Category: Current Affairs

Thai-Cambodia refugee camps, 1975-1999

by  Tyler Cowen in

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.

Haitian demographics and mortality

by  Tyler Cowen in

“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.

Zakaria on Incentive Design

by  Alex Tabarrok in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

by  Tyler Cowen in

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)

by  Tyler Cowen in

…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.

The Haitian Renaissance of 2010

by  Tyler Cowen in

A spokesman for the Maryland-based company said a Comfort Inn will open in the Caribbean coastal city of Jacmel this May.

The 32-room motel will be owned by a New York-based group of Haitian-American investors. The partners also plan a 120-room upscale hotel at the nearby Belle Rive tourism development this fall.

The full story is here.  Over the last year Haitian exports rose 23 percent and the country is expected to grow at a rate of 2.4 percent, only one of two countries in the Caribbean expected to have positive growth, Guyana being the other.  Here are the recent economic growth rates of Haiti.  Here is a photo of Jacmel.

How many scary ideas can you fit into one paragraph?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Government officials say their rationing plan should help the country reach May, when seasonal rains are predicted to return. But even Chavez concedes the situation is serious. His past efforts to solve the problem have included sending cloud-seeding planes to produce rain with the help of Cuba.

I count at least seven.  The broader story, which has even more scary ideas, is here.  It seems quite possible that over seventy percent of Venezuela could end up without electrical power, within a year.

On the brighter side, they've finally devalued the currency.

Keep Momma on the Train!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Today, Paul Krugman writes, under the headline "Stop, you’re killing me" the following:

Eight and a half years ago, when I dubbed the first Bush tax cut the Throw Momma from the Train Act of 2001,
I didn’t really think that we’d get to the point where there would be
strong financial incentives for wealthy heirs to bump off their parents
before the legislation expired, and the estate tax was reinstated….[but] it’s really happening.

As Paul might say, uh no. Or at least not yet. The estate tax goes away in January of 2010 so the story today is that the rich have an extra incentive to keep momma on the train or, as the WSJ correctly puts it, Rich Cling to Life to Beat Tax Man.  (What happens in 2011, however, is another story although the law will almost certainly be changed by then.)  Paul, it seems, just can't stop blaming Republicans for killing people or maybe he just had to make the story fit his Monty Python clip.

How does Delhi gridlock get cleared up?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Sometimes it's so bad that the cars can't even more, at least not without external assistance:

…heads begin to appear between the hoods and trunks.

Motivated by a meeting they wish to keep, men wade into the fray,
examining the crystalline structure of the traffic, looking for gaps,
irregularities, wiggle room. Because there’s always wiggle room. Six
inches here, a foot there, and this makes all the difference. It’s
reverse Tetris: move one this way, move another that way, and suddenly
some cars are free.

The amazing thing is this: these men don’t coordinate their actions.
They don’t formulate strategies. In fact, they probably think they’re
working against each other–as passengers in trapped cars, they care
about helping the other cars move only insofar as it helps get their
own car on its way.

The article is here and I thank Dave Prager for the pointer.  Here is one photo of a Delhi traffic jam.