Disaster Housing: Solutions Conceived by the Hexayurt Project

Vinay Gupta of the Hexayurt Project has done much work in the area of emergency housing, something I have explored in some postings here at Bubbleconomics — see “MSF’s ‘Plug and Play Hospital’ in Haiti,” “Haiti Disaster: Housing for When the Bubble Pops,” and “Where will people live after the Big Bubble pops?“ Gupta articulates [...]

MSF’s ‘Plug and Play Hospital’ in Haiti

Yesterday I was discussing the potential value of rapidly-deployable emergency housing in disasters — see “Haiti Disaster: Housing for When the Bubble Pops.” Today, BoingBoing published a fascinating interview with Laurent Dedieu, logistics supervisor for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, aka Doctors Without Borders), about the inflatable hospital the organization has deployed in Haiti. (See “Haiti: [...]

Haiti Disaster: Housing for When the Bubble Pops

Seeing the devastating effects on the lives of the people in Port au Prince, Haiti, in the wake of the recent earthquake emphasizes the potential value of emergency housing solutions for recovery. In such a disaster, survivors are thrust into chaos and forced to live in unstable, unsanitary conditions, seeking out housing any way they [...]

How the Wall Street Boom Went Kablooey

Reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Bright-Sided recently, I became aware of Michael Lewis’s November 2008 article for Portfolio, “The End of Wall Street’s Boom,” which offers a fascinating inside look at how bubbles develop, sustain themselves, and then collapse. Lewis makes an interesting connection with the delusional “positive thinking” mode that seems to be an [...]

Simon Johnson: ‘What kind of catastrophe would you like?’

On CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on 7 January, MIT economist Simon Johnson delivered a perky, upbeat prediction of economic catastrophe in the next year due to the megalomania of banks that have drunk the too-big-to-fail Koolaid — see “Crisis Just Beginning: Economist“. You’ll get a kick out of Johnson’s collegial banter with CNBC’s Erin Burnett [...]