Why are hurricanes seemingly worse than ever? Man-made global warming? Natural global warming? Reporting bias (more media=more hurricane reports/sensationalizing)? Who knows; there's a huge amount of variables in a storm as complex as a hurricane.

Anyway, Gregg Easterbrook posits (and quite rightly, methinks) that a big reason why hurricanes destroy so much more these days is that rich idiots keep building more expensive crap in the way of hurricanes.

But maybe there's another reason losses keep rising--namely, that property keeps becoming worth more. With each passing year, hurricanes that strike the United States are striking a nation of ever-more-affluent people who build ever-more properties in coastal areas. No wonder the destruction keeps getting worse. Every year there's more to destroy!

In 1947, before tropical storms were named, a major hurricane struck Florida, the most hurricane-exposed state. The 1947 storm brought peak winds of 155 miles per hour and caused the Sunshine State an estimated $775 million in damage. At the time, Florida had about 600,000 detached single-family homes worth roughly $20 billion. In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew hit Florida with peak gusts of 164 mph, causing an estimated $37 billion in damages. By the time Andrew arrived, Florida possessed about 3 million single-family detached homes worth roughly $500 billion. Housing-stock value was way up, and so losses were way up. And this is a simplified calculation taking into account only single-family detached homes—the value of office buildings, industry, apartments, infrastructure, and amusement parks was also much higher in Florida in 1992 than in 1947. Andrew did roughly 50 times the monetary damage to Florida as did the similar hurricane of 1947. And it's a fair guess that in 1992, Florida was 50 times more valuable than in 1947.