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 the need for inexpensive, rapidly-deployable solutions for housing in emergencies in his article “Hexayurt Country.”

In an infographic called “Six Ways to Die,” he sketches out a map of the infrastructures that keep us all alive and illustrates how lives are threatened when those infrastructures fail or are disrupted.

Built around that “Six Ways to Die” framework is a presentation called “Dealing in Security: Understanding Vital Services and How They Keep You Safe.”

The Hexayurt is a sheltering solution made from flat panels that can be quickly and cheaply constructed but are much more durable than emergency tents. Here is a very useful video, “Ending Poverty With Open Hardware,” in which Gupta explains some important concepts about how to prevent loss of life using open technology.

AB — 23 January 2010

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: HOWTO set up a plug-and-play hospital — Doctors Without Borders.”)

Just the fact that MSF has a job title “Logistics Supervisor” makes a statement about the character of the organization and the way it thinks about relief work. The group also has an R&D organization, which has developed the “plug and play hospital,” described by BoingBoing as “a series of inflatable tents with generators and sanitation equipment designed to be mostly independent from the water and power systems typically unavailable after a catastrophe.”

Follow this link for a gallery of photos showing how the hospital was set up.

In the interview, Dedieu describes the hospital:

The mobile field hospital is 9 tents, and each is about 100 square meters, so the total is about 900 square meters. The land we’re using is a former football field, so it’s the perfect space for this, nice and flat.

[The hospital consists of the] 9 tents, 100 beds, including hospitalization and ICU and recovery beds. A triage and emergency tent, and two operations theatres. The idea is that within the tent we have a complete kit we can deploy including energy supply, water supply, all the sanitation, and all medical equipment inside the tent. In Haiti, everything needed to run a hospital including beds and biomedical equipment is included.

We want to be as autonomous as possible with regard to energy. In this case we have one 30 KV generator and one 60 KV generator. Plus an electrical board, and equipment to ensure electrical safety. And then you have all the electrical wire you need to set up lights inside the ward, and set up plugs for the medical equipment.

Here he gives some insights into how MSF’s R&D and innovation processes work:

We are working with standard MSF equipment, we have R&D centers and storage in Europe, in Bordeaux and Brussels. When the equipment reaches the field, typically you have to face some technical issues, some small problems, but the big issues have been solved. One of the problems we had the first time we used this hospital in Pakistan in 2005 was that there was a big difference in temperature between day and night, at night the tents were deflating. The pressure inside the tent was not enough and was creating a problem. Now we have gauges that constantly measure the pressure and trigger compressors to re-inflate if it goes too low.

MSF’s solution speaks to the need for technologies that can be rapidly deployed in crisis situations to deal with medical needs. Previously I wrote out some thoughts about the need for solutions for post-bubble housing needs — see “Where will people live after the Big Bubble pops?” from June 2009 and “Haiti Disaster: Housing for When the Bubble Pops” from earlier this week, 20 January 2010.

What I’m trying to get at is that, if the Bubbleconomics premise is correct, then the world is going to see increasing needs for large-scale relief solutions, as the global situation worsens and economic bubbles pop at all levels. This emerging regime will call for innovative efforts on the parts of governments, NGOs, and businesses to create solutions that can be deployed rapidly at large scale to meet such needs as housing, medical care, and food.

AB — 21 January 2010

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 can. It seems to me this suggests a need and opportunity for emergency housing solutions that can be quickly and massively deployed by governments or NGOs.

An article in Wired from October 2007 includes a gallery of interesting designs for such situations — see “Instant Housing and Designing for Disaster.”

Just having the housing technology, though, isn’t enough, as demonstrated by the difficulties of getting medical and food assistance to the people in Port au Prince. The problem isn’t necessarily getting relief resources in the first place, but in getting them implemented and distributed.

Deploying emergency housing for potentially hundreds of thousands of people would require a tremendous amount of advance expenditure and organizational infrastructure. So the solution that’s called for is more along the lines of an urban-planning project rather than just an architectural problem.

Suppose it were possible to manufacture in advance the components of a massive portable community that could be stored in advance and deployed rapidly anywhere in the world?

Just thinking out loud — see my previous article, “Where Will People Live After the Big Bubble Pops?“

AB — 19 January 2010

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 important component of economic bubbles. This is the source of Ehrenreich’s interest in what Lewis has to say.

The main character of Lewis’s story is Steve Eisman, who built a busines toward the end of the bubble short-selling mortgage originators and homebuilders riding the subprime boom, as well as Wall Street firms and even rating agencies that were complicit.

Lewis relates that Eisman said something both interesting and funny to Brad Hintz, a prominent financial analyst at a conference in spring of 2007. Eisman told Hintz that his group had just shorted Merrill Lynch. Hintz wanted to know why.

“We have a simple thesis,” Eisman explained. “There is going to be a calamity, and whenever there is a calamity, Merrill is there.” When it came time to bankrupt Orange County with bad advice, Merrill was there. When the internet went bust, Merrill was there. Way back in the 1980s, when the first bond trader was let off his leash and lost hundreds of millions of dollars, Merrill was there to take the hit. That was Eisman’s logic—the logic of Wall Street’s pecking order. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant roles, just happy to be a part of things. The game, as Eisman saw it, was Crack the Whip. He assumed Merrill Lynch had taken its assigned place at the end of the chain.

Lewis is a former Wall Street hack who wrote the 1989 expose Liar’s Poker about his experiences in the industry in the 1980s.

His 2008 article ends on a curiously touching note as he recounts his recent lunch meeting with John Gutfreund, the ex-CEO of Salomon Brothers who took the company public and then led it during its period of prominence in the 1980s.

