{"id":218413,"date":"2010-01-18T03:43:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T08:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1752027331714385066.post-873299877063224444"},"modified":"2010-01-18T03:43:22","modified_gmt":"2010-01-18T08:43:22","slug":"the-underlying-haitian-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/218413","title":{"rendered":"The Underlying Haitian Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Of course we know how to solve poverty.  <\/span>Just financially empower every smuck willing to lift a hammer or man a hoe and get out of the way.  <\/span>Have them organize their communities to allow common assets to be produced.<\/o:p><\/span><\/h1>\n

We do not have time to wait for the benevolent few to accumulate enough liquidity to do it if they ever will or even could.<\/o:p><\/span><\/h1>\n

You must help create a proper legal code and establish title to assets that is simple and cheap.  <\/span>Get used to treating slabs of reinforced concrete like it is land.<\/o:p><\/span><\/h1>\n

It helps if the community has a prime employer, but that has been solved just about everywhere with government employment of some sort.  <\/span>At least it distributes cash into the economy.<\/o:p><\/span><\/h1>\n

The advent of cell phones and cell phone banking is just now making all this way easier.<\/o:p><\/span><\/h1>\n

In the event, this horrific event opens the door for a full press reorganization of Haitian society.  <\/span>They themselves have already shed their history of oppressed ignorance and a full international commitment in resources and manpower can turn this into a healthy country. Perhaps we have the will now.<\/o:p><\/span><\/h1>\n

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The Underlying Tragedy<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/h1>\n
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By <\/span>DAVID BROOKS<\/a><\/span><\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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Published: January 14, 2010<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/01\/15\/opinion\/15brooks.html?ref=opinion<\/a><\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California<\/st1:place>. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince<\/st1:city>, Haiti<\/st1:country-region><\/st1:place>. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It\u2019s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>: \u201cYou will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.\u201d 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\u2019s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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The first of those truths is that we don\u2019t 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<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>, have not.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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In the recent anthology \u201cWhat Works in Development?,\u201d a group of economists try to sort out what we\u2019ve 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\u2019t seem to produce the expected results.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: \u201cIt is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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The second hard truth is that micro-aid is vital but insufficient. Given the failures of macrodevelopment, aid organizations often focus on microprojects. More than 10,000 organizations perform missions of this sort in Haiti<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>. By some estimates, Haiti<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> has more nongovernmental organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing the Lord\u2019s work, especially these days, but even a blizzard of these efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados<\/st1:country-region>, and Barbados<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth \u2014 with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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As Lawrence<\/st1:city> E. Harrison explained in his book \u201cThe Central Liberal Truth,\u201d Haiti<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>, like most of the world\u2019s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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We\u2019re all supposed to politely respect each other\u2019s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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Fourth, it\u2019s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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These programs, like the Harlem<\/st1:place> Children\u2019s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don\u2019t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don\u2019t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement \u2014 involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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It\u2019s time to take that approach abroad, too. It\u2019s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people \u2014 maybe just in a neighborhood or a school \u2014 with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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The late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington used to acknowledge that cultural change is hard, but cultures do change after major traumas. This earthquake is certainly a trauma. The only question is whether the outside world continues with the same old, same old.<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
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Of course we know how to solve poverty.  Just financially empower every smuck willing to lift a hammer or man a hoe and get out of the way.  Have them organize their communities to allow common assets to be produced. We do not have time to wait for the benevolent few to accumulate enough liquidity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}