Category: Current Affairs
Free Hearing
Who gets the right to free speech is a status marker and disputes over this right a status game, so argues Robin Hanson:
The usual rationale for “free speech,” which seems persuasive, is that in the long run we as a society learn more via an open competition for the best ideas, where anyone can try to persuade us as best they can, and listeners are free to choose what to hear. Yet that concept would best be called “free hearing” – a freedom to hear and evaluate any case presented, based on any criteria you like (including cost).
“Free hearing” would apply not just to hearing from adult citizens in good standing, but also to hearing from children, convicts, corporations, robots, foreigners, or demons. We wouldn’t argue if corporations have a right to speak, but rather if we have a right to hear what corporations have to say.
But in fact we have “free speech,” a right only enjoyed by adult citizens in good standing, a right we jealously guard, wondering if corporations etc. “deserve” it. This right seems more a status marker, like the right to vote, than a way to promote idea competition – that whole competition story seems more an ex post rationalization than the real cause for our concern. Which is why support for “free speech” is often paper thin, fluctuating with the status of proposed speakers.
There are other explanations for our focus on free speech rather than free hearing such as it’s the speech makers who are easiest to punish and control (being so many smaller in number than the speech hearers) but Robin’s point remains characteristically insightful.
Haitian public opinion
This is from a few years back:
Surprisingly, given the limited outreach of basic services in Haiti and their reputedly poor performance, the large majority of Haitians interviewed expressed confidence in schools, health services, and the police (see Table in Appendix G). All of these are given an “approval rating” of more than 60 percent by the rural population, and somewhat less in the cities. The schools rank highest with a 95 percent approval, which is far higher than school enrollment rates. Rather than an evaluation of performance, the statistics are best viewed as an expression of people’s expectations of the various institutions. Thus political institutions- including parliament, the popular organizations, and the political parties-received a very low approval rating in 2001. Again, approval is positively correlated with the distance from those institutions: in rural areas, approval of political institutions is nearly double that in the metropolitan area. Surprisingly, traditional religious institutions, voodoo, and houngans receive the lowest approval rating of any of the institutions surveyed.
I wonder how the houngans would do if you took out the Protestant respondants. And to what extent are the houngans viewed as responsible for the quality of all the other institutions? Or is it again a distance effect, namely that almost everyone knows a houngan?
The source document is here.
Other ways to help Haiti
1. Repeal tariffs on Haitian sugar and lower remaining restrictions on Haitian garment imports.
2. Give expedited approval, in terms of food safety rules, to the importation of Haitian mangoes.
3. Set up a Term Loan Auction Facility for Haitians, or alternatively apply quantitative easing to the market for Haitian mud cakes. It's worked for every other macro problem. Alternatively, get out the helicopter, I have heard worse ideas. Stabilize Haitian nominal GDP!
4. Find someone from the government to give a radio address.
5. In Port-Au-Prince and environs, define squatter's rights.
6. Invite Haitians to occupy the empty homes in the run-down parts of New Orleans.
7. Set up nearby charter cities which would welcome Haitian migrants.
8. Redefine the mission of Guantanamo to help Haiti.
9. Shift the capital to Cap-Haitean, if only temporarily, and build up Cap-Haitien in the meantime. That may be a better investment than PAP. As it stands, people will flow into Cap until living standards across the cities equalize.
10. Move Citigroup to St. Marc, which is underbanked (hat tip).
11. Offer special Haitian coffees at select shops, to boost employment in a more or less intact sector of the Haitian economy.
12. Continue military and special operations assistance. Reconstruct the port as quickly as possible.
13. Let more Haitians enter the United States and organize a consortium to accept refugees.
Addendum: Here is Whirled Citizen, a very good new blog on Haiti, which will eventually turn into a blog on development in general, Africa too.
Haiti: what’s at stake
Maybe you thought Obama was the "health care President" or perhaps the "Afghanistan President", but to my eyes right now he looks like the "Haiti President." I predict we'll have over a million Haitians living in refugee camps for the foreseeable future. (It depends how many of the homeless of those can be absorbed by northern Haiti.) If people don't make it into camps they will be sleeping on the street with little or no means of food or water or employment.
It's a mistake to think there's any brick-by-brick way out of that predicament. It's not like the earthquake in Armenia or for that matter eighteenth century Lisbon. Haiti has no functioning government, no working legal system, and very little remaining infrastructure. There's no formal means to make decisions about reconstruction and no capital to clear away the mess. As I've written, the country as we know simply doesn't exist any more (view the second video or try these photos). Port-Au-Prince is destroyed and the city was the heart of the country, economically, politically, and otherwise. Léogâne, Jacmel, and other significant locales are mostly destroyed as well and they're not receiving much assistance.
Obama will (and should) do something about this situation. First, I believe he sincerely wants to help but also he cannot ignore his African-American constituency, especially after former President Clinton devoted so much attention to Haiti and especially if health care reform doesn't go through as planned. Yet he will have a festering situation on his hands for the rest of his term. If "looting" (a bad word in this context) increases or continues, how quickly will the American people lose sympathy with the Haitians? How can the "reconstruction" possibly go well? Ugly gang rule isn't even the worst case scenario.
Obama now stands a higher chance of being a one-term President. Foreign aid programs are especially unpopular, especially relative to their small fiscal cost. Have you noticed how Rush Limbaugh and others are already making their rhetoric uglier than usual? It will be a test of the American populace; at what point will people start whispering that he is "favoring the other blacks"?
Just as it's not easy to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan, it won't be easy to pull out of Haiti.
