a lesser extent, chicken and swine production.)
Also, I got into some weird arguments about whether or not Bill Gross’ prediction of hyperinflation back in the early period we now call The Great Recession had any validity. Of course, in 2022, we know that he was totally wrong, and that persistent prediction of hyperinflation, believed by so many financial professionals, is part of why The Great Recession went on so long. In the midst of _actual deflation_, everyone was proposing further disinflationary measures and opposed to any meaningful stimulus. It was insane and I did some yelling to no good effect. I now realize that Gross and others had in mind that early 1970s period of drought, rising personal income leading to greater consumption of meat and petroleum, all of which turned out to be less elastic than expected for a variety of reasons. For reasons having more to do with their own formative years and age in the late aughts, they were incredibly pre-disposed to respond to problems in financial markets with fears of inflation. They were totally wrong to think that example was relevant then.
Altho it _might_ be relevant soon. We’ll see. Maybe I’ve just hit That Age where fear of inflation eating away at all one has acquired undermines one’s ability to interact with reality. You see enough people behave irrationally, and a sensible person has to allow for the possibility that they, too, may yet succumb to the nonsense.
But to return to the displacement of persons. I found this:
https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2021/downloads/background_papers/background_paper-analytics.pdf
Which was honestly kind of a shocker in its own way. During the collapse of the subprime mortgage market that led to a run on the banks and the Great Recession, I got into some arguments with people that forced me to dig into macroeconomics vs. microeconomics in a way that I had before that successfully avoided. One of the things I ran across quite rapidly was just how _bad_ the models used by microeconomics people were. Specifically, they were trying to model society level money flows but had a model that had individuals and households, but no banks. I’m like, well, that’ll let you model Afghanistan or Yemen or whatever, but it’s not gonna help you in England or the US any time after the 1600s. Having places to put money so that it could be loaned out is a huge, pervasive, necessary feature of our economy. Nothing exciting happens without it, because coming up with the resources to Do a New Thing whether it is inventing a better mouse trap or building a house or putting solar panels on roofs all requires resources in advance of cash flows. You can _try_ to do that in a communistic system with central planning. Good luck.
Also, a little weird that microeconomics people of a libertarian nature in the late aughts would be modeling primitive communistic communities and claiming this somehow maps to a modern, capitalistic society. I didn’t use the word weird, then. And the volume. My throat hurt.
Where was I? Oh, right. Displacement of persons happens when people cannot stay where they are. There are a lot of possible causes: wildfire, soldiers, floods, earthquake, volcano, radiation, lack of economic opportunity, disease, inadequate safe food and/or water. I’m sure I missed something important. Interpret soldiers broadly — they don’t have to be outsiders, and they don’t have to be representing any kind of “legitimate” government, local or otherwise, just a bunch of violent marauders will do. If you have a bunch of resources, maybe you can buy what food and water is available, build your house up on stilts for the floods, or with extra care to stand despite earthquake. You can keep disease at bay by walling yourself in. You can buy off the soldiers or hire your own. But if you don’t _have_ those resources, you’re going to suffer and/or die, unless you can leave, and even then, it’s going to be awful. It was astonishing that the document referenced above appears to be an early effort to account for these differences of economic position.
That document _also_ is an early effort to account for “area under the curve”. Apparently — and this is really surprising to someone from earthquake country, where we’ve always understood that a very high magnitude quake can be a low intensity event if it occurs nice and far away from where anyone lives and not under water that will transmit a tsunami. In general, if you are thinking of a disaster in human terms (whether lives lost or property damage caused or both), you don’t necessarily care what the magnitude of the quake or the speed of the wind was that caused the damage or killed the person. But you _are_ interested in how many people are affected, and the knock-on results.
This is the long way around (very long, I apologize) to saying I now have a really different perspective on Florida than I did before I started thinking about, hey, what _is_ Florida going to be like to live in in 20 years.
Florida — like a lot of Republican controlled, sunbelt and/or coastal states (where coast includes Gulf Coast, not just east coast) — has made it particularly difficult to talk about the risks of climate. Florida is not a high elevation sort of place, and they already have a lot of “blue sky” flooding in populous areas. The beef shortage questions — believe it or not — came up as a subsidiary issue when I was trying to figure out the answer to this question:
What kind of internal migration flows are we going to be seeing in the United States in the next 20 years?
