Earthquakes And Prosperity

The next time you see an anti-globalization march, think of it as a pro-20,000 earthquake deaths in Asia march.

Let me start explaining this thought at the beginning. Although Anglo-Saxon in heritage, my family has Asian roots, thanks to my dad's US Navy posting in Tokyo in 1958, which started a long stay in the Far East for all of us.

So when news of 20,000 dead in Pakistan and India reached me, I knew the look of the place where these deaths occurred. I've been to villages like the ones destroyed in the quake, and it's easy to see why the death toll is so high. Simply put: Poor construction.

Everything is brick or, if the owner is wealthy, concrete block. Reinforcing is nonexistent or rare. Foundation engineering? I doubt it.

This was a big quake; at 7.6, you will have deaths and damage. But in the 1989 quake in the Bay Area, which registered 7.1, there were 63 deaths. Granted, there's a marked increase in power between 7.6 and 7.1, but there are weaker earthquakes with even more horrifying death tolls in the Third World, like 1991's 6.3 quake in Bombay that killed 30,000.

My first thought is that the governments are to blame for their nonexistent, lax or corrupted building standards, and they do hold a share of the blame. But more to blame is a lack of prosperity -- or as Jonah Goldberg explained it in NRO in 1991, Turkish toilets vs. flush toilets:

On December 7, 1988, there was an earthquake in Armenia (Turkish toilets) that killed 28,854 people. It recorded 6.9 on the Richter scale. Less than a year later there was an earthquake in San Francisco and Oakland (flush toilets). It was a 7.1 on the Richter scale, but it claimed 63 casualties. About seven months later there was a quake near Rasht, Iran, (Turkish toilets, and soup served to Jews) scoring six tenths of a point higher, at 7.7. But that earthquake killed 50,000 people.
(h/t Gateway Pundit)

You can be poor and happy, but not if you're a nation. High standards of construction -- not to mention education or medicine -- require money. Only a nation with a fair amount of wealth can afford the staff to research, write and enforce high standards; the engineers to design them; the construction personnel with the training to build to them; and ultimately, the home and building owners with the money to buy the materials to meet the standards.

You can't achieve it without a steel industry that can make rebar, or the money to import it. You can't achieve it without the equipment and money to study the soil and compact it properly, if need be. You can't achieve it if inspectors take cash so contractors can cut corners. And you can't achieve it easily if you have no seismic-friendly lumber because your forests have been stripped clean for firewood because you have no useful electrical or natural gas industries.

Politics has consequences, sometimes life and death consequences. Hard environmentalists and anti-globalists want people in poor countries to stay poor, just like they want people in rich countries to become poorer. But they hatch these schemes in their well-engineered, reinforced, heated and cooled homes.

Let them try to stick to their beliefs in the village of Garhi Habibullah, where 300 bodies have been recovered from the ruins of a girls school.