Isn't Katrina going to slow the deflation of the housing bubble (via Palmer)? Hundreds of thousands of homes and apartments have been removed from the housing stock, and construction resources are going to be diverted to the Gulf Coast, increasing the pricing of new housing. I also distrust an economist who uses the sort of graph that Gross does with his "X marks the spot" chart.

Craig Newmark and John Palmer analyze Gregg Easterbrook's claim that first-round draft choices who hold out cost themselves lots of money by putting themselves behind the curve in competing for spots on the team. Newmark gives a couple of possible explanations why Easterbrook might be wrong, the first of which I agree with; Palmer suggests why the players may not be acting rationally. (Newmark's second reason may apply to agents, but I don't think players have a sufficient number of opportunities to benefit from being a repeat player in the bargaining game.)

But Palmer's explanation—that the players are being big-headed because their retinue of yes-men punish anyone who tells the player "no"—doesn't explain why the teams may not be acting rationally. There's a large opportunity cost in making a first-round pick; one could have traded the pick for an established player. The importance of the pick is illustrated by the fact that the Minnesota Vikings were crippled for years when they traded three first-round picks to get the past-his-prime Herschel Walker from the Dallas Cowboys, while the Cowboys' picks ended up winning three Super Bowls in four years.

I think Easterbrook is wrong, and camp is not as important for players' careers as avoiding injury in camp is. If teams, knowing the importance of camp, low-ball a player, the player can either hold out, sign a low-ball deal, or go to camp without a deal and risk career-ending injury. The risk of career-ending injury is not small. The risk of career-ending poor camp performance is not terribly small, either. In such a circumstance, the players are going to hold out, and, with backwards induction, the team knows the player is going to hold out—so why lowball the player if doing so is so damaging to the team's capital investment in the draft pick?

What percentage of players who show up to camp early only sign one contract in their lives? What percentage never collect more than the signing bonus? I think these two numbers present a high enough percentage that players aren't hurting their careers that much by holding out, especially when agents collectively hold out every first-round pick, as has happened this year. There's anecdotal evidence on both sides, and it's worth empirical exploration.

The original looters post is on Point of Law, not here.

Seamus (née Satchel) Farrow is starting Yale Law School. Ok, he's a teenage prodigy, but still. The article goes into some detail about the child custody dispute but somehow forgets to mention that Farrow made phony child molestation allegations against Allen.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite Simpsons moments, where the family, visiting Japan, runs across Woody Allen filming a commercial:

Hello. So many rice crackers claim to be low-cal, but only Fujikawa Rice Crackers make your interiors go bananas!

[to self] What did I do to deserve this? ... Oh, right.

Related Vows column. Both have since left Wilmer.

Hilarious account of Sean Penn's unintentional self-parody of an attempt to rescue New Orleans victims. If it was in a South Park episode, you'd think they were being over the top.

Malkin; Loy.

I had an iconoclastic high-school history teacher, a Chilean named Diego Gonzalez-Grande, who discarded textbooks and taught four different, sophisticated, history classes, all from lectures and the occasional Douglas Richard Hofstadter book, each more intense than any liberal arts class I took in college. Gonzalez also coached the soccer team, and was perhaps the most successful swim-team coach who didn't swim: the team trained by practicing arm-strokes across the blacktop, since there was no swimming pool. He'd give simultaneous chess exhibitions during lunchtime (the building had no food service in the cafeteria, so students had autonomy for lunch, and only a few of the 18-year-old seniors bought a liquid lunch at the daquiri shop a couple of blocks away); that I beat him four times in three years felt like a significant accomplishment. Diego had no recollection of me when I returned to the school in the summer of 2001, but, still, I was concerned about him, single, living on a teacher's salary, doesn't drive. A popular t-shirt featured a student's rendition of Mount Rushmore with the faces of Diego and three other iconic teachers.

Ray, a class of '82er, has set up the Ben Franklin Alumni Katrina Blog, which I was thinking of doing if no one else did. Another '82 correspondent (apparently only a few blocks from my AEI office) reports "Diego apparently is in Chicago," so that's good news.

Since I graduated, Franklin relocated from its crumbling 19th-century courthouse in Uptown to a much larger Taj Mahal of a facility on the University of New Orleans campus. This blog reports that the nifty Scipionus site (which I haven't been able to get to work consistently with my browser) reports the new building is underwater, which doesn't surprise me, given its location a few blocks from Lake Ponchartrain on the east side of town. Wired story on Scipionus.

Update: You can see the water in the Google satellite photo. Leon C. Simon Boulevard is completely underwater. If I recall correctly, the ground floor of the high school's new building was beneath street level. The top floor may be alright, but damage to the lower floors may require razing. Most of the city's landmarks are in the older part of the city that was built above sea level, on the natural levee created by the Mississippi, and they've largely seemed to survive (hat tip: Cowen), so if the arsonists can be stopped, there will still be a (considerably smaller) New Orleans.

Alas, satellite photos had a cloud covering Riverbend, so no telling what the status of the courthouse is. It should be dry; it was above street-level, and street-level was above sea level.

There was a lot of complaining that the federal government didn't send buses until Saturday the 3rd. But the city of New Orleans has 365 buses that it could have used to evacuate 22,000 people in a single trip. And Mayor Nagin failed to issue the evacuation order until after Greyhound and the airlines had shut down. This post has more detail, though I disagree with his claim that two round-trips to Houston could have been made—traffic gridlock would barely have permitted a single trip.

The main problem is that New Orleans only has so many roads out of the city, and several of those led to other places that needed evacuation. The comparison to a WMD attack on a city isn't quite precise; a hurricane creates devastation over a much larger area, and New Orleans wasn't the only place that needed immediate assistance.

This WaPo story (via B. Newmark) buries the lede that the Army Corps of Engineers didn't tell anyone about the levee break for several hours. How many people could've been evacuated from New Orleans East and the Ninth Ward in that time?

As an earlier post of mine noted, New Orleans had surrendered to its criminal element long before the flooding, and this article has more on that subject.

Fellow Ben Franklin High alum Anya Kamenetz (blog) writes in the Village Voice (Aug. 31).

As residents of war zones and the Midwest probably know already, the national news is almost useless when you want to find out what's happening to your own city. To take just one example, both The New York Times and CNN at first showed multiple dramatic shots of tall palm trees downed on Canal Street, the downtown hotel strip south of the French Quarter. They obviously didn't realize that those were non-native, promotional trees, planted just a year or so ago. Meanwhile, the first detail that broke me down, out of all I've seen and read, was a casual note about oak trees felled on St. Charles. This wide avenue, the one the streetcar rolls down, is the jewel of the city, and the trees that shade it on both sides are spreading live oaks a hundred years old or more. I don't know how many have fallen, but each one is like losing a tooth.

Then she devolves into Bush-bashing, which I suppose is mandatory for the Voice. But you'd think she'd make the connection between the police letting looters run rampant at the Wal-Mart and the fact that looters then proceeded to attack Children's Hospital.

Must-read post documenting NY Times editorials in between 1993 and 2005 complaining that too much money was being spent on flood control and the US Army Corps of Engineers. Remember this when hindsight is being used to criticize Bush for budget cuts made in June 2005 that had absolutely no impact on the floods.

13 April 2005:

Anyone who cares about responsible budgeting and the health of America's rivers and wetlands should pay attention to a bill now before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The bill would shovel $17 billion at the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control and other water-related projects -- this at a time when President Bush is asking for major cuts in Medicaid and other important domestic programs.