by Patrick Appel
Summarizing an old post, Ilya Somin explains natural disaster political incentives:
[P]olitical ignorance makes disaster policy less effective than it might be otherwise. “Rationally ignorant” voters over-reward disaster relief spending and under-reward disaster prevention spending, even though the latter is demonstrably more effective. They also give politicians insufficient incentives to prepare for very rare but extremely devastating disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and the massive earthquake that hit Japan earlier this year.
Joyner sympathizes with public officials:
Governors and mayors have to make decisions about evacuation in time to actually affect an evacuation safely. The safe course is to take the worst projections, add 50 percent, and act accordingly. Nine times out of ten, though, people will be pissed that they were forced to evacuate unnecessarily. The other time, though, countless lives will be saved.
In the same ballpark, Joshua Tucker points to a paper that finds that "voters are willing to blame incumbents for just about anything, including things beyond the control of government like the weather."
The Dish 