NYTimes quotes Stratfor and more

Stratfor, Motley Fool and Murry get quoted
Stratfor : it's the Geopolitics of New Orleans

Murry : cat's out of the bag on racial issues

The Necessity of New Orleans - New York Times

AS horrible as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath have been, the markets and pundits have concluded that the economic fallout won't be so bad.

Not so fast, writes George Friedman, chairman of Strategic Forecasting at the company's news-driven, globally oriented Web site (stratfor.com). While the river, the port and the oil infrastructure appear to be basically functional or reparable, that doesn't mean everything's jake.

"During the cold war," he writes, "a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans."

After describing how and why New Orleans is and always has been central to the economy - for reasons that go way beyond the oil industry - Mr. Friedman writes that while it's good that so much of the infrastructure is intact, the population loss could be devastating.

"The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States."

The cost of rebuilding can't help but affect the economy. But rebuild we must, Mr. Friedman says, even though "it is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist."

"Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place."

MICROECONOMICS The financial analyst Stephen D. Simpson, writing for the Motley Fool (fool.com), drills down to the specific effects the hurricane may have. "There will be far-reaching consequences across the entire economy," he writes. "While the region will someday recover and return to normalcy, it won't happen quickly."

and

Commentary - The Inequality Taboo
"Eleven years after the assumptions underlying "The Bell Curve" were rejected as bad science by many critics and academics, Charles Murray, one author of the book, has decided that now is the time for a defense on the Web site of Commentary magazine. His inspiration is Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard University president whose remarks about women's aptitude for math and science caused a stir early this year. Despite the vast differences in what they said, how they said it, and how people reacted, Mr. Murray declares that both he and Mr. Summers are victims of "Orwellian disinformation."