Good old earthquakes and tsunamis

Sorry to be flippant about such natural disasters, but I have been provoked. Sean O'Grady has pointed out, in The Independent newspaper, that "the longer-term boost to spending from reconstruction and development can even help an economy". It's true, GDP will be helped, but an ounce of common sense show this up for how warped and stupid this claim that natural disasters have advantages is.

Are we so blinded by the need to increase GDP, that we cannot see that this paradox does not have to exist? The destruction of property is not a good thing and in no way should it be mistaken for growth in any positive way. OK, with it being a natural disaster, we could sustain an argument that the damage should be excluded from GDP/growth calculations, but if it were counted, in the negative direction, then all the warning systems, earth quake and tsunami proofing and general avoidance of destruction would limit the negative effect of the natural disasters on our sane GDP calculation.

Nature is a dictatorship; cooperation

I hope you won't think it glib or distasteful for me to comment that the devastating earthquake in Japan and the resultant terrifying tsunamis in the region show us above all else how powerless we are in the face of nature. Politics is useless in that you can't vote against an earthquake and so is money insofar as you can't buy or sell an earthquake.

Money will be needed to clear up the mess, and paradoxically this counts as economic growth, but the other thing that the aftermath of disasters (natural or man made) shows up is how we tend to co-operate at such times. The question is why do we revert to competing during more settled times?