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Shorter Tyler Cowen:  If we have the good economic sense to build shantytowns in New Orleans for the poor peoples to live in, they will make some fun soulful music for us to dance to!  It’s like a natural mystic, blowing through the air!

Tyler Cowen is professor of economics at George Mason University and director of the Mercatus Center, which is running a project on post-Katrina reconstruction.

Posted by on 04/20 at 12:30 PM

  1. Natural *mystic* blowing through the air?  Watch that fever.  Or I just didn’t get your reference.

    But yeah, the article has that nutty libertarian flavor.  It works for any problem.  Water shortage, say.  Well, just let people sell contaminated water—that way poor people can afford the cheap water, and if anyone goes too far, why the marketplace will correct it in the form of lawsuits by heirs.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  01:58 PM

  2. But this one’s got a nutty libertarian flavor with flava, Rich.  Or at least a nice Brazilian- Jamaican shantytown soundtrack.  Check out the penultimate paragraph.

    Posted by Michael  on  04/20  at  02:07 PM

  3. Where do I bid for the gourd banjo, washtub bass, and comb with tissue paper contract?

    Posted by corndog  on  04/20  at  02:14 PM

  4. Sorry, corndog, Halliburton has had the contract since August 27, 2005.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  02:22 PM

  5. 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.

    What an idiot. The favelas exist precisely because the government is completely unable to provide basic services for the desperately poor.

    He’s buying into the gringo “Black Orpheus” fantasy.

    The music for that film, btw was written by Tom Jobim and Luiz Bonfá. Both decidedly upper middle class.

    Posted by Randy Paul  on  04/20  at  02:23 PM

  6. With apologies to Lipps, Inc.

    Gotta make a plan for a town that’s not for me
    Town to keep ‘em movin’ keep ‘em groovin’ without money

    Well, I blog about it, blog about it, blog about it, blog about it
    blog about, blog about, rebuilding Big Easy

    Gotta be quick
    Gotta not last
    Gotta be cheap

    Won’t you take me to, Shantytown
    Won’t you take me to, Shantytown
    Won’t you take me to, Shantytown
    Won’t you take me to, Shantytown

    Posted by corndog  on  04/20  at  03:05 PM

  7. Well, I am too teary-eyed reading this to write anything even remotely coherent. So the best I can offer is a link to what I feel is a much more… damn, I can’t even form words right now. I can’t write when I’m crying, apparently.

    Anyway, here’s a link to an assessment of post-Katrina New Orleans that is not written by Tyler Cowen. My comment there is the very first one after the blog post.

    http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7111

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  03:32 PM

  8. That sounds pretty attractive. You know the poor are lucky duckies because they don’t pay taxes, yet they get lots of great government services for free. It’s such a great lifestyle, that I’m thinking of ditching what few middle-class trappings I have left in order to go on down there and get in on the ground floor of all the creative grooving action. I’m extending an invitation to Tyler to come on down there with me. Think of the papers we can write, Tyler! We two rude boys can a boom up de town!

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  03:39 PM

  9. "Who is Mr Brown? I wanna know now! He is nowhere to be found.”

    heh.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  03:46 PM

  10. Well, I thought it made a lot of sense--but then, I’ve lived much of my life in habitable constructions.  (Habitable constructions, on tax maps in my home county, are buildings in which people live that are not houses or mobile homes; they include anything that was a vehicle once, quonset huts, converted barns, etc.) And some of the habitable constructions were better than some of the houses.
    (Just to clarify; when I moved out of my house and into the college dorm, that was the biggest one-step improvement in living conditions I’ve experienced).

    More basically, I think Tyler has a point--many of the poor live in houses that are lousy.  You could rebuild the 9th ward with cheap-but-functional houses, or manufactured housing--but it’s unlikely to be rebuilt with nice 2500 sq ft houses.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  04:23 PM

  11. When Mr. Cowen gives up his job at GMU and goes to teach at Xavier, living in one of those shacks he espouses, then I’ll consider his suggestion credible.

