The Haiti earthquake “is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story,” writes David Brooks in “The Underlying Tragedy,” in yesterday’s New York Times. Here’s why I agree with him, and still think he’s so wrong.
1. Aid: “We don’t know how,” Brooks says “to use aid to reduce poverty.” I agree. Despite billions that have poured into places like Haiti, billions continue to live under a dollar a day. Brooks goes wrong, however, when he points to China, which, “has not received much aid… but has seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions.”
It is true that China has grown in economic might. But from what I recall of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, which measured 8.0, and over 68,000 that perished and 4.8 left homeless, China’s infrastructure and disaster response is vintage third world. Don’t mistake increased wealth with development. No one would call Saudi Arabia a developed nation.
2. Micro efforts: What Brooks doesn’t mistake is the problem with development, which is that it is a macro problem, being tackled through micro efforts. I agree. Though there is massive goodwill (which as become one of my favorite organizations), which helps poor people out of poverty, there is never enough critical mass to lift poor nations out of poverty.
So the solution would be to dismantle micro effort approaches and replace them with comprehensive projects that can help developing economies grow. Such a solution would require the overhaul of aid policies and approaches.
Brooks makes no mention of this. Instead he wrongly focuses on culture.
3. Culture: Rather than focusing on overhauling aid policy and approach, Brooks picks on voodoo, which dominates in Haiti, and which he says, “spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile.” That’s about as insulting and ignorant as saying that Judaism spreads the message of greed and that Islam spreads the message of violence. (Yes, I am prepared for those crazies to tell me that Islam does preach violence – bring them on.)
Beliefs, whatever they might be, are anchored in community, responsibility and a shared set of values and not in false messages intended for false ends.
Community is the principle belief in voodoo as well. But instead of that community coming together in trust in Haiti, it has been riven by corruption and greed. Brooks seems to think that because of voodoo, and some racist notion he has that Haitians have poor child rearing practices, there’s no way to change this. He couldn’t be more wrong. Haiti can change and it has nothing to do with the type of god the Haitians worship.
What it does have to do with is how international aid agencies, governments and donors work with the Haitians. That includes not just focusing on micro projects and micro efforts but working with Haitians to build an innovative, growth economy that creates jobs and opportunity. Most importantly, however, it involves holding Haitian politicians, many who have plundered the country’s coffers, to account. For too long the West has compromised on leaders that it has felt comfortable with, but who have not had the best qualifications or intentions for their developing nation.
Haiti needs a leader like Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, who has turned his small African country into an economic miracle simply by focusing on security, combating corruption and by telling the international “blah, blah,” as he calls it, what he will and will not accept in terms of development projects. Rwandans making decisions for Rwanda, not the international community – that is a model that Haiti and the entire the developing world should replicate.
David Brooks is right to say, “we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty.” But he doesn’t offer up a persuasive solution that will. In fact his article exemplifies why it is that Haiti’s earthquake is a poverty story. It’s because pundits like him are focused on easy excuses and not on the hard work and compromises that must be made to “save the world.”
3 Comments
Thanks for pointing out that wealth does not necessarily equal development, and communities make sense of their experience in shared ways — regardless of the causes for those experiences — such as fatalism when life is out of control. Blaming Haiti’s poverty on its own fatalism (plus the failure of micro-effort policy in general) is in itself a form of fatalism.
Thank you for taking him seriously enough to show us what went wrong. As 1/18 draws to a close, I appreciate the difficult hope you express.
Continue being awesome.
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