6 ms·

If floods are a 1 in 100 years black swan, do we bail them out and don’t require insurance? I'm fine with that, but it all depends on what you mean by "bail th

If floods are a 1 in 100 years black swan, do we bail them out and don’t require insurance? I'm fine with that, but it all depends on what you mean by "bail them out," which feels a bit loaded.

Swizec 9y ago
I mean as in using taxes to pay for recovery instead of property insurance. It’s an important feature of society that we do that for rare catastrophic events. But I think there should be a line that’s somehow tied to the probability of said event happening.
- rhizome 9y ago
  100 years isn't rare? Yes, using taxes. Taxes aren't just for waging wars.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    100 years is frequent enough that -- if there's no variance in how long passes between occurrences -- it will pretty much always have happened within living memory and society will have an established way of handling it. But an event that happens once in 4-5 generations is still rare.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      The problem is that the risk of a once in 100 year storm happening along hundreds of miles of coast is much higher than the risk of a given place having a once in 100 year storm. One thing I would prioritize at a policy level is making sure that developers are not able to run in front of flood controls and profit by building in unprotected areas without paying for much of the flood control.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    That’s why I escalated in my original post. Did you read it? We pay for 1 in 100 years. Sure. What about 1 in 20? Maybe 1 in 10? Uhhh 1 in 5? Let's look at some stats. The east coast gets devastated by some hurricane or another about every 5 years right? Like absolutely trashed. Other years it gets milder hurricanes. At what point do we require hurricane insurance of everyone near the Atlantic Ocean? Or at least some sort of federal hurricane tax. We KNOW it’s going to hit some part of the coast super hard every small number of years. Why are we so surprised every time? I mean, look at this wikipedia page on hurricanes in the US[1]. For the past 160 years we've had between 10 and 25 hurricanes hit land every decade. That's an average of 1 to 2.5 hurricanes PER YEAR. Why are we so surprised every time? Something that happens every year is not a rare event. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurricanes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurrican...
    - chrisco255 9y ago
      We already do require flood insurance for anyone who lives in flood plains, which are defined by the 100 year high water mark in each area.
    - rhizome 9y ago
      I'm not an actuary, so I'll have to defer my quantitative analysis, but: Or at least some sort of federal hurricane tax We already have this. Federal income taxes are what's used to fund FEMA, which admittedly only handles one aspect of a complex disaster, but if I take your point correctly it would provide a narrowing of the issues.

If floods are a 1 in 100 years black swan, do we bail them out and don’t require insurance? I'm fine with that, but it all depends on what you mean by "bail them out," which feels a bit loaded.

Swizec 9y ago

I mean as in using taxes to pay for recovery instead of property insurance. It’s an important feature of society that we do that for rare catastrophic events. But I think there should be a line that’s somehow tied to the probability of said event happening.

rhizome 9y ago
100 years isn't rare? Yes, using taxes. Taxes aren't just for waging wars.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  100 years is frequent enough that -- if there's no variance in how long passes between occurrences -- it will pretty much always have happened within living memory and society will have an established way of handling it. But an event that happens once in 4-5 generations is still rare.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    The problem is that the risk of a once in 100 year storm happening along hundreds of miles of coast is much higher than the risk of a given place having a once in 100 year storm. One thing I would prioritize at a policy level is making sure that developers are not able to run in front of flood controls and profit by building in unprotected areas without paying for much of the flood control.
- Swizec 9y ago
  That’s why I escalated in my original post. Did you read it? We pay for 1 in 100 years. Sure. What about 1 in 20? Maybe 1 in 10? Uhhh 1 in 5? Let's look at some stats. The east coast gets devastated by some hurricane or another about every 5 years right? Like absolutely trashed. Other years it gets milder hurricanes. At what point do we require hurricane insurance of everyone near the Atlantic Ocean? Or at least some sort of federal hurricane tax. We KNOW it’s going to hit some part of the coast super hard every small number of years. Why are we so surprised every time? I mean, look at this wikipedia page on hurricanes in the US[1]. For the past 160 years we've had between 10 and 25 hurricanes hit land every decade. That's an average of 1 to 2.5 hurricanes PER YEAR. Why are we so surprised every time? Something that happens every year is not a rare event. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurricanes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurrican...
  - chrisco255 9y ago
    We already do require flood insurance for anyone who lives in flood plains, which are defined by the 100 year high water mark in each area.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    I'm not an actuary, so I'll have to defer my quantitative analysis, but: Or at least some sort of federal hurricane tax We already have this. Federal income taxes are what's used to fund FEMA, which admittedly only handles one aspect of a complex disaster, but if I take your point correctly it would provide a narrowing of the issues.