Category: Current Affairs
The subsistence wage
Until the broken Haitian government can figure out how to distribute paychecks, the national police have been working for food. That's one meal a day, given to them by the foreigners, that "we have to beg for," said the chief of police.
The article is interesting throughout, as it focuses mostly on how corruption among the Haitian police has plummeted since the earthquake.
Watch Obama debate the Republicans
Via Brad DeLong. Who did better?
One paragraph plus a sentence
Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other exotic enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box.
But was he writing?
The rest of the Salinger obituary, interesting throughout, is here.
Who are the biggest donors to Haiti?
Here is an interesting visual, which expresses pledged support to Haiti in per capita terms. #1 is Canada, by a large margin, followed by some of the Nordic countries.
Per capita the U.S. doesn't do so well (NB: I don't think remittances are counted), with less than half of what Guyana supplies. We're also behind Estonia, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates, among other countries. The visual is measuring earthquake aid pledged, not all foreign aid.
In absolute terms here is another visual; U.S. is #1. I don't think this is using the same metric as above.
Here's another interesting visual. Relative to per capita gdp, Ghana is the single most significant pledger of aid to Haiti.
For the pointer I thank Rahul Nabar.
The incomes and professions of Haitian-Americans
The blog post is here. It's a proposal for "diaspora bonds" (I fear that excess corruption is a problem). I was more interested in this bit:
…nearly one-third of Haitian immigrants in the US belong to households that earned more than $60,000 in 2009. In comparison, less than 15% of the immigrants from Mexico, Dominican Republic and El Salvador in the US had that level of household income. A quarter of Haitian immigrants, especially women, are reportedly in the relatively higher paying health care and education sectors; only a small number of them are in the construction sector.
Hat tip goes to Whirled Citizen.
Haiti fact of the day
In 2009, the cost of dealing with construction permits in Haiti was about 570% of income per capita.
Here is the source post, with further information. Had I mentioned that perhaps as much as eighty percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is homeless?
Real estate and transportation in Port-au-Prince
Port-au-Prince is now a city where most people are sleeping outside at night (estimates put it at 80 percent of the residents). I drove back to our camp just after dark a couple of nights ago, rushing to meet our own night-time curfew. At street corner after corner, people had blocked access to their blocks by placing stones in the way. They didn't want vehicles rushing blindly in and injuring sleeping families. I looked up these blocks and saw winding ribbons of re-created bedrooms, demarcated with bedsheets and string, as far as my eyes could see in the dark.
That's Monte, via Andrew Sullivan.
Some problems they are having in Haiti
1. Since many financial institutions are closed, transport is difficult, and people don't all have their papers (fear of theft also may be an issue), it is almost impossible to receive remittances, which account for more than one-quarter of the country's gdp.
2. The current makeshift shelters are not robust to rain and storms and the rainy season is starting in May. Rain also brings a greater risk of various diseases.
3. The price of food keeps on rising. It was already the case — before the earthquake — that poor people commonly ate mud cakes as a source of nutrition. 54 percent of Haitians live on less than one dollar a day.
4. The party with the ability to make things happen — the U.S. military — isn't formally in charge and is sensitive to bad publicity.
5. In the Darfur crisis, eighty percent of the fatalities came from disease and disease has yet to begin in the Haitian situation.
6. There are already 150,000 accounted-for dead and many more uncounted.
7. It's by no means clear that the aftershocks are over and there is even some chance of a bigger quake to come. This also discourages aid efforts and the construction of more permanent shelter.
8. Outside of some parts of Port-Au-Prince and immediate environs, external aid is barely underway yet damage is extensive.
9. It is not clear that the upcoming planting season — which starts in March — will proceed in an orderly fashion. One-third of the country's population is living at loose ends and most of the country's infrastructure is destroyed. For the planting season many Haitian farmers need seeds, fertilisers, livestock feed and animal vaccines. That planting season accounts for sixty percent of Haiti's agricultural output.
10. Before a limb can be amputated, some doctors have to first go to the market and buy a saw.
Those aren't the only problems.
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.