The Haiti Crisis

The tragedy and trauma that is going on in Haiti right now is on a scale few of us in our comfortable homes can imagine. David Brooks, in an excellent NY Times editorial Friday, points out that the enormity of the devastation reveals much about the developed world's ineffective efforts to meet the real needs of impoverished peoples around the globe during the past century.
Brooks' essay, The Underlying Tragedy, begins by comparing and contrasting the results of this earthquake to the 7.0 shaker that struck San Francisco during the 1989 World Series. Less than 100 were killed there and in this one they estimate fifty thousand, and counting. The difference in outcomes between these near identical quakes reveals some difficult truths about the disparity between various parts of the world.

"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."

Here's a second hard truth, according to Brooks... "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. By some estimates, Haiti has more non-governmental organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing the Lord’s work, especially these days, but even a blizzard of these efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change."

American doctors, mission organizations and food organizations have been sending help to Haiti for decades. In my Wednesday commentary, I cited a young Iraqi war veteran who devoted some time at a Catholic mission there. Brooks, however, raises a good point. The compassionate sacrifices of ten thousand organizations has not changed Haiti's future from hopeless to hopeful. Why is this?

His third hard truth brings additional light. "As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book 'The Central Liberal Truth,' Haiti, like most of the world’s 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.

"We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them."

Much more can be said on this point alone, but I'll save that for another space in time. You can read the rest of Brooks' commentary here.