On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.
This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.
The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.
In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.
A good piece but I couldn’t help wondering if Brooks is positing a false dichotomy between microprojects and locally-led paternalism. Isn’t the whole point of the former to promote locally-led initiatives that encourage greater personal responsibility and economic independence?
He does make a good point that Haiti has much in common with both the Dominican Republic and Barbados, historically, economically and socially, and yet ranks far behind them in so many ways.
Some think it a Gaia story: http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/pact_with_gaia/
Wonder if either of these commentators will make the Joy Behar show like Pat Robertson?
[blockquote]There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile.[/blockquote]
Christian Evangelism anyone?
One statement of Brooks’ that does not ring true to me is that “there are no policy levers that consistently correlate to economic growth.” It made me think right away of another heading I read recently: “Benedict XVI to the Diplomats: Three [b]Levers[/b] for Lifting Up the World: Ecology of nature but above all of man, positive secularity, freedom of religion. The salient points of the pope’s annual speech to representatives of states.” (from ‘Chiesa’ website; my bold). As a side issue I note that the environmental issues Haiti’s economy struggles with are summed up in this first lever.
It seems implicit that B16 ‘s three levers might correlate to economic growth but I doubt seriously that Brooks has taken time to make such an evaluation, and who knows – there just might be a correlation.
Another area of weakness in his analysis is that there are similarities between Barbados and Haiti. Haiti and the DR, yes, some of course but with Barbados, I am hard-pressed to think of one that matters. Barbados has been English-speaking and only ever English-speaking, since the 1600s. It has or had until recently about a 98% literacy rate, and not for nothing did it call itself Little England. Its slavery ended when the Queen abolished it in England in the early 1800s. In the Eastern Caribbean economic community it has a different and higher valued unit of currency than even the nearby Windward Islands such as Grenada. It has produced oil since at least the earliest decades of the 1900s. There also, interestingly, has been an active synagogue there since the 1600s, along with many Anglican churches and RC and many other denominations. It has in fact far more in common with Trinidad than with many of the northern Caribbean islands and to compare Haiti with B’dos is just not useful.
One can debate the details but we sure don’t have much to show for 100 years of social and spiritual work in Haiti. One does need to compare the differences in Haiti and make rational sense of this disaster or there have just been 100s of thousands of lives lost for nothing.
My observation is that the spiritual weakness engenders a social weakness that engenders a governmental weakness that finally results in economic weakness. We need to work with all of these simultaniously but to ignore the first one would be to waste any effort.
Don
I would recommend the book Collapse by Jared Diamond for a scholarly analysis of what went wrong in Haiti, and why the neighboring Dominican Republic did not share the same fate. Not much spiritual basis in either.
[blockquote]There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.[/blockquote]
This almost sounds like a rationale for return to colonialism.
Larry Schell has a good companion piece to his on his blog [url=http://legacyofmyfathers.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/a-woman-injured-after-the-building-she-was-in-collapsed-the-haiti-earthquake-has-affected-3-million-people-in-the-caribbean-nation-the-disaster-struck-on-january-12-2010/]Legacy of my fathers[/url]. Definitely well worth the read (and maybe it’s own link here?).
Another point Brooks could have made was that of the 6.8 “Ash Wednesday” earthquake which hit in Nisqually Valley just south of Tacoma, WA in 2001. I think they credited one heart attack death to the quake. A crack in the State Capitol dome in Olympia, questions about the Alaska Way viaduct in Seattle, and one collapsed Starbucks was the extent of the damage. There was even an April Fools joke about the organ being broken at St. Mark’s Cathedral, the damage was that light. Wind and rain cause more damage every year than that quake did. Of course that was after the quake-prone Puget Sound region heeded the lessons of California, such as the World Series ’89 quake.
Astute observation – this really is about poverty and not natural disaster. The Iowa floods a couple years ago (2008?) were just as bad as Hurricane Katrina in scope, but no where near the loss of life or human tragedy (or that any of us heard…)
How do we not just get the aid there but actually get the aid to help?
The epicenter of the Nisqually quake, though, was very deep; Wikipedia says 32 miles. The epicenter of the Haiti quake was only 8 miles deep. That makes a huge difference in the severity of damage on the surface.
Brooks says, “Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.”
By this logic we’d be able to celebrate great success if we’d given a bunch of aid money to China. Maybe the point is somebody recognized China didn’t need aid money to succeed.
I think Brooks makes some good points, but much of his argument seems sloppy to me. He lumps NGOs with government aid, but is “growth” the way Mother Theresa gauged success is her orphanage there? Was her work all failure?
One more thing about China. Brooks starts the piece by saying the disaster in Haiti is about poverty not nature, then argues Haiti vs China in his piece. But China loses lots of people in natural disasters on a fairly regular basis. Again, it doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but it struck me as sloppy.