Lost amid continued talk of billions in federal aid is the fact that most homeowners and businesses are being left to make the toughest calls on their own. Lost is that New Orleans' recovery — which President Bush once suggested would be one of the largest public reconstruction efforts the world had ever seen — is quickly becoming a private market affair.
"My constituents have pretty much concluded that it's up to us to put our neighborhood back together and get on with our lives," said Republican city council member Jay Batt, who represents the Lakeview neighborhood just west of Vignaud's.
To market advocates, this is the way it should be. Rugged individuals settled the American West in the 19th century and can resettle the Crescent City in the 21st.
But the risks that individual New Orleanians must shoulder in such an on-your-own recovery appear staggeringly large.
"There is no market solution to New Orleans," said Thomas C. Schelling of the University of Maryland, who won this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of the complicated bargaining behavior that underpins everything from simple sales to nuclear confrontations.
Not even encouraging words, or good information for rebuilding.
"It essentially is a problem of coordinating expectations," Schelling said of the task that Vignaud and her neighbors must grapple with. "If we all expect each other to come back, we will. If we don't, we won't.
"But achieving this coordination in the circumstances of New Orleans,'' he said, "seems impossible."
The situation in which residents find themselves is an extreme example of a trend underway for a quarter-century, a shift of economic risk from business and government to working families, and an increasing reliance on free markets to manage society's problems.
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