Hurricane Katrina caused the temporary displacement of about 50 beeps of the US population (half of a percentage point of the US population) and the permanent displacement of 25 (a little less, actually) beeps of the US population.
Most of the people permanently displaced by Hurricane Katrina moved to other sunbelt states (notably: Houston TX). A lot of them were young and/or poor and/or POC.
That was 17 years ago (unless I can’t do math, which is a real possibility) (I know it was in August; I rounded up).
Obviously, there have been some hurricanes since then. Right now, a lot of property insurance companies are moving out of Florida, and I actually found an NBC news article that blamed the property insurance problems in Florida on _roofing contractor insurance scams_.
Now, there _may_ be some validity to this accusation. Maybe. Some. I mean, Florida apparently has a law that says if the roof has 25% damage, the insurance has to pay to replace the whole thing. And I do believe there really are insurance scams in Florida. It’s a place characterized by bad judgment and sketchy governance, so I can easily believe that more people are engaged in scamming and more people are susceptible to scamming and the government at all levels less inclined to do anything effective about the scamming.
However, I will also note that there have been some hurricanes since Katrina. And while they maybe were not as eye-catching as Katrina, they did damage roofs, enough to make it possible for possibly scamm-y contractors to threaten litigation unless the insurance agrees to the contractor’s estimate of damage.
Without taking any particular position on how much of the I Can’t Do Business Here I’ll Go Sell Property Insurance In a Marginally Less Ridiculous Environment can be attributed to scammy roofing contractors, I will note that if you have a house in Florida and you cannot get roof insurance, or property insurance at all, then every storm that comes through is going to feel kinda different, and you won’t really have to replace that roof very many times before maybe you can’t afford to live in Florida any more, whether or not you can get your money back out of the house that you bought there during the pandemic to get away from The Rules that all those other states had.
(ETA: Here is a much more plausible explanation for why property insurers in Florida are leaving Florida. https://thecapitolist.com/heres-why-floridas-property-insurance-market-is-melting-down/ You will noticed that the summary here involves storms since 2016, which is basically the 6 years of above average storms that has plagued Florida, and is about to turn into year 7, and, honestly, no end in sight. It is a little entertaining that _that_ particular source has that summary of why insurers are leaving, as it is not at all a left leaning or even all that centrist a publication.)
And this comes down to area under the curve. An earthquake country person thinks _mostly_ in terms of the big one, but occasionally in terms of glassware that falls off shelves. An earthquake country person maybe _doesn’t_ buy on filled land because they’ve heard of liquefaction. An earthquake country person maybe is a bit more diligent about having the things that connect your house to the foundation so it doesn’t slide off, and connects tallish storage furniture to the walls, you know, because you just don’t know what might keep going if there’s a bit of rocking.
I’m going to assume that a hurricane country person thinks _mostly_ in terms of better roofs, keeping a stock of plywood around to nail up. A person who lives in a flood zone maybe thinks in terms of only the garage on the ground floor, and everything else is up a floor, to deal with storm surge.
But all of that is based on Katrina / Andrew / etc. thinking. The bad ones don’t happen that often, and the other ones are pretty manageable. Maybe you have a generator, and water storage, and stock up on gas for the generator, and you monitor the weather. Maybe you have arrangements with out of state friends to go stay with them for high impact stuff. Maybe you are a snowbird and just aren’t there during the worst of it. What happens when just normal, every day stuff is requiring that kind of adaption?
My husband tells me that in Miami, gentrification is happening in areas traditionally back a bit from the edge. I asked, so, we’re just planning on letting all that stuff along the edge … fall in? And pollute the water and be a hazard? And he was like, probably be a bit more strategic than that. I asked how much it costs to take down a house. A hundred thousand or so, put it in a landfill. And I laughed and said, okay, that’s the path forward! The people who stay — the ones who are not displaced, internally to a few blocks back, or to central Florida, or to wherever they came from in Ohio or Massachusetts or New York or whatever — the people who stay as blue sky flooding stops being flooding and is just where the water is all the time now. Those people are not gonna move all that stuff to a landfill. They’re going to use that to build a new barrier for their houses and shops and so forth a bit further back. They’re really just going to do this.
