{"id":5107,"date":"2011-03-15T15:05:13","date_gmt":"2011-03-15T14:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=5107"},"modified":"2011-03-15T15:06:56","modified_gmt":"2011-03-15T14:06:56","slug":"how-well-do-countries-handle-natural-disasters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=5107","title":{"rendered":"How well do countries handle natural disasters?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This<a href=\"http:\/\/volokh.com\/2011\/03\/14\/democracy-natural-disaster-and-political-ignorance\/\"> interesting posting <\/a>suggests that democratic countries &#8211; like Japan or the USA &#8211; handle disasters better than totalitarian regimes &#8211; such as North Korea &#8211; since a free media makes information more available to citizens and elections provide politicians with an incentive to act effectively. This is probably true as a general rule but, on the other hand, some totalitarian regimes like China have greater resources, such as a massive army, and more freedom over how to use them.<\/p>\n<p>The posting makes the point though that democratic countries have more incentive to devote resources to disaster alleviation than to disaster prevention. This is why a country like the United States did not spend enough on the levies in New Orleans and why British politicians do not spend enough on flood prevention measures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This interesting posting suggests that democratic countries &#8211; like Japan or the USA &#8211; handle disasters better than totalitarian regimes &#8211; such as North Korea &#8211; since a free media makes information more available to citizens and elections provide politicians with an incentive to act effectively. This is probably true as a general rule but, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5107"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5111,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5107\/revisions\/5111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}