In relating his meeting with Gutfreund, Lewis offers an interesting analysis of the shift that took place in the 1980s, led by figures such as Gutfreund:

You can’t really tell someone that you asked him to lunch to let him know that you don’t think of him as evil.

Nor can you tell him that you asked him to lunch because you thought that you could trace the biggest financial crisis in the history of the world back to a decision he had made. John Gutfreund did violence to the Wall Street social order—and got himself dubbed the King of Wall Street—when he turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into Wall Street’s first public corporation.

… From that moment … the Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risks had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and as the risk-taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished.

The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had by the investment bank as public corporation, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted from trust to blind faith.

AB — 15 January 2010

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 and Mark Haines — for example:

Johnson: “The next 12 months could really be exciting. People could be very positive. But we are setting ourselves up for an enormous catastrophe.”

Haines: “Aw, man! Here we go again! Isn’t there anybody who comes on this show and doesn’t see storm clouds on the horizon? What kind of catastrophe?”

Johnson: “Ah, well, what kind of catastrophe would you like?”

Enjoy the full five minutes of comradely back-and-forth in this video linked from YouTube:

AB — 8 January 2010

Pumping up the Big Bubble

From the Bubbleconomics point of view, the U.S. government’s efforts over the past year can be seen as an attempt to keep the Big Bubble pumped up. The current economic design requires a strong and powerful system of banking and investment, which is why the government has focused so much on propping up the banking system. The hope is that the banking bubble can stay inflated long enough for the real sectors of the economy to recover.

With that background in mind, we thought it was interesting to see this comment on Monday from RiverFront Investment Group (see “2010 Outlook — Reflation and Beyond: A Delicate Balancing Act“):

The Great Reflation experiment has achieved its objective of engineering an economic recovery through government spending, credit creation, and lower interest rates for both corporations and mortgage buyers. As the Federal Reserve contemplates removing monetary accommodation, it faces a delicate balancing act: We think the Fed will continue to err on the side of reigniting inflation rather than risking a return of deflation and will not hesitate to extend its program of purchasing government debt beyond its scheduled termation in March if it deems necessary.

To clarify what is meant by “reflation,” here is how it is defined on Wikipedia:

Reflation is the act of stimulating the economy by increasing the money supply or by reducing taxes. It is the opposite of disinflation. It can refer to an economic policy whereby a government uses fiscal or monetary stimulus in order to expand a country’s output. This can possibly be achieved by methods that include reducing tax, changing the money supply, or even adjusting interest rates. Just as disinflation is considered an acceptable antidote to high inflation, reflation is considered to be an antidote to deflation (which, unlike inflation, is considered bad regardless how high it is).

AB — 23 December 2009

Why Bankers Don’t Understand Business

Today, Gary Hoover published his favorite quotations on Hoover’s World. The one that stood out most to me was this one from Peter Drucker:

No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real.

AB — 19 Nov. 2009

 

 

 

Heartlessness in Hard Times

Naked Capitalism ran an interesting item today about a family who was looking for help dealing with unreasonableness they encountered in dealing with Bank of America. Today’s post was actually Part 2 of an account of this family’s problems since the main wage-earner lost his job — you can read it all at “Debt Stress in Middle Class America, Revisited.”

What was striking was the level of heartlessness received in reader’s comments on the original post:

[S]ome responded with vitriol, their comments having no grounding in anything more than prejudice, on why this family was having trouble making ends meet. Quite a few of the comments also reflected a considerable lack of understanding as to how the bottom half, income-wise, lives (for instance, saying that the couple “should” have several hundred thousand in savings plus that much in their home equity). A different theme was the couple should be on food stamps and the adult children and their kids should be on [Medicaid].

It was interesting (but not surprising to me) to see the extent to which many people living in their personal bubble (see “Levels of Economic Bubbles”) show not only gross heartlessness toward others but a profound ignorance of economic realities even right here in the U.S.

AB — 1 Nov. 2009

‘The whole economy is a pyramid scheme’

That was a quote I picked up from the recently-posted trailer for a documentary called Collapse, which features the ideas of Michael Ruppert, an independent journalist who predicted the current financial crisis in his newsletter From the Wilderness. The movie opens in theaters Nov. 6, 2009.

From the trailer I picked up an interesting quote from Ruppert in the movie:

It’s not that Bernie Maddof was a pyramid scheme. The whole economy is a pyramid scheme.

The mortal blow to human industrialized civilization will happen when oil prices spike and nobody can afford to buy that oil, and everything will just shut down.

Watch the trailer here:

AB — 28 Oct. 2009

Ditching the GDP: Report from Sarkozy/Stiglitz commission

The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, a group initiated by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, has released a set of recommendations for a more sophisticated set of indicators to replace the concept of GDP (gross domestic product). Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz is chair of the commission.

The draft of the report dated June 2, 2009, is available at this address.

In an article for The Guardian (see “The Great GDP Swindle,” Stiglitz emphasizes the need for a new regime for the measurement of economic progress:

If we have poor measures, what we strive to do (say, increase GDP) may actually contribute to a worsening of living standards. We may also be confronted with false choices, seeing trade-offs between output and environmental protection that don’t exist. By contrast, a better measure of economic performance might show that steps taken to improve the environment are good for the economy.

An article by Saamah Abdallah, researcher at the New Economics Foundation (nef), calls the new report “bold. (See “Sarkozy and Stiglitz challenge GDP ‘fetish.’”)

However, Abdallah sees a danger if policy leaders decide to take only partial measures to correct the current GDP mindset:

The report carries many recommendations, and there’s a risk that politicians will latch onto the easier ones, without really taking home the big message: namely, that we need to radically shake up our understanding of progress and success.

Abdallah’s organization has created a “Happy Planet Index” designed to measure humanity’s progress in a more holistic fashion.

AB — 14 Sept. 2009