EconTalk - Pete Boettke on Katrina, ten years after — Lessons learned from Katrina recovery after 10 yrs of study

Russ here does a followup interview with Prof. Pete Boettke whose been leading a team studying the on-the-ground reality of Hurricane Katrina recovery on the Gulf coast. There's some great stories of recovery and interesting discussion of how economic studies are done. Couple interesting notes: - Pete setup teams focused on looking at recovery from 3 perspectives - Government, Private Sector and "Civil Society" (e.g. churches, clubs, schools, other non-profits) - New Orleans suffered in recovery from not allowing "Permissionless Innovation" and from preventing skilled laborers, who could rebuild homes, from using their licenses in New Orleans. Feels a bit like Uber & AirBnB's struggles with regulations. -Pete articulates an interesting model for how structural changes happen in the economy (see picture) - Ideas legitimate institutions (ex. Private Property - The fact that people believe in the idea, decreases the cost of enforcement and so helps create it) -> Institutions structure intensives and control flow of information and feedback -> This Generates economics performance -> We evaluate the outcome based on Ideas about "the good life" and "human flourishing" feedback into which ideas have traction.