I knew this shit about New Orelans' population not recovering was going to be popping out of the pipline. The fact is, a half a million people should not be living at the mouth of a delta regularly on the path of hurricanes! The French Quarter can stay, it's above sea level, but the rest shouldn't be propped up for the sake of bureaucrats who have an interest in the perpetuation of particular urban conurbations. Cities aren't alive, people are. The fact is that scattering New Orleans' population is probably good for the people who used to live in that city. First, the culture of the town was nasty, the corruption and murder rates tell the tale. Second, hurricanes aren't going to go away, no matter how sturdily you rebuild. People need to move past this mystical Living Cities mentality, cities come alive from the bottom up, not by executive fiat (as the hundreds of urban renewal projects often find out). The same reality applies to the hollowing out of the heartland, we aren't a nation of family farms anymore. Deal with it.

Addendum: Let me make something clear, I think gene-environment correlation and gene-environment interaction are crucial. I think that New Orleans has problems with social capital (due to a variety of factors) on an individual level, but I also believe that the concentration of these individuals in one place creates an environment that exacerbates the baseline traits. Scattering the poorer residents of the city across the country will at least mitigate some of this. It might result in social headaches in other parts of the country, but since the environmental milieu will not be as favorable to the expression of social pathologies the cost vs. benefit is a no brainer. And from what I can see the impact on most places throughout the country excluding Houston and Baton Rouge will be mild enough that we can neglect it.

Addendum II: People who complain about racial segregation (residential) should also oppose the re-population of New Orelans. The city was 70% black. At least temporarily the scattering will result in more integration in this country.

Related: Jack Shafer agrees. A guy on "Talk of the Nation" on NPR is prattling about the loss of "richness and diversity" if people don't come back. We're going to hear a lot of that in the next few weeks...I don't know if common sense will overwhelm this pap.

Update: OK, the guy who loves richness and diversity edited a book titled Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender and the Sociology of Disasters. One caller stated that rebuilding NOLA is "moronic." Hallelujah brother!

Update II: My reference to gene-environment correlation or interaction shouldn't be meant to imply that I think gene-non-gene dynamics are all that is at work, my point is that there are higher order effects when you concentrate individuals of type x in a small spatial region. For example, if you have have 9 crack addicts, and 90 non-crack addicts, a situation where you distribute the crack addicts among evenly among 3 groups of 30 (so 30 non-addicts and 3 addicts per group) is I think preferable to throwing the 9 into one group of 30 and leaving the other 2 groups crack-addictless. The synergistic effects of greater numbers of socio and psychopaths is a definite cost.

Update III: David agrees. Keep spreading the meme!

Update IV: Steve weighs in. Randall from last week.