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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="232" data-total-count="232">Texans will find few consolations in the wake of a hurricane as terrifying as Harvey. But here, at least, is one: A biblical storm has hit them, and the death toll —<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/harvey-death-toll.html">38</a><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/harvey-death-toll.html"> as of this writing</a> — is mercifully low, given its intensity.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="294" data-total-count="526">This is not how it plays out in much of the world. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch ripped through Central America and killed anywhere between 11,000 and 19,000 people, mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua. Nearly a decade later Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar and a staggering 138,000 people perished.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="180" data-total-count="706">Nature’s furies — hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, infectious diseases, you name it — may strike unpredictably. But their effects are not distributed at random.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="437" data-total-count="1143">Rich countries tend to experience, and measure, the costs of such disasters primarily in terms of money. Poor countries experience them primarily in terms of lives. Between 1940 and 2016, a total of 3,348 people died in the United States on account of hurricanes, according to <a href="http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/hazstats/resources/weather_fatalities.pdf">government data</a>, for an average of 43 victims a year. That’s a tragedy, but compare it to the nearly 140,000 lives lost when a cyclone hit Bangladesh in 1991.</p><div id="story-ad-1" class="story-ad ad ad-placeholder nocontent robots-nocontent ">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="524" data-total-count="1667" id="story-continues-1">Why do richer countries fare so much better than poorer ones when it comes to natural disasters? It isn’t just better regulation. I grew up in Mexico City, which adopted stringent building codes following a devastating earthquake in 1957. That didn’t save the city in the 1985 earthquake, when <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/25/world/mexicans-link-damage-in-quake-to-breaches-of-city-building-code.html?mcubz=3">we learned</a> that those codes had been flouted for years by lax or corrupt building inspectors, and thousands of people were buried under the rubble of shoddy construction. Regulation is only as good, or bad, as its enforcement.</p>        <a class="visually-hidden skip-to-text-link" href="#story-continues-2">Continue reading the main story</a>
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="276" data-total-count="2120">Every child knows that houses of brick are safer than houses of wood or straw — and therefore cost more to build. Harvey will damage or ruin thousands of homes. But it won’t sweep away entire neighborhoods, as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/11/11/world/asia/typhoon-haiyan-map.html?mcubz=1">Typhoon Haiyan did</a> in the Philippine city of Tacloban in 2013.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="459" data-total-count="2579">Harvey will also inflict billions in economic damage, most crushingly on uninsured homeowners. The numbers are likely to be staggering in absolute terms, but what’s more remarkable is how easily the American economy can absorb the blow. The storm will be a “speed bump” to Houston’s $503 billion economy, according to Moody’s Analytics’ Adam Kamins, who <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-its-economic-heft-houston-is-equipped-to-recover-from-harvey-1504085403">told T</a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-its-economic-heft-houston-is-equipped-to-recover-from-harvey-1504085403">he Wall Street Journal</a> that he expects the storm to derail growth for about two months.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="478" data-total-count="3057">On a global level, the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/disasters-cost-more-than-ever-but-not-because-of-climate-change/">notes</a> that disaster losses as a percentage of the world’s G.D.P., at just 0.3 percent, have remained constant since 1990. That’s despite the dollar cost of disasters having nearly doubled over the same time — at just about the same rate as the growth in the global economy. (Pielke is yet another victim of the climate lobby’s hyperactive <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-unhappy-life-as-a-climate-heretic-1480723518">smear machine</a>, but that doesn’t make his data any less valid.)</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="553" data-total-count="3610">Climate activists often claim that unchecked economic growth and the things that go with are principal causes of environmental destruction. In reality, growth is the great offset. It’s a big part of the reason why, despite our warming planet, mortality rates from storms <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/ofdacred-international-disaster-data/">have declined</a> from .11 per 100,000 in the 1900s to .04 per 100,000 in the 2010s, according to data compiled by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser. Death rates from other natural disasters such as floods and droughts have fallen by even more staggering percentages over the last century.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="439" data-total-count="4049">That’s because economic growth isn’t just a matter of parking lots paving over paradise. It also underwrites safety standards, funds scientific research, builds spillways and wastewater plants, creates “green jobs,” <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html">subsidizes Elon Musk</a>, sets aside prime real estate for conservation, and so on. Poverty, not wealth, is the enemy of the environment. Only the rich have the luxury of developing an ethical stance toward their trash.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="245" data-total-count="4294">The paradox of our time is that the part of the world that has never been safer from the vagaries of nature seems never to have been more terrified of them. Harvey truly is an astonishing storm, the likes of which few people can easily remember.</p><button class="button comments-button  theme-speech-bubble-large" data-skip-to-para-id="">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="338" data-total-count="4632">Then again, as meteorologist Philip Klotzbach points out, it’s also only one of four Category 4 or 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the United States since 1970. By contrast, <a href="http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E23.html">more than twice as many</a> such storms made landfall between 1922 and 1969. Make of that what you will, but remember that fear is often a function of unfamiliarity.</p><div id="story-ad-2" class="story-ad ad ad-placeholder nocontent robots-nocontent ">
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