Haiti’s tragedy

Tyler Cowen succinctly describes the magnitude of the challenge in Haiti at Marginal Revolution:

…the country as a whole is currently below the subsistence level and will remain so for the foreseeable future…the U.N. Mission has collapsed, the government is not working…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…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

…the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more.

Matthew Yglesias’s conclusions are equally as grim:

The most likely alternative to mass immiseration and death for the survivors seems to me to be large-scale emigration to the developed world. Otherwise you’re going to have millions of people with no means of supporting themselves.