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  04/20  at  04:34 PM

  12. My good old prophet Marcus Garvey prophesize, say:
    “St. Jago de la Vega and Kingstown is gonna meet”
    And I can see with mine own eyes
    It’s only a housing scheme that divides…”

    Culture, “Two Sevens Clash”

    Garvey didn’t mention they’d meet in the Ninth Ward, but still.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  04:41 PM

  13. going completely OT and shamelessly abusing Michael’s hospitality, since this is a place frequented by a lot of people even more erudite than me AND w/easy access to academic libraries -

    Anyone know which Blake painting is on the cover of the Cambridge companion shown here)? I saw a print of this in someone’s dorm like 15 years ago and all I can remember is it’s by Blake, I want to use it as an illo for a post, and OMGWTFdoyouknowhowmuchartBlakedid??!!1? andmostofit’sonGoogleImage-gah!!!1! I’ll be old/er and gray/er before I finish going through every Blake site to find it, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to get down to the College library next...Thanks in advance, as they said on Usenet back in the day.

    And Tyler needs to be slapped, but good. I bet he thinks his student TAs do better work when they’re lean & hungry, too.

    Posted by bellatrys  on  04/20  at  05:04 PM

  14. Oh, OK.  Somehow I didn’t make the connection with the Bob Marley song.

    Google is always cooler than I am.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  05:05 PM

  15. bellatrys, look here. The picture’s title is in the address.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  05:20 PM

  16. Eh. Before the Blakeologists descend, that should be ”Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” not “…Children of….”

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  05:39 PM

  17. Well one NOLA mayorial candidate prefers Disneyland rather than anything that might be regarded as “shanty.”
    http://www.wonkette.com/politics/new-orleans/kimberly-williamson-butler-continues-to-astound-us-167923.php

    “Just how they gonna keep all dem poor black folk down in that shanty Trenchtown?”
    Seems as though Tyler hasn’t quite thought all of this through as yet.  Well he doesn’t seem to have thought about it what he said at all??  There are two critical problems in the area w/ regards to future development, says my FEMA manager friend.  Deadly molds sporing in every possible nook and cranny that hasn’t been removed and carted off (and that translates to 70% remaining), the Formosan termite now exceptionally hungry for sustenance.  Any shanty type development would be catastrophic for the inhabitants; and thus it seems that there is a very nasty ulterior motive to Prof Cowen’s suggestion.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  05:48 PM

  18. Cowen didn’t even bother to think through what he’s proposing.  Suppose you have a bunch of barely-better-than-trailers in the Ninth Ward.  Who’s going to buy them, knowing that they can’t survive a strong gale, much less a hurricane or flood? 

    Answer - people who can’t live elsewhere, or more likely, investors who want to turn a buck before the next storm.  Mainly the latter, I’m guessing.  Those investors will rent the shacks out for as much as they can squeeze.  They’ll skimp on maintenance - too big a risk, natch - and the place will start looking like those favelas Cowen admires. 

    Then when the next wave washes over, the people living there will lose everything, just like in 2005.  And the Tyler Cowens of the world will say they didn’t make rational economic decisions.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  06:03 PM

  19. That’s why Cowen directs the Mercatus Center, spyder and jackd.  Word is that it was originally going to be called the Ulterior Motive Center, but that name was considered less donor-friendly than the classical-sounding “Mercatus.” Mercatus was, of course, the first director of the Cato Institute in 55 B.C.E.

    Posted by Michael  on  04/20  at  06:09 PM

  20. No, no, jackd.  I’ve had so many arguments with libertarians that I can fill in their bit myself.  Look, by keeping people from living in shacks to be washed away in the next storm, you are aggressing against their freedom of contract.  They could do something else with all the money they save by renting a shack—something that they choose, not something that you paternalistically choose for them.  That shack space lying fallow in the Ninth Ward is an economic opportunity, not only for those making the shacks, and those who own the land, but also for the people who’d be living in them.

    See?  It writes itself.  I often think that the reason to be a libertarian economist is that you can just let your backbrain take over, go for a snooze, and wake up later with your next piece all typed up.

    Although I wouldn’t have come up with the music angle, I have to admit.  I guess I’m not ready to ghost columns for Cato quite yet.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  06:17 PM

  21. Mr Cowen really seems to like them Favelas. Someone should give him an invitation to live there. Also, he might as well suggest that in addition to the Shanties, basic amenities (water, food, electricity, guitars etc) must be kept limited. That way the market will decide the fittest people to live and make great music there. Sometimes economists are truly disgusting, and he is just following a long and distinguished tradition (from the famous British economist who suggested famine as a good way of controlling population in colonial India).

