Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit.
The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.
They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit.
The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.”
The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.
Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, “You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can’t help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing.”
“That’s not true”, responded the second economist. “We increased the GDP by $200!”
Helene churned through Florida and Georgia last September before it detoured into Appalachia, where it unleashed record rain that caused mudslides and raging floods. More than 100 people died in North Carolina alone. The devastation in the western part of the state was overwhelming. Fixing communities affected by Helene would cost $59.6 billion, the state estimated in December. Federal and state agencies sent more than $5.7 billion to the stricken region through September.
Weather disasters like Helene are becoming both more frequent and more severe because of climate change. Although they blow over fast in physical terms, the economic impacts play out slowly. It takes three to six months for survivors’ insurance checks to land, at best; maybe three years for federal reimbursements to cash-strapped localities to drip out.
The result is that the US is now always paying to recover from disasters, and this is contributing a larger and larger share of GDP growth. The US has run up about $7.7 trillion in climate-related costs since 2000, according to research by Andrew John Stevenson, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
“It is undeniable now that climate change is having significant effects on the drivers of the economy,” says Sarah Bloom Raskin, a professor at Duke Law School and former deputy treasury secretary in the Obama administration. “You don’t have to squint hard to see that extreme weather events are so harsh and strong, and so repeated, that they are affecting labor-market functioning, supply chains, insurance markets and inflation dynamics in ways that are pronounced, prolonged and pervasive.”
The country spent almost $1 trillion in the 12 months ending in June, money that most everyone would prefer to spend on goods or services of their choosing. In the 1990s, the annual average was closer to $80 billion in current dollars. Government spending on disasters, and companies leading the recovery, make up an underappreciated, yet major, slice of the US economy.
The money goes to insurers and waste haulers, power grid equipment manufacturers and engineering contractors, hardware stores and self-storage facilities. These are good businesses to be in in challenging times.
Stevenson created a set of about 100 large public companies across many sectors that together outperformed the S&P 500 by 6.5% a year from October 2015 to October 2025. He calls it the Prepare and Repair Index.
Home Depot and Lowe’s are where members of the general public are most likely to interact with the disaster industrial complex. Asheville’s Lowe’s, which sits beside the Swannanoa River, shuttered after taking on 13 feet of water; it reopened in May. Eastern Asheville’s Home Depot location never even closed. Manager Teresa Peterson-Spoonholtz didn’t leave the facility for two days straight, she says, and neither did other team members.
She ended up sending back 57 pallets of Christmas goods to make room for chainsaws, generators and buckets. And eventually, “it became massive amounts of drywall,” as people were ready to repair their homes.
Rebuilding made post-Helene sales vault over the prior year’s, she said in May. “Without giving actual sales data,” said Peterson-Spoonholtz, “I am over-comping last year at this point by 40%.”
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Robert F Kennedy (the original one without the brain worm) Remarks at University of Kansas, March, 18, 1968:
Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.
It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.
It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.