Obama’s to-do list

For a long time, I have thought Obama has a particularly long to-do list. Steve Benen agrees with me:

Since then [April 2009] – in addition to the two wars, economic crises, and global flu pandemic — it’s been hard to keep up the pressing and immediate challenges on the Obama administration’s to-do list. We’ve seen natural disasters (Haiti’s earthquake, Nashville’s flooding, Oklahoma’s tornadoes), man-made disasters (the BP oil spill), default crises (Dubai, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal), foreign policy crises (North Korea, Israel), and attempted terrorist attacks (Abdulmutallab on Christmas, Shahzad in Times Square).

I can only assume that it’s fairly common for President Obama to wake up, receive his morning briefings, and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Well, nobody made him run for president.

We don’t care about Haiti anymore

Chris Blattman has a great chart showing news attention to natural disasters. He has found, surprise, surprise, that we no longer care about Haiti (and makes Tyler Cowen look pretty foolish in the process).

Al Jazeera’s cheap shot

As I have written before, I am a fan of Al Jazeera. However, a recent report criticizing US aid efforts in Haiti made me pretty angry. The report criticized the US for “taking over,” “deciding who lands in Haiti,” and turning back aid from other nations. The US is pushing its own agenda and is not taking the needs of Haitians into account, according to a former defense minister.

Excuse me, what possible agenda could the US have in Haiti other than aid and reconstruction? It has no natural resources, is one of the poorest countries on earth, and is strategically irrelevant for US national security. What on earth does the US have to gain from aiding Haiti at this moment? Perhaps you say praise. Well, this may be true, but how does the US gain praise if it is turning away aid from other countries? Maybe the US is doing it because it fears mass exodus of Haitians to the US. This is plausible, but if this is the reason, the US agenda is to improve governance in Haiti to reduce demand for emigration. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps you argue the US is attempting to assert its dominance over Haiti. Sure, the US has a history of doing this, but usually for a reason. Why does the US care if Haiti is on its side or not? What does Haiti have that the US wants?

Moreover, I agree that the Government of Haiti should lead the relief efforts. The only problem is that the government doesn’t exist. The president is using a police station as his headquarters because all government buildings have been destroyed. There is no telecommunication infrastructure and Haiti has no army – not a weak army, but no army at all. Sadly, very sadly in fact, the earthquake destroyed the capacity of the Government of Haiti to lead the relief efforts. The UN is a bit better off, but it is in no position to lead the efforts, either.

Finally, I know its not pleasant to hear, but it is important to have infrastructure in place before starting large-scale relief efforts. Currently, the US military is probably the most well-equipped organization on this planet to be able to do this on a moment’s notice. I don’t like the militarization of humanitarian relief efforts and I don’t agree with it, but that is the world we have. Save the moral high ground talk until after the crisis. Just sending food onto the street without some plan for how you are going to distribute it would simply cause chaos.

This report was a gratuitous shot at the US. I am sure the operations are far from perfect, but look at the scope of the disaster. Expecting perfection not very realistic. I haven’t seen any other country offer anything close to the level of assistance the US has and if any other country wants to, let it come forward. Save the criticism for a worthy cause.

Random thoughts on Haiti…literally

I hope that the Washington Post’s Alec MacGillis just googled “experts Haiti” for his recent story on rebuilding the country. The article appears to be a set of random and somewhat contradictory ideas from a haphazard survey of people who know something about Haiti. If it reflects the actual policy discussions taking place, they country will only improve by luck.

Continue reading »

David Brooks makes my brain hurt

David Brook’s column in yesterday’s New York Times really made my brain hurt.  Brooks starts off well, noting (as I have in a recent post) that the magnitude of the disaster in Haiti is in large part man-made:

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services…

So far, so good. Brooks next discusses the challenges we face in Haiti because we have very little understanding of how foreign aid can reduce poverty:

…we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty…

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…

I think he goes a little to far, but he is being polemical, so it’s no big deal. The real problem starts four paragraphs later when Brooks begins to contradict himself completely:

…programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement – involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.

It’s time to take that approach abroad, too.

At this point, I became utterly confused. A few paragraphs ago he seemed to be saying that we have no idea how to reduce poverty, now he says we do. What is Brooks trying to say?  He might be saying that economists are too narrow in looking only at developing countries. Aid has worked to reduce poverty in the US, so perhaps we can learn what might work overseas by looking at successful programs in the US. Yet this contradicts his argument that we don’t know anything about how to use aid to reduce poverty. I am not being polemical. I am genuinely confused. Is the article just a cheap shot at development economists? Continue reading »