You can probably map out exactly how it’s going to happen by looking at the extensive documentation of which roads are worth putting the engineering into raising to deal with new normal water levels. A lot of those roads are already marked as not gonna happen. You could probably predict fairly accurately which people will “stick” and which will move out of Florida, based on some kind of weird demographic analysis. Anyone without the resources to move, stays, until they are in the circle of a big enough Event to attract evacuation assistance. That’s the crowd that probably does a comparatively local displacement, a la going to Houston from New Orleans after Katrina (not predicting that they go to Houston, mind you!). Anyone with the resources to move, it’ll come down to whether (weather!) they can sell their house and move somewhere else they have some kind of connection to. You can see how that’s got death spiral built into it, tho.
What a weird couple decades we are speeding towards.
Hurricane Season is about to start. I can’t say that I gave Hurricane Season all that much thought for the first thirty some odd years of my life, because I grew up worrying about a different The Big One — I lived in earthquake country, altho again, for most of my life, I’d never experienced one, and within state there had been a newly active volcano that attracted more attention than actual earthquakes. If you’ve lived in more than one place, or have distant loved ones, you’ve probably noticed that there is no place with no trouble at all. There’s always something to worry about somewhere.
I’m not here to necessarily worry about anything in particular, but I _have_ been thinking a lot about how to get people to respond in collectively helpful ways to a crisis, instead of doing things that maybe make a lot of sense personally, but collectively make things worse. So, for example, if there’s a beef shortage in the early 1970s, stocking up on beef makes sense personally (assuming you eat the stuff, and I do get that a lot of people do not), but collectively produces excess waste (3% before and after the shortage ; 9% during, according to research done by The Garbage Project’s Willem Rathje, and documented entertainingly in _Rubbish!_ from 1992/3 time frame and now available on kindle!).
Why was there a beef shortage? That’s complicated and there are competing theories. This takes an All of the Above, approach:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1973/06/1973b_bpea_schnittker.pdf
Careful when you read, that, tho, because the person who wrote it and the responses to it when the information was presented feel _now_ to be actually kind of heart-stoppingly callous. Oh, we _should not_ have subsidized the sale of wheat to Russia on that scale, it contributed to price rises. We thought it was to feed their animals; if we’d known it was to feed their people, we wouldn’t have subsidized it. It just honestly defies belief how horrifying economists can be _now_, but they appear to have been materially worse 50 years ago.
We’ve retired a lot of the farm programs which get blamed for the low soybean production, but it is interesting to see how ocean temperature off of Argentina was an issue in producing protein for animal feed back in the 1970s. I’m not sure I knew that was an issue? Also, no wonder fisheries collapsed. We were harvesting the ocean to feed to the cows. Bad judgment all around; I hope we are not still doing that, but I suspect we still are.
(ETA: https://law.lclark.edu/live/news/44283-from-fish-to-feed-our-broken-global-food-system
Now it’s Peru, and it goes to China to support aquaculture, and to a lesser extent, chicken and swine production.)
Also, I got into some weird arguments about whether or not Bill Gross’ prediction of hyperinflation back in the early period we now call The Great Recession had any validity. Of course, in 2022, we know that he was totally wrong, and that persistent prediction of hyperinflation, believed by so many financial professionals, is part of why The Great Recession went on so long. In the midst of _actual deflation_, everyone was proposing further disinflationary measures and opposed to any meaningful stimulus. It was insane and I did some yelling to no good effect. I now realize that Gross and others had in mind that early 1970s period of drought, rising personal income leading to greater consumption of meat and petroleum, all of which turned out to be less elastic than expected for a variety of reasons. For reasons having more to do with their own formative years and age in the late aughts, they were incredibly pre-disposed to respond to problems in financial markets with fears of inflation. They were totally wrong to think that example was relevant then.
