Science can tell us how ocean temperatures relate to hurricane strength, can predict when a storm will make landfall. But other questions—“Why did so many people die in Hurricane Katrina? Why were those who died mostly poor? Why were so many victims elderly? Why were most of the sad, distressed faces in the Superdome black? Why was the area so quickly militarized?”—have nothing to do with meteorology or oceanography.

John Mutter, author of Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make The Rich Richer And The Poor Even Poorer, writes from an unusual position—the nexus of the natural and social sciences. Mutter, who teaches at Columbia in both the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the School of International and Public Affairs, originally approached natural disasters as a geophysicist, but has spent years, he writes, “feeling my way around the social science landscape” because any serious response to natural disasters will need to be informed by both spheres. Perhaps the most important revelation in Mutter’s book is the first one: he points out that, though we think of earthquakes, cyclones, floods and the like as “natural” disasters, the pattern and level of destruction they inflict are socially determined.

Why do disasters seem to do most damage to the already poor and dispossessed? Partly, Mutter points out, it is because poor people live in more dangerous areas and in more tenuous conditions: steep hillsides and shoddily constructed buildings. Partly, it is because of global inequalities of information—the geoscience and risk assessment relevant to natural disasters are largely carried out in richer, safer nations. There is, for example, only one seismologist in Haiti. This creates a dangerous paradox, writes Mutter: “scientists working in relatively safe places… know more about risks to poor countries than people in those countries know themselves.”

But existing inequalities, of housing or land quality or information, are only part of the story. Natural disasters, Mutter shows, often make inequality worse, but that process is no accident of nature. In the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, “destruction was indiscriminate; the homes of the rich and the homes of the poor were all targets.” But the homes of the poor were poorly constructed and much more vulnerable. Though it wasn’t true, as some reported, that Haiti had no building codes, it was true that the weak and corrupt government did not enforce the codes that were on the books. Though the quake itself—what Mutter calls “the natural part of the disaster”—affected rich and poor alike, the relief process was not so even handed. In a society already starkly divided by class, the elites were able to pay for private medical and rebuilding services, the poor were relegated to crowded, dangerous tent cities.

Floods of donations poured into Haiti, donations that were “viewed as manna from heaven by the unscrupulous, a chance for new profits.” But how were these donations used? Mutter cites a report from the Center for Economic Policy and Research that showed that of the nearly 1500 contracts awarded as part of the Haitian relief project, only 23 went to Haitian companies. Haitian companies received only 2.5% of the $195 million; much of the rest went to US contractors based in and around Washington DC, often through no-bid contracts.