Dagmar wrote: NEW ORLEANS is battered and submerged today. But it will rise again because it is — and always has been — the single most important cog in the nation's economy.
I've seen some pretty irrational things said to justify expense reports for seasonal junkets to conferences, but this one really takes the cake. The last time I checked, choked highways and swamp don't exactly make for a manufacturing or shipping paradise. Mississippi can pick up the slack on this just fine.
I'm going to have to go with Dagmar on this one. While I enjoyed reading George Friedman's historical perspective on the importance of New Orleans, the article I'm linking here provides a more modern perspective. Our cities may have grown up around shipping and transportation, but this isn't the 1700s anymore. Modern cities are successful due to an interplay between culture, captial, and eductional institutions, not transportation routes. New Orleans has two of those, but you need all three to make it work, and so the city has been in decline for quite some time, and this event is likely to hasten that decline. All of those poor people in the city, and the corrupt institutions there, are all symptoms of a community which exists in a place after the economic pillars that made it healthy have eroded away. (See Detriot...) The fact that NOLA is fun and interesting doesn't make it economically viable. Its not a place that ends up on the list of places you'd be likely to move. There are people who'd like to live there, but they are people like Anne Rice and Trent Reznor who don't need to live in close proximity to a normal industry. The tourist industry will return, but the resulting city is apt to look more like Savanna then a top U.S. metro area. It might have better prospects in the extreme long term (decades) but its too early to tell. NOLA SOL | 