Altho it _might_ be relevant soon. We’ll see. Maybe I’ve just hit That Age where fear of inflation eating away at all one has acquired undermines one’s ability to interact with reality. You see enough people behave irrationally, and a sensible person has to allow for the possibility that they, too, may yet succumb to the nonsense.
But to return to the displacement of persons. I found this:
https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2021/downloads/background_papers/background_paper-analytics.pdf
Which was honestly kind of a shocker in its own way. During the collapse of the subprime mortgage market that led to a run on the banks and the Great Recession, I got into some arguments with people that forced me to dig into macroeconomics vs. microeconomics in a way that I had before that successfully avoided. One of the things I ran across quite rapidly was just how _bad_ the models used by microeconomics people were. Specifically, they were trying to model society level money flows but had a model that had individuals and households, but no banks. I’m like, well, that’ll let you model Afghanistan or Yemen or whatever, but it’s not gonna help you in England or the US any time after the 1600s. Having places to put money so that it could be loaned out is a huge, pervasive, necessary feature of our economy. Nothing exciting happens without it, because coming up with the resources to Do a New Thing whether it is inventing a better mouse trap or building a house or putting solar panels on roofs all requires resources in advance of cash flows. You can _try_ to do that in a communistic system with central planning. Good luck.
Also, a little weird that microeconomics people of a libertarian nature in the late aughts would be modeling primitive communistic communities and claiming this somehow maps to a modern, capitalistic society. I didn’t use the word weird, then. And the volume. My throat hurt.
Where was I? Oh, right. Displacement of persons happens when people cannot stay where they are. There are a lot of possible causes: wildfire, soldiers, floods, earthquake, volcano, radiation, lack of economic opportunity, disease, inadequate safe food and/or water. I’m sure I missed something important. Interpret soldiers broadly — they don’t have to be outsiders, and they don’t have to be representing any kind of “legitimate” government, local or otherwise, just a bunch of violent marauders will do. If you have a bunch of resources, maybe you can buy what food and water is available, build your house up on stilts for the floods, or with extra care to stand despite earthquake. You can keep disease at bay by walling yourself in. You can buy off the soldiers or hire your own. But if you don’t _have_ those resources, you’re going to suffer and/or die, unless you can leave, and even then, it’s going to be awful. It was astonishing that the document referenced above appears to be an early effort to account for these differences of economic position.
That document _also_ is an early effort to account for “area under the curve”. Apparently — and this is really surprising to someone from earthquake country, where we’ve always understood that a very high magnitude quake can be a low intensity event if it occurs nice and far away from where anyone lives and not under water that will transmit a tsunami. In general, if you are thinking of a disaster in human terms (whether lives lost or property damage caused or both), you don’t necessarily care what the magnitude of the quake or the speed of the wind was that caused the damage or killed the person. But you _are_ interested in how many people are affected, and the knock-on results.
This is the long way around (very long, I apologize) to saying I now have a really different perspective on Florida than I did before I started thinking about, hey, what _is_ Florida going to be like to live in in 20 years.
Florida — like a lot of Republican controlled, sunbelt and/or coastal states (where coast includes Gulf Coast, not just east coast) — has made it particularly difficult to talk about the risks of climate. Florida is not a high elevation sort of place, and they already have a lot of “blue sky” flooding in populous areas. The beef shortage questions — believe it or not — came up as a subsidiary issue when I was trying to figure out the answer to this question:
What kind of internal migration flows are we going to be seeing in the United States in the next 20 years?
Hurricane Katrina caused the temporary displacement of about 50 beeps of the US population (half of a percentage point of the US population) and the permanent displacement of 25 (a little less, actually) beeps of the US population.
Most of the people permanently displaced by Hurricane Katrina moved to other sunbelt states (notably: Houston TX). A lot of them were young and/or poor and/or POC.
That was 17 years ago (unless I can’t do math, which is a real possibility) (I know it was in August; I rounded up).
Obviously, there have been some hurricanes since then. Right now, a lot of property insurance companies are moving out of Florida, and I actually found an NBC news article that blamed the property insurance problems in Florida on _roofing contractor insurance scams_.
