Our Enemy, The State

Last fall I argued that the relatively light death toll of hurricane Sidr was due to improvements in the institutional framework of the Bangladeshi polity. More recently, I suggested that Burma's social & economic deficits vis-a-vis Bangladesh were due to negative government action. Now Chris Mooney has an article up on the reverberations of hurricane Nargis. Here's what caught my attention:

Hurricanes have been dramatically active in the North Indian region in the past year, just as they were in the Atlantic region in 2004 and 2005. There is quite a body of scientific research now developing on whether global warming may be leading to stronger storms, more of them (or fewer), and so forth. However, this remains a very murky area, and global warming can hardly explain a fact like this: Although the Yucatan and Central America got smacked by back-to-back Category 5 storms last year--Hurricanes Dean and Felix were both far more powerful, meteorologically, than Cyclones Sidr and Nargis--the combined death toll was only 162. That's because nations like Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras warned their populations and, in some cases, evacuated people in vulnerable areas. It's already painfully obvious that Myanmar's military junta did nothing of the kind.

I think Amartya Sen's observations about the general responsiveness differences between democratic and non-democratic regimes applies here....*

* Yes, I know Bangladesh is not currently a democracy; but since some modicum of civil, if corrupt, society has emerged over the past generation even authoritarian rulers are extremely sensitive to democratic pressures. In contrast, in Burma the military is a privileged caste apart which zealousness defends the power of the junta.