The Outlook for New York, Continued

Arnold,

I like that you are following logical predictions of PSST and in some sense giving the theory a natural experiment.

Can we nail down some specific predictions? First to see how much disagreement there is between you and commenters and second to make evaluation easier ex post.

Would you predict?

Total employment will be lower in New York in one year. [perhaps controlling for national avg chg]

Total income will be lower in 1 year.

Total population will be lower in one year.

The number of commuters on public transportation will be lower in one year.

Maybe there are more/better predictions we can write down. I picked one year arbitrarily, because the argument is that the effects are long-lasting and possibly permanent. Maybe sorting into short and long-run predictions to see if most of the disagreement is on the “this will be harder to fix than you think” and “this will have negative effects on the city permanently.”

I don’t like that I used quotes in that last sentence, since those are my words and not yours. I just wanted to separate two arguments that you were making in my reading of your post.

Ed Glaeser’s book and the ebooks of Matt Yglesias and Ryan Avent all make a powerful case for the economic benefits of dense cities. They also document that because of zoning it would would be almost impossible to build another place as dense as Manhattan in America today. Where would the businesses go to if they left New York if they want a similar environment?

Memory says the Allies did start to focus bombing on raillroads and the like in German-held areas in the latter stages of WW II, with sort of effectiveness that you would have hoped for.

Why did it take so long? Lack of theory, I suspect, and unwarranted faith in the accuracy of aerial bombing. It just seemed so obvious that hitting a high-priority target like a factory was more important than tearing up a couple of miles of railroad track… until it turned out hitting factories from 20,000 feet was about as easy as threading needles from that distance. Later on … the Allies had hopes of using those same roads and rail tracks themselves, which argued against indiscriminate attacks.

Not to argue against the subject of your post.

Good to see you here again!

There is something of a literature on this matter:

The strategic bombing of German cities during World War II and its impact on city growth by Steven Brakman, Harry Garretsen and Marc Schramm

We construct a unique data set in order to analyse whether or not a large temporary shock has an impact on city growth. Following recent work by Davis and Weinstein on Japan, we take the strategic bombing of German cities during World War II as an example of such a shock, and analyse its impact on post-war German city growth. If the war shock has only a temporary impact, then there will be a tendency towards mean reversion. Our main finding is that the bombing had a significant but temporary impact on post-war city growth in Germany as a whole as well as in West Germany separately, but that this is not the case for city growth in East Germany.

Bones, Bombs and Break Points: The Geography of Economic Activity by Davis and Weinstein

We consider the distribution of economic activity within a country in light of three leading theories – increasing returns, random growth, and locational fundamentals. To do so, we examine the distribution of regional population in Japan from the Stone Age to the modern era. We also consider the Allied bombing of Japanese cities in WWII as a shock to relative city sizes. Our results support a hybrid theory in which locational fundamentals establish the spatial pattern of relative regional densities, but increasing returns may help to determine the degree of spatial differentiation. One implication of these results is that even large temporary shocks to urban areas have no long-run impact on city size.

I read this as evidence against any lasting consequence to Hurricane Sandy.

Q,

I showed up at Hewes around 6:45am to a seething mass of humanity and no buses, no cops and one lone MTA guy trying to wrangle everyone and keep them relatively calm. Buses did show up, one at a time, and confusion between which bus went all the way to Midtown and which bus took passengers only as far as over the bridge caused a lot of pushing and shoving to get in/out. Once we were finally underway, the traffic crept along so slowly people started yelling at the driver, who wasn’t having any of it. Once we finally got on the bridge you would think that people would breathe a sigh of relief, but instead passengers were barely keeping their rage in check. It was the kind of tension right before a fight. Nothing ultimately happened, and I’m sure everyone was tired and cranky, but I had expected a much different attitude on the first day of interboro transportation post-storm.