Now, there _may_ be some validity to this accusation. Maybe. Some. I mean, Florida apparently has a law that says if the roof has 25% damage, the insurance has to pay to replace the whole thing. And I do believe there really are insurance scams in Florida. It’s a place characterized by bad judgment and sketchy governance, so I can easily believe that more people are engaged in scamming and more people are susceptible to scamming and the government at all levels less inclined to do anything effective about the scamming.
However, I will also note that there have been some hurricanes since Katrina. And while they maybe were not as eye-catching as Katrina, they did damage roofs, enough to make it possible for possibly scamm-y contractors to threaten litigation unless the insurance agrees to the contractor’s estimate of damage.
Without taking any particular position on how much of the I Can’t Do Business Here I’ll Go Sell Property Insurance In a Marginally Less Ridiculous Environment can be attributed to scammy roofing contractors, I will note that if you have a house in Florida and you cannot get roof insurance, or property insurance at all, then every storm that comes through is going to feel kinda different, and you won’t really have to replace that roof very many times before maybe you can’t afford to live in Florida any more, whether or not you can get your money back out of the house that you bought there during the pandemic to get away from The Rules that all those other states had.
(ETA: Here is a much more plausible explanation for why property insurers in Florida are leaving Florida. https://thecapitolist.com/heres-why-floridas-property-insurance-market-is-melting-down/ You will noticed that the summary here involves storms since 2016, which is basically the 6 years of above average storms that has plagued Florida, and is about to turn into year 7, and, honestly, no end in sight. It is a little entertaining that _that_ particular source has that summary of why insurers are leaving, as it is not at all a left leaning or even all that centrist a publication.)
And this comes down to area under the curve. An earthquake country person thinks _mostly_ in terms of the big one, but occasionally in terms of glassware that falls off shelves. An earthquake country person maybe _doesn’t_ buy on filled land because they’ve heard of liquefaction. An earthquake country person maybe is a bit more diligent about having the things that connect your house to the foundation so it doesn’t slide off, and connects tallish storage furniture to the walls, you know, because you just don’t know what might keep going if there’s a bit of rocking.
I’m going to assume that a hurricane country person thinks _mostly_ in terms of better roofs, keeping a stock of plywood around to nail up. A person who lives in a flood zone maybe thinks in terms of only the garage on the ground floor, and everything else is up a floor, to deal with storm surge.
But all of that is based on Katrina / Andrew / etc. thinking. The bad ones don’t happen that often, and the other ones are pretty manageable. Maybe you have a generator, and water storage, and stock up on gas for the generator, and you monitor the weather. Maybe you have arrangements with out of state friends to go stay with them for high impact stuff. Maybe you are a snowbird and just aren’t there during the worst of it. What happens when just normal, every day stuff is requiring that kind of adaption?
My husband tells me that in Miami, gentrification is happening in areas traditionally back a bit from the edge. I asked, so, we’re just planning on letting all that stuff along the edge … fall in? And pollute the water and be a hazard? And he was like, probably be a bit more strategic than that. I asked how much it costs to take down a house. A hundred thousand or so, put it in a landfill. And I laughed and said, okay, that’s the path forward! The people who stay — the ones who are not displaced, internally to a few blocks back, or to central Florida, or to wherever they came from in Ohio or Massachusetts or New York or whatever — the people who stay as blue sky flooding stops being flooding and is just where the water is all the time now. Those people are not gonna move all that stuff to a landfill. They’re going to use that to build a new barrier for their houses and shops and so forth a bit further back. They’re really just going to do this.
You can probably map out exactly how it’s going to happen by looking at the extensive documentation of which roads are worth putting the engineering into raising to deal with new normal water levels. A lot of those roads are already marked as not gonna happen. You could probably predict fairly accurately which people will “stick” and which will move out of Florida, based on some kind of weird demographic analysis. Anyone without the resources to move, stays, until they are in the circle of a big enough Event to attract evacuation assistance. That’s the crowd that probably does a comparatively local displacement, a la going to Houston from New Orleans after Katrina (not predicting that they go to Houston, mind you!). Anyone with the resources to move, it’ll come down to whether (weather!) they can sell their house and move somewhere else they have some kind of connection to. You can see how that’s got death spiral built into it, tho.
What a weird couple decades we are speeding towards.