Natural disasters have a way of shaking up preconceived notions.
The tsunami in faraway Asia tugged at American hearts and pursestrings with an unprecedented urgency.
The earthquake in Kashmir has Indians and Pakistanis talking to each other like neighbors and not mortal enemies.
Katrina blew the cover off the Bush administration’s carefully constructed veneer of competence and credibility to expose its crony infested, bumbling political machinery.
But one unshakeable constant of war and other disasters is that while thousands suffer, a handful of wily individuals always find a way to make money – by either denying victims what should rightfully be theirs or by scalping them. The more respectable looking the thief, the bigger is the take.
Accidental Blogger 
6 responses to “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose”
This raises the more general question of when something counts as “exploitation.” We have a strong intuition that price-gouging after a disaster is exploitation; yet it follows naturally from the exalted laws of supply and demand, doesn’t it? It turns out to be pretty hard to articulate what makes something count as exploitation, if one takes the free market –whatever that really is– as one’s moral default (state of nature; initial position; whatever).
My personal view is that the shocking opportunism of some in the private sector (leaving aside here the corruption of their cronies in the public sector, which is a separate issue) in the wake of disasters such as Katrina is just a dramatization of the exploitation that takes place in the name of the free market all the time, albeit in less blatantly shocking magnitude.
I know that’s a broad statement, but in the interest of resisting our usual defaults, I’m ready to make the broad statement first and refine it later.
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Even some Republican congressmen are concerned.
See here:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=1256620
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i hope we’re not being overly romantic about what the quake in Kashmir (or even the tsunami is Asia) have done.
a couple years ago, after the devastating quake in Gujarat, India had freely accepted aid from Pakistan. i don’t think anyone remembers that as a watershed moment in Indo-Pak relations.
the present disaster is following predictable lines — moderate and liberal Pakistani newspapers such as The Dawn and The Daily Times (and i daresay, the a substantial portion of the “common masses”) appreciate India’s gestures, while the hardliners deride as political posturing as innocuous a thing as the sentence “from the people of India to the people of Pakistan” on India’s aid packets.
families who have been split because of the partition have always been hankering for normalized relations, if not a borderless subcontinent.
the question has always been whether each country can overcome its ego and whether Pakistan can at least have a stable polity responsive to the people rather than the army brass.
in that respect, the quake has changed nothing. while the Pakistani liberals have bemoaned Musharraf’s hesitation in accepting Indian aid both on humanitarian grounds as well as as a missed opportunity in improving crossborder relations, the fact is, his administration is hardly constrained by public opinion.
If anything, reports that the administrative vacuum in providing quake relief has been filled by local militant outfits — who have consequently turned into heroes overnight — only bodes ill for the peace process.
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quick response to Sanjukta’s comment:
nothing in economic theory has ever indicated that a “free market” achieves equity. “efficiency” in a narrowly defined sense, is all it hopes to achieve — not that the importance of that should be underestimated.
an economist would in general have no hesitation in agreeing with you that the market left to its own devices, can be highly exploitative.
it is interesting — and sad — though that as pervasive a problem as “exploitation” is simply not part of the general vocabulary of economics. discussion of market inequities in mainstream economics in the West probably went out the window with labour unions, and with the gravitational shift of the discipline from Europe to the US. The economics of developing countries, where exploitation is so blatantly conspicuous as to be hard to ignore, has yet to break free of Bretton Woods-imposed neoclassical ideology, and come into its own.
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Thanks for the perspective from the vicinity of ground zero . The western media made much of the Indian aid to Pakistan. However feeble the effort, any gesture of goodwill is an improvement over unbreachable hostility. And just today, my husband and I were discussing that the extremists will have yet another opportunity to capitalize on the incompetence and corruption of the local government and the misery of the victims in the aftermath of the quake.
Changes in set attitudes after a particularly grisly human tragedy such as I mention, may indeed be a temporary improvement. It was meant to contrast with the attitudes that never change – that of making a quick buck at someone else’s cost.
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It is no accident that Marx, a man who nearly succeeded in changing the world order in a fundamental way and did manage to reduce exploitation, turned away from philosophy somewhat towards economics. We seem to be past the days when a noble message alone was enough to move humans in practical ways to improve matters. The messiah, consequently, may never come. Perhaps good thoughts will exert their intended beneficial effects in modern civilization only if they are disguised in the language of economics — such is the power of material things over spiritual matters. Or, from a more fundamentalist viewpoint, this may simply be another example of the clash between the quasi-instincts of altruism and selfishism as practiced by modern humans.
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