Even right-wing columnists are not immune to this change of style. Take Margaret Wente ("The storm has just begun. How did a piece of America become a Third World hellhole?"): "The US Army Corps of Engineers built a system of levees around the city. In 1998, when hurricane George grazed the city, the waves reached within a foot of the top of the levees. Hurricane George was only a Category Two storm.

"For years, everyone has known that a slightly stronger storm on a slightly different course would wreck the city. There were elaborate computer models that showed exactly how. Three years ago, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published reports about the threat. ‘Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable, but there wouldn’t be much to come home to. The Red Cross predicted the death toll could reach 100,000. Some people will be housed in the Superdome. Survivors will end up trapped on roofs, in buildings, or on high ground with no means of escape.’

"At the time, experts put the economic devastation at $50 billion. There was a way to protect the city: a massive, decades-long engineering project to raise the levees, at a cost of $10 to $15 billion. Another proposal was to restore the coastal wetlands that protect against storm surges. The price tag on that was $14 billion. Nobody was prepared to foot that bill – not a succession of federal administrations, not the dirt-poor state of Louisiana, and certainly not the citizens of New Orleans.

"Yet nobody predicted what came next. The social collapse. The armed gangs of looters, the scenes of predators and prey, the tales of rape and murder. The stories of snipers firing on doctors trying to move their sickest patients. Dead babies floating in the water. And, most of all, the stark correlation of class and race and survival. The white people got out. The poor black did not."

The pure and perfect market, it would seem, has its own way of performing.

"‘They’re drowning in their living rooms and their bodies are rotting where they drowned,’ said an angry Anderson Cooper on CNN. ‘And there are corpses being eaten by rats, and this is the United States of America.’"

Only now can we savour Pat Robertson’s advice to his nation that the time has come to bump off the duly elected President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, for offering cheap fuel to the poor of the world’s lone superpower.

The perfect storm blew in with no lack of warning. It had simply been proclaimed an "externality." For it was not traded on the market, and was not of infinitesimal size as is required by the "pure and perfect market" that economics courses deal with. Otherwise there are no equilibrium points that are always assumed to exist; and you can’t apply a few elementary processes of infinitesimal calculus. What we had then was an encounter between a pure and perfect storm and the "pure and perfect market."

Without the doctrine of economic "externalities" no government could have ignored the ample warnings of the weather people of what was coming up in New Orleans.

And what is more, the official economic theory could be preparing not dissimilar perfect storms of a purely economic nature. The same issue of the G&M carries a column "Taking Stock. Hurricane Katrina could be just the hiccup the US economy doesn’t need" by Derek DeCloet that says in part: "So it’s official: Mother Nature is more powerful than Alan Greenspan after all. History tells us that every time the US Federal Reserve Board has raised interest rates – as it has done ten times since June, 2004 – a calamity eventually follows in some part of the economy. In 1987 it was the stock market crash, in 1989 the savings-and-loan bailout, followed by recession, in 1994 the tequila crisis in Mexico; in 2000 another stock market crash.

"For 2005, economists placed their bets on the next hiccup – a plunge in home prices, the collapse of a major hedge fund, or several. Then came Katrina, and suddenly the balance sheet of Fannie Mae or the prospect of a derivatives meltdown didn’t seem worth discussing."

However, exactly the opposite conclusion could be drawn – that an economic system that is itself increasingly a disaster – needs the stimulus of disaster. A tongue-in-cheek exposition of that view was penned by the late Lynn Turgeon, a much missed leader of COMER at Hofstra University:

"Apparently there is nothing like a catastrophe or ‘Act of God’ to mobilize resources. According to The New York Times (1/28/94) Southern California is on the verge of an ‘earthquake boomlet.’ With damages estimated to run about $30 billion, one would expect a construction boom. But more than drywall contractors are doing a land office business. Motorcycle sales are up, massage therapists are solidly booked."

Better to Stimulate the Economy with Public Investment than Leave the Job to Catastrophes

"At a recent press conference, Laura Tyson, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, predicted that the 4th quarter growth would be stimulated by what she called the ‘flood factor.’ The Midwest is now the most rapidly growing region thanks to the stimulus coming from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Authority) payments connected with the 1993 floods.

"Earlier Peter Passell on the front page of The New York Times boasted that the effect of the World Trade Center bombing represented a net stimulus to the New York economy. All the replacement for bomb damage created jobs and the former surplus of office building space was reduced.

"Still earlier, Florida benefited from the ‘Hurricane factor.’ None of this would have surprised John Maynard Keynes who recognized that ‘Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen or the principles of classical economics stand in the way of anything better.

"President Clinton was rebuffed on his $16 billion stimulus package in early 1993. If Congress is reluctant to spend for reconstructing areas like Watts, perhaps the black community might resort to prayers. Luckily, there is some evidence that God is a Keynesian, perhaps the last."

Certainly that was the effect of the destruction of the Second World War, coming as it did after a decade of deep depression. But what certainly plays a key role in deciding whether such destruction is a stimulus for healthy growth, or on the contrary tears a country apart to jungle status, will depend on the moral state of society. And that will be determined by whether the policy of those in the saddle includes the welfare of the population as a whole or just concentrates on feathering the nests of the privileged. A supreme expression of that will be central bank policy. The destruction of World War II dwarfed even the New Orleans disaster. But to make possible the victory of the allies, promises were made for a better world, and left-of-center governments took over in most lands. They had a sensitivity for the need for tempering injustices. That was what transformed the Good Lord himself into a Keynesian. Today that is no longer the case. And the New Orleans disaster laid bare the shame of the world’s lone superpower. Even the disaster-relief that reached New Orleans was conceived and executed in a highly privilege-skewed manner. The shame of our Superpower was uncovered to the eyes of the world.

- from Economic Reform, October 2005