Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing. -- As You Like It (Hat tip Patrick Sullivan.)

Yes, the newspapers were right: the breaking of windows was general all over Ireland . They were breaking on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, breaking softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly breaking into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. They were breaking, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. Shards of glass lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the windows breaking faintly through the universe and faintly breaking, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.  All right, enough of that now! No more literary parodies today! (See the last paragraph of the link just offered.) On to business: Summing up my views on disasters: 1) When we look at history, we see disasters have sometimes been a) the downfall of a person, local group, or whole cu...

Bob Murphy tries to do a reductio of the case that disasters sometimes contain a silver lining by positing the absurdity of the analogous microeconomic case: The "macro" case of an economy with idle resources, suddenly being jolted out of its rut by a hurricane, is analogous to a "micro" case of a man who was laid off, agonizing over what to do with himself. Should he go back to school, apply to work at fast food restaurants, start his own lawn-cutting business…? Then, in the midst of his indecision, he realizes his house is on fire! The man suddenly knows exactly what he needs to do with himself—he has to run to the kitchen and grab the fire extinguisher. Yet would anybody dare argue that the fire, notwithstanding the property damage to the house, at least solved the man’s problem of idle labor? Well, Bob, the answer, unfortunately for your argument, is that perhaps not in such an extreme case (but who knows without more details), but in closely similar cases,...

Kuehn defends Morici against Boudreaux here . Then Murphy responds, criticizing Kuehn: "For an example of an economist who quite clearly is saying that the storm is bad on a personal, human level, but that it might actually leave us better off in material terms, see this guy ." But what did Morici actually write? "None of this is meant to discount the storm's costs to individuals and the temporary or even permanent disruption to lives and communities, much of which cannot be quantified. However, when government authorities facilitate quick and effective rebuilding, the process of economic renewal can leave communities better off than before in many tangible ways... A few years down the road, then, natural disasters on the scale of Sandy are not as devastating as they once may have seemed ." So Morici characterizes the post-hurricane state at some unspecified later time as better in many ways: the hurricane will prove to have been not as devastating...