In fact, even Bill Davis’s assumption that Anchorage was atypical would turn out to be typical. Eventually, it would be possible to look back on disaster after disaster and recognize that so many communities tended to interpret their own levelheaded and altruistic conduct as exceptional—New Orleanians being New Orleanians, or Puerto Ricans being Puerto Ricans—instead of wholly consistent with a half century of rigorous social science. It would be hard to accept that our goodness is ordinary.