It could have been much better this morning, I don’t know. I left an hour earlier and was grabbed by a car that needed an additional body to meet the three-person-per-car requirement to cross the bridge. Getting back home will likely be a good deal more complicated.

Bridges and rail rolling stock were significant targets in WWII, the former from high altitude and the latter by fighters returning from escort missions (once aircraft like the P-51 were available that had appropriate range).

Bridges, being relatively small, were tough to destroy with the technology of the time, but were still common targets. They were often found to be disappointingly easy for the enemy to repair or replace. (And bridges considered potential avenues for invasion were intentionally left standing.) Destruction of rolling stock (esp. locomotives) by fighters was a major problem for Axis supply lines.

Rail lines themselves were not common targets, as they are hard to hit and very easy to repair. Rail yards (being much larger, and also concentrating rolling stock) were targeted.

Pipelines and petroleum infrastructure were also major targets, and this caused significant problems, though those effects took a while to manifest. In the end scores of German tanks and other vehicles were abandoned due to lack of fuel (both due to lack of supply and logistics problems.)

The electrical system was not targeted, because wartime intelligence suggested that the German system was flexible enough to route around damage. There was considerable debate about this, and probably attacking power generation and switching would have been a very good idea, as both are expensive and lengthy repairs. Chaff caused quite a few problems on both sides of the channel, however.

Water distribution, being mostly a “civilian” target, was not commonly attacked–though several dams were destroyed.

Factories were considered good targets since they are time- and resource-intensive to repair, and there are a reasonably small number of them. Or, at least, that’s the idea. The ball bearing industry was an especially good target, it being a cornerstone industry–but attacks were not intense enough to entirely shut it down. Factories proved also to be surprisingly hard to destroy, as they could be hardened (sandbags around machinery), dispersed, disguised, and repaired with reasonably rapidity.

One of the lessons of WWII’s strategic bombing is that there’s an awful lot of nodes in an economy, and it’s really hard to take out enough to shut the whole network down. It’s even very hard to take out a whole sector (rail, ball bearings, oil) when specifically concentrating on it, because there’s usually quite a lot of spare capacity and/or redundancy, and because the network becomes even more resilient when under attack (due to expedient repairs, hardening, decentralization, etc). Which is not to say strategic bombing didn’t work. It did make things much harder, and degraded German capacity in almost all areas–but only with costly and continued attack.

In many ways, a hurricane causes worse problems than a bombing campaign, as it hits many systems all at once. But the most critical components, roads and power, usually come back quickly, and that helps everything else get back to normal.

The ultimate effects of a hurricane really depends on the extent of damage not to utilities but to real estate. In many ways Galveston never recovered from 1900 (almost everything there was destroyed) and New Orleans is still recovering from Katrina. But Houston, which was almost entirely without power for a week following Ike, showed almost no signs after a few months. Losing utilities is annoying, but a mere blip.

New York, I suspect, will barely notice after a few months, too. A city not going to work for a few days, or even a few weeks, is hardly a disaster. (It happens to the whole country of France for months each year!) If a few subway lines take a month to reopen, well, there are other ways to get around. Coastal mid-New Jersey will be different–though from what I’ve seen, probably better than many Gulf Coast coastal hurricane hits.

Submitted via power from an emergency generator in NY:

If the lights don’t come on by Monday, my guess is that the folks in lower Manhattan are going to be in a less-than-positive frame of mind.

Hey, that’s *me* you are talking about, 16th St., Chelsea, Manhattan. Say that to my face! 🙂

Actually I’m in a worse situation than that. My family is on 16th St., I’m in the burbs looking after my mother, where power is expected to be out for another 10 days and it is beginning to get really cold at night. I’m posting this from a shelter where I’ve been helping take seniors.

I occasionally fantasize about what I would have done differently on the Allied side during World War II. Instead of trying to bomb cities and factories, I would have tried to take out the main transportation conduits, particularly railroad bridges and highway bridges. I would also have gone after electrical transmission stations, fuel pipelines, and the water distribution system.

