Rather than making plans to explain proper child-rearing practices to the Haitians, I wish David Brooks had stuck to his discussion of the limitations of humanitarian aid to effect economic growth. I thought the study he cited was interesting.
In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.
The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”
Seeming to accept this verdict, Brooks moves on to blame voodoo and bad parenting for Haiti’s problems. The truth of the matter is that Haiti needs investment, but it just isn’t a very attractive place to invest. I am not a fan of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, but she’s right about disaster capitalism to a degree. I’ve already seen a lot of people talking about a clean, blank slate, as if economic powers can now impose the kind of discipline on Haiti that would make it a good place to invest. Where Klein’s analysis breaks down is that Haiti desperately needs foreign investment, and people don’t invest their money out of the goodness of their hearts. That is what humanitarian aid is for, and humanitarian aid doesn’t create jobs on a large scale. A progressive response to this tragedy shouldn’t be to oppose an extent of paternalistic corporate opportunism, but to ask our government to guide that opportunism in ways that are mutually beneficial.
Haiti needs foreign investment but, they, and we, must know that doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result in the definition of insanity.
