This is the eighth installment of What Tax Profs Are Reading. The goal is to share with the broader tax community reviews of both tax-related and nontax-related books recently read by tax professors. We invite tax professors to submit book reviews for publication on TaxProf Blog.
Jim Maule (Villanova) shares with us his thoughts on The Big One: The Earthquake That Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science by Jake Page & Charles Officer:
The authors take the reader on a fascinating and frightening exploration of earthquakes. Specifically, though most Americans expect “the big one” to be targeting California, the most powerful earthquake to strike the continental U.S. happened almost 200 years ago near what was then a tiny town called New Madrid, Missouri. It will happen again. When? That’s a good guess.
When it does, with the population of the affected area many orders of magnitude larger than what it was in 1811, the damage and loss of life will be staggering, especially because earthquake-proof construction isn’t as favored as it is in California. Destruction in Memphis, St. Louis, and, yes (sorry, Paul) Cincinnati would be devastating. FEMA officials predict that the quake would cause “damages, disruptions, asualties, and injuries on a scale never experiences from a natural hazard in the history of this nation.”
The damage would not only be the building collapse, highway destruction, rail line warping, fires, looding, and other upheavals associated with earthquakes. It would put at risk the strategic oil reserve caverns in Louisiana. It would destroy the pipelines through which oil and gasoline move from the Gulf oast to the Midwest and Northeast. Considering that the 1811 earthquake caused church bells to ring out on the East Coast, it is not surprising that more than two dozen states would be directly affected, and most all would be indirectly affected.
Page and Officer have written a quick-read book, which despite its slightly more than 200 pages, packs a lot into the text. The reader is treated to a description of the 1811 earthquake, put together with some xcellent detective diggings through old records. The authors describe what is known about the causes of earthquakes generally, the history of human attempts to measure them, and the research that has been nderway to determine why such a devastating earthquake could occur in a place where two continental lates are not colliding. Readers are taken on a verbal tour of places hit by earthquakes, and are ntroduced to an interesting cast of people who have tried to predict earthquakes. It’s a wonderful explanation of scientific issues without any requirement that the reader be a scientist or understand its formulas.
The law does not escape scrutiny. At the present end of the time scale, the authors explain why it is so ifficult to get legislatures to enact laws in the Midwest that would mandate implementation of earthquake resistant standards in building codes. It’s not just cost, despite the looming damage measured in the undreds of billions of dollars, but this conundrum, which was new to me: the better a building resists earthquakes, the more vulnerable it is to tornadoes. Hmm. So maybe California isn’t the state most dangerous in terms of natural disaster potential.
At the other end of the time scale, Page and Officer explain how there came to be a settlements at and around New Madrid. Readers get a lesson in the land speculation that ran rampant through the Mississippi River valley before, during and after the acquisition of the territory from France. In describing the impact of this land settlement on the run-up to the War of 1812, the authors share a brief description of the Congressional debates focusing on the issues. Explaining the disagreement between John C. Calhoun, who advocated war, and John Randolph, who did not, they quote historian James Penick, Jr., who concluded that in these exchanges much like “the immoveable object and the irresistible force, inflated eloquence met magnificent pomposity.”
Ah, so on the legal end not much has changed. And, as the irresistable force of the pressures under the New Madrid and surrounding faults come to bear on the surely not immoveable objects built on the land above them, much will change.
For anyone interested in earthquakes, natural disaster planning, scientific measurement, why earthquakes are no longer measured on a “Richter scale” (more “news” to me), history, and social policy, this is a nifty book to grab and read. Alas, nothing directly is mentioned of taxation, but surely the casualty loss deduction is lurking in the shadows of these pages.
For prior TaxProf Blog book reviews, see here.