They did exactly that as soon as they could. The reason why they bombed cities in the start was just because cities were the only targets big enough for them to hit. The early British raids were lucky to hit the right country, literally — raids aimed at France often hit Holland and Belgium.

Once the USAAC had control of the skies for daylight bombing so they could see the target, plus radio directed location fixing and targeting skills improved enough so they could actually hit what they saw, they went right to Raiload Campaign and Oil Campaign, with devastating effect. Although German war production in total still continued up near all the way through it, there is remarkable resiliance in an economy.

Forget about whether my fantasy strategy would have been feasible. The point here is that the storm executed that strategy in New York.

No, it isn’t. Nothing like it.

It took out key transportation arteries, electrical transmission, and it disrupted the fuel and water system.

Which are all very fixable, very simply and directly, with time measured in a few days and effort valued in readily affordable dollars.

The point of the USAAC Railroad and Oil Campaigns was that they kept hitting the same targets day-after-day, relentlessly, so the targets could never be fixed and the Reich utterly bankrupted its resources in the attempt.

I was very cold here without power. I went on Amazon.com and with *one day delivery* — the roads and bridges into NY have not been bombed out — obtained a very nice kerosene heater that has me nice and toasty. The Germans couldn’t do that! Power is promised back tomorrow.

I stand by the point that if you think of the economy as a system of collaboration, then the conduits that facilitate collaboration are vital.

Of course. But you are also relying upon an implicit belief that if damaged they cannot be fixed. That the same forces that drove their creation somenow cannot drive their restoration. That simple tasks like fixing power lines can’t be done. Where does that come from?

I wrote in the other post, the patterns of interdependence make for a compounding effect.

They also have a reinforcing effect. Society is a web. This strand depends on that strand, true, but when that strand breaks many other strands also support this one. Unless the USAAC is relentlessly destroying them all.

I would think that would be the free-market, libertarian belief.

Instead, I detect an Austrian prejudice that “roundabout production processes” somehow are narrow, rigid and inflexible, so if they break for some reason society is doomed. *And* that “non-roundabout processes” — there’s nothing “roundabout” about fixing power lines and draining tunnels — are the same. Where this prejudice comes from I don’t know.

Where I am writing from there are within my sight construction crews from Colorado and Mississippi reparing on the power lines. That shows remarkable flexibility and regenerative resources, does it not?? (Not available to the Germans in 1944.)

I keep thinking that there is probably some 70-year-old couple trapped on the 10th floor somewhere without electricity or running water, and perhaps city personnel should be dealing with them rather than with setting up water stations and barricades for a race.

And this is the typical left-wing prejudice justifying big govt: Somewhere somebody is in an unhappy circumstance and being ignored by free people going about their happy business, so government is needed to restrict and take from the free to help whomever that somebody is, real or not.

An odd prejudice to combine with libertarian sympathies.

This is consistent with what I wrote in a post that most people disagreed with, and which may yet prove to be mostly wrong.

Quantify your belief into a measurable claim and lets consider a bet. As a NYCer who lives in blacked out lower Manhattan, I’ll consider taking the other side.

Most New York Subway service returns. After 4 days.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-new-york-subway-service-resumes-2012-11-03-111034518?link=MW_latest_news

Ed beat me to it. NYC subway service 80% restored as of today. All trains expected to be operating within a few days. No word yet of Citigroup decamping to the suburbs.

I’ve always liked Arnold’s blogging but these two posts were not up to his usual standards. As I commented on the prior post, this appears to have been a classic “hedgehog” prediction fail.

To borrow a phrase from Delong (forgive me), will any beliefs be marked to market?

Hi,

On Arnold’s firt post I predicted more than 60 percent of pre-storm ridership by November 10. Does anyone know if that prediction came true? It sounds like it did, but there doesn’t seem to be any exact ridership information anywhere.