Maybe you thought health care was a hard problem. Maybe you thought that cap and trade would make health care look easy. This may be the hardest problem yet and it wasn't on anybody's planning ledger. Obama won't have many allies in this fight either. A lot of Democratic interest groups might, silently, wish he would forget about the whole thing.
Mass starvation wouldn't look good on the evening news either. What does it mean to preside over the collapse of a country of more than nine million people? It's Obama who's about to find out, not the increasingly irrelevant Rene Preval. Everyone in Haiti is looking to President Obama.
Why are the images of Haiti so graphic?
By the way, I favor such graphicness, but I am wondering:
The images coming out of Haiti are more graphic than those from recent natural disasters, and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…
Or is Haiti simply an exception? Is there something about the essential status of the entire country and its people that gives the media new license?
The usual conventions of suggesting rather than displaying trauma seem to have been punctured, at least for now. Bodies caked in dust and plaster, faces covered in blood, the dead stacked in the streets without sheets to hide them — these are all violations of the unwritten code that death can only be seen, in the established etiquette of the mainstream media, by analogy or metaphor or discreet substitute.
Here is more detail. You'll note there is a long history of portraying Haiti in lurid terms.
Haitian riddles
Ou bwa seche? (You give up?) The answers are:
- A table.
- Bread.
- It's not raining.
- A dog.
- Only one. After that the sack's not empty.
You'll find more Haitian riddles and proverbs here.
Thai-Cambodia refugee camps, 1975-1999
Study this model and try to improve on it. Here is further historical information.
What does the domestic U.S. political equilibrium look like when we are funding and running these camps? Will Obama be seen as "doing too much" for "black people"? How will we punish wrongdoers in the camps? Will the residents be treated better than those in Guantanamo? What happens when we, explicitly or implicitly, start using Haitian gangs to keep order in the camps? How many Haitians will the DR shoot crossing the border?
Haitians are extremely nationalistic, sensitive to foreign influence, and they have a clear historical memory of the U.S. occupation of 1915-1934. What if they ask us to leave before the camps are self-sustaining? For how long will we pretend that Haiti still has a real government?
Those are my questions for today.
Sentences to ponder, Haiti edition
“Money is worth nothing right now; water is the currency,” one foreign aid worker told Reuters.
The story is here.
Haiti Tweet
Port-au-Prince, Charter City?
Hat tip: Tim Kane.
Haitian demographics and mortality
“Something like 40 to 50 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is kids,” he said. “Kids are much more fragile – a 30-pound block of a wall that would only seriously injure an adult will kill a child. They die much more rapidly of dehydration, of loss of blood, of shock. An infection will cause explosive diarrhea, which can kill a trapped child. Everything about this is devastatingly worse for kids than for adults.”
That's Dr. Irwin Redlener from Columbia University and the full story is here.
I don’t mean to be morbid, but…
The media are not paying attention to this kind of problem. Richard Morse, who once sold me four Antoine voodoo flags to finance a record album, is providing very good Twitter coverage of Haiti.
Zakaria on Incentive Design
As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy's father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door.
From an excellent op-ed by Fareed Zakaria. Hat tip to Jeff Miron.
Geopolitical speculations about Haiti
Haiti is about the size of Maryland and a big chunk of the population lives in or near Port-Au-Prince, maybe a third of the total, depending on what you count as a suburb. So the collapse of Port-Au-Prince is a big, big deal for the country as a whole. It's a dominant city for Haiti. Plus Jacmel seems to be leveled. From the reports I have seen, my tentative conclusion is that the country as a whole is currently below the subsistence level and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, the U.N. Mission has collapsed, the government is not working (was it ever?), and hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people are living in the streets without reliable food or water supplies. The hospitals and schools have collapsed. The airport is shut down. The port is very badly damaged. The Haitian Penitentiary has collapsed and the inmates — tough guys most of them – are running free for the foreseeable future. There is no viable police force or army.
In other words, it's not just a matter of offering extra food aid for two or three years.
Very rapidly, President Obama needs to come to terms with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more.
In what sense does Haiti still have a government? How bad will it have to get before the U.N. or U.S. moves in and simply governs the place? How long will this governance last? What will happen to Haiti as a route for the drug trade, the dominant development in the country's economy over the last fifteen years? What does the new structure of interest groups look like, say five years from now?
Is there any scenario in which the survivors, twenty years from now, are better off, compared to the quake never having taken place?
Luck and disasters
Just two days ago I was trying to convince a group of my colleagues to come to Haiti with me for a three-day weekend outing. Had we gone, we would have stayed in what is now the epicenter of the earthquake. The hotel I had in mind…I believe it does not exist any more but has fallen down the hills into oblivion. It is difficult for me to fathom what must be going on there and how it will continue to play out. In addition to thousands of lives, much of the Haitian cultural heritage has been destroyed. Here is an image of Simbi, god of healing.
Here is one reputable place to donate. Here is another.
Renaissance postponed (earthquake in Haiti)
…there were growing reports of mass destruction — a hospital is believed to have collapsed, along with a sections of the National Palace. Haitian President René Préval is said to be seeking safe haven on the island…
Part of the road to Canape Vert has collapsed, as have houses in the mountains of Petionville, where the quake was centered. Petionville is a suburb some 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, the capital.
Several aftershocks have followed, according to The Associated Press.
The article is here; Twitter updates are here. There are reports that the major government buildings, among many other structures, have collapsed. Most buildings of more than one story are down; Richard Morse reports: "people in large numbers are singing prayers downtown" The UN mission building has collapsed as well.