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  07:11 PM

  22. Some of the comments here about Tyler Cowen are really pretty far over the top.  The notion that he’s some sort of crypto-racist who wants to keep the brown folk down so they keep making that soulful music is a little absurd to anyone who’s read much of his blog or his writings.

    Posted by  on  04/21  at  12:45 AM

  23. So, when people are suffering, the best thing to do for them is to allow the suffering to continue in the name of art.  Interesting. 

    You know, since this oppressive “no bad words if you’ve ever considered voting blue” regime, I’m suffering from a lack of appropriate interjections. The man clearly needs to be told he’s wrong. I suspect that utilizing plain, old Anglo-Saxon terminology would best communicate to him the level of wrong on which he’s playing. Such terminology would also help me to adequately express my dissatisfaction with his unapologetic jackanapery.  This is a most vexing situation.

    Posted by Heo Cwaeth  on  04/21  at  02:00 AM

  24. Thank you very much, peter.

    Posted by bellatrys  on  04/21  at  07:35 AM

  25. My pleasure, bellatrys. Ackroyd’s biography of Blake has been in my stack of someday books for quite awhile, and every time Blake’s name comes up, as it did in your comment, I remember to intend to finish reading the thing.

    —You might be interested in Ackroyd’s comment on the poem it serves to illustrate, which he calls,

    …a powerful and perceptive assault upon sexual repression as one element of the general restriction of human consciousness. Blake sees the connection between the slaves of Surinam and the women of England, between commerce and sexual brutality, between Lockean theories of sensation and religious orthodoxy, all filaments in the web of the materialist mercantile world…”

    I look forward to seeing what use you make of the picture.

    Posted by  on  04/21  at  10:56 AM

  26. aaahh yes, the ulterior motive obfuscation operation.  Mercatus receives substantial funding from ExxonMobil.  How could i have overlooked the blindingly obvious immersed in the happy music.  I also under-appreciated today’s report on the $7.8 million wasted on the Alaskan company who had the contract to build shanties in NOLA.

    Posted by  on  04/21  at  01:17 PM

  27. He’s so patronizing it’s shameful.  I wonder if Tyler Cowen wants Brad deLong to call him “stupidest man” ?

    Posted by  on  04/21  at  06:29 PM

  28. "And so many of the people in the shantytown here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.”

    captcha: music! Made by the poor people, so happy in the shacks!

    Posted by Orange  on  04/21  at  06:51 PM

  29. Christopher M,
    No one is accusing Mr Cowen of racism against brown folks. His article in Salon displays a certain lack of common sense. In addition he comes across as callous and patronizing. I have been reading his weblog for long enough to know that racism is not his problem.

    Posted by  on  04/21  at  08:57 PM

  30. It’s synthetic racism, krishna.  If your ideology drives you to do the exact same things as a racist would, what’s the difference?

    Posted by  on  04/21  at  11:14 PM

  31. This guy is advocating building substandard housing for the poor folks who come to New Orleans because there will be jobs building substandard housing.  I don’t understand the reasoning here, but then, I took Economics 101 pass/fail.

    Posted by  on  04/22  at  04:12 AM

  32. That’s not a Marley lyric.

    From “The Harder They Come” soundtrack, it’s Desmond Dekker’s “Shantytown”.

    http://www.jamaicalyrics.com.ar/index.php?mod=lyric&id=168

    Just...FYI.

    Posted by  on  04/24  at  11:36 PM

  33. DoryO, I think Rich (comment 1, comment 14) was referring to “Natural Mystic,” from Exodus.  Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail, on the other hand, is most certainly Desmond Dekker.  And rudeboy bomb up the town. . . .

    Posted by  on  04/24  at  11:50 PM

  34. Can I say how glad I am to see ska/rocksteady and reggae reference - and properly referenced - in this discussion? because I am.

    long time lurker (and late to the game!).. I’ll be more on point next time.

    Posted by ripley  on  04/26  at  05:43 PM

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