New Orleans

Though not even close to being an expert on American politics, I would say that the White house is very good at 'Economies of Scale' and it is blatantly obvious how bad they are at 'Economies of Scope'. I will not go into the Iraq case, because it has more angles to prove my point than I could write down in this blog. The New Orleans situation is a much clearer case where executive-style leadership, 'We've got good people in all the top positions, we're hierarchical, we plan' is how the Whitehouse is trying to recover the situation. They are going with their strength to a point of weakness. No way can you plan for such a disaster. The governing chain is managed very efficiently for day to day operations, but is vulnerable because its staff lacks the room to manoeuvre and the chain collapses with these kind of disruptions. In my view, the only option is to empower local authorities to deal with local situations and give them control over what is needed where. They are the ones with a clear scope of what is happening and what is needed, but are powerless to do anything with this information until someone on a federal level approves. The interview Ray Nagin (Mayor of New Orleans) gave is a painful statement to this effect.

I always have this optimistic hope that we learn something from these human tragedies, sadly it always ends up a ‘blame game’ with the first signs already showing. Let’s hope this time we can move past blaming people and start empowering them.