Haiti is plagued by a culture of poverty. There are some parallels between the Haitian culture of poverty and the culture of welfare dependency which can be seen in so many of our inner cities in America. The Katrina debacle in New Orleans is a prime example of generations of Americans addicted to poverty and to government welfare – so when a natural disaster strikes, the people are powerless waiting for outsiders (particularly the government) to come save them. Individual initiative is a foreign concept to those who depend on a higher authority to take care of their needs. Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic and the contrasts between those two nations are striking. Although there is poverty in the Dominican republic, there is also a growing middle class in that nation (which at one point it seemed as if their greatest exports was shortstops to the major leagues)!.
by Jonah Goldberg
The images from Haiti are, if anything, only getting worse. What was left of an already fragile society is starting to break down, as violence and chaos take over. Despite the heroic efforts of aid workers and the battered Haitian government, it looks as if Haiti’s problems will persist well into the 21st century, long after the debris is cleared and the houses are rebuilt.
While the scope of the tragedy in Haiti is nearly impossible to exaggerate, it’s important to remember that last week’s earthquake was so deadly because Haiti is Haiti.
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It’s hardly news that poverty makes people vulnerable to the full arsenal of Mother Nature’s fury. The closer you are to living in a state of nature, the crueler nature will be — which is one reason why people who romanticize tribal or pre-capitalist life (that would be you, James Cameron) tend to do so from a safe, air-conditioned distance and with easy access to flushing toilets, antibiotics, dentistry and Chinese takeout.
The sad truth about Haiti isn’t simply that it is poor, but that it has a poverty culture. Yes, it has had awful luck. Absolutely, it has been exploited, abused and betrayed ever since its days as a slave colony. So, if it alleviates Western guilt to say that Haiti’s poverty stems entirely from a legacy of racism and colonialism, fine. But Haiti has been independent and the poorest country in the hemisphere for a long time.
Even if blame lies everywhere except among the victims themselves, it doesn’t change the fact that Haiti will never get out of grinding poverty until it abandons much of its culture.
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Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz note in their phenomenal new book, “From Poverty to Prosperity,” that low-skilled Mexican laborers become 10 to 20 times more productive simply by crossing the border into the United States. William Lewis, former director of the McKinsey Global Institute, found that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican agricultural laborers in the US were four times more productive than the same sorts of laborers in Brazil.
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Why? Because American culture not only expects hard work, but teaches the unskilled how to work hard.
It’s true that Haiti has few natural resources, but neither do Japan or Switzerland. What those countries do have are what Kling and Schulz call valuable “intangible assets” — the skills, rules, laws, education, knowledge, customs, expectation, etc. — that drives a prosperous society to generate prosperity.
Tags: earthquake, Haiti, Jonah Goldberg
