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The Underlying Tragedy
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: January 14, 2010
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.
The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist
Abhijit Banerjee: “It 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.”
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. By some
estimates, Haiti has more nongovernmental 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.
Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the
center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so
poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and
colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty
well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and
foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, 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 — with trees and progress on one side, and
deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.
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.
Fourth, it’s 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.
These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No
Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t
understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but
they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local
culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of
achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing
practices to stricter schools to better job performance.
It’s time to take that approach abroad, too. It’s time to find
self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses
countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe
just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class
assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.
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.
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