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Comment by sailormoon | Hacker News Reader

An earthquake has no one to blame.

The event itself does not, it's true. But there certainly is someone to blame for the shoddy construction standards and grievous lack of preparation. The government is entirely accountable for these things.

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Easy to say if you're coming from the vantage point of someone living in a rich country.

How many deaths have you heard about in the Dominican Republic?

Its not exactly Luxembourg over there but they survived.

The earthquake epicenter was in Haiti. It wasn't felt as strongly in the Dom. Rep.

About 6 years ago, an earthquake centered in the northern part of the island destroyed the nearby towns.

The buildings were made to withstand hurricanes, not earthquakes. They chose the less frequent of two disasters to be exposed to.

Coming from Trinidad and Tobago, where we get both, I assure you it's possible to build in a way to withstand both.

GDP per capita (World Bank, 2008):

  $24,742 Trinidad and Tobago (28th)
   $1,177 Haiti (146th)

What's possible in a rich country isn't much of an example of what's possible in a dirt poor country -- the poorest in the western hemisphere. (What other expenditures should Haitians have forgone to afford in-advance disaster preparations and rich-country building standards, for an earthquake that might never come?)

Poverty is the ultimate killer here. An event like the earthquake just sets the time-of-death. Blame the poverty, and the policies which perpetuate it, sure. Blaming the Haitian government for not buying insurance -- building standards and disaster preparedness -- they couldn't have afforded anyway is silly.

Agreed. As an example of the abject poverty there compared to even their closest neighbour.

Last night my parents recounted their trip (about 10 years ago) to the Dominican Republic. A lot of Haitian labour work in the DR in the fields etc (usual "immigrant labour" stuff you get everywhere). The average wage was about $1 a day. To put it in perspective in the DR (admittedly in the tourist resorts) you bought Coke for $1 :)

But $1 didn't buy you a lot more even in the non-tourist regions. And Haitians worked there, apparently, because the wages were good!

Calling it a mess is an understatement I think.

(I also showed my Dad this link and he said [rough quote] "it was pretty much a dying country when we went there")

>Poverty is the ultimate killer here.

But what is the cause of the poverty. Is it overpopