“We can come back and get them later.”
This didn’t comfort the old man. But there was nothing for it but to wait for the vaporetto and try to stay out of the rain, which luckily had reduced to a drizzle. They were about as wet as they could get anyway. From one area of the vapo dock they could see the immense pile of wreckage that marked the fallen tower; it appeared to have pancaked onto its lower floors and then tipped to the south, distributing the higher floors across two or three canals. People in boats had stopped right in the middle of Eighth to stare at the collapse, causing a big traffic jam. It was going to take a while for the vapo to make its way down to them. There were sirens in the distance, but there were always sirens in the distance; it wasn’t clear that these sirens were in response to the collapse. Presumably any number of people had been crushed and were lying dead in the wreckage of the tower, but none of them were visible.
“I hope we don’t turn into pillars of salt,” said Mr. Hexter.
The skyscrapers of New York are too small.
suggested Le Corbusier Widening income inequality is the defining challenge of our time. We find an inverse relationship between the income share accruing to the rich (top 20 percent) and economic growth. The benefits do not trickle down.
noted the International Monetary Fund years later
h) Franklin
Jojo and I set up a chatbox on our screens, and we didn’t talk that much about business in it, although we did both follow some of the same feeds, because those were the feeds anyone needed in order to trade in coastal futures. Mostly it was just a way to stay in touch, and it gave me a glow to see it there in the upper right-hand corner of my screen. And sometimes we did discuss some movement of interest in the biz. Like she wrote, Why’s your IPPI dropping like this?
A Chelsea tower melted just now.
It’s that sensitive?
That’s my index for u.
Braggart. Are u shorting it now?
Got to hedge, right?
You think it will drop more?
A little. At least until Shanghai brings it back up. Catch a wave meanwhile.
Aren’t you long on intertidal?
Not so much.
I thought ownership issues were clarifying.
Intertidal isn’t just ownership uncertain.
Physical?
Right. If ownership solidifies on properties that have melted, so what?
Ah. That’s factored into the index?
Yes. A sensitive instrument.
Just like its inventor.
Thanks. Drinks after work?
Sure.
I’ll come get you in Jesus.
Heavenly.
So I worked on through that afternoon heavily distracted by our evening’s date and my vivid memory of her Oh oh, enough to make me look tumescently at the clock, wondering how this night would go and checking the tide and moon charts, and thinking of the river after dark, the melvillemood of the Narrows at night, mysterious in moonlight.
My IPPI’s New York number had indeed dipped briefly at the news of this building collapse in Chelsea, but now it had stabilized and was even inching back up. A sensitive instrument indeed. The index, and the derivatives we had concocted at WaterPrice to play on it, were all booming in a most gratifying way. Helping our success was the fact that the continuous panicked quantitative easing since the Second Pulse had put more money out there than there was good paper to buy, which in effect meant that investors were, not to put too fine a point on it, too rich. That meant new opportunities to invest needed to be invented, and so they were. Demand gets supplied.
And it wasn’t that hard to invent new derivatives, as we had found out, because the floods had indeed been a case of creative destruction, which of course is capitalism’s middle name. Am I saying that the floods, the worst catastrophe in human history, equivalent or greater to the twentieth century’s wars in their devastation, were actually good for capitalism? Yes, I am.
That said, the intertidal zone was turning out to be harder to deal with than the completely submerged zone, counterintuitive though that might seem to people from Denver, who might presume that the deeper you are drowned the deader you are. Not so. The intertidal, being neither fish nor fowl, alternating twice a day from wet to dry, created health and safety problems that were very often disastrous, even lethal. Worse yet, there were legal issues.
Well-established law, going back to Roman law, to the Justinian Code in fact, turned out to be weirdly clear on the status of the intertidal. It’s crazy to read, like Roman futurology: The things which are naturally everybody’s are: air, flowing water, the sea, and the seashore. So nobody can be stopped from going on to the seashore. The seashore extends as far as the highest winter tide. The law of all peoples gives the public a right to use the seashore, and the sea itself. Anyone is free to put up a hut there to shelter himself. The right view is that ownership of these shores is vested in no one at all. Their legal position is the same as that of the sea and the land or sand under the sea.
Most of Europe and the Americas still followed Roman law in this regard, and some early decisions in the wake of the First Pulse had ruled that the new intertidal zone was now public land. And by public they meant not government land exactly, but land belonging to “the unorganized public,” whatever that meant. As if the public is ever organized, but whatever, redundant or not, the intertidal was ruled to be owned (or un-owned) by the unorganized public. Lawyers immediately set to arguing about that, charging by the hour of course, and this vestige of Roman law in the modern world had ever since been mangling the affairs of everyone interested in working in—by which I mean investing in—the intertidal. Who owns it? No one! Or everyone! It was neither private property nor government property, and therefore, some legal theorists ventured, it was perhaps some kind of return of the commons. About which Roman law also had a lot to say, adding greatly to the hourly burden of legal opinionizing. But ultimately the commons was historically a matter of common law, as seemed appropriate, meaning mainly practice and habit, and that made it very ambiguous legally, so that the analogy of the intertidal to a commons was of little help to anyone interested in clarity, in particular financial clarity.
So how do you build anything in the intertidal, how do you salvage, restore, renew—how do you invest in a mangled ambiguous zone still suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous tide flow? If people claim to own wrecked buildings that they or their legal predecessors used to own, but they don’t own the land the buildings are on, what are those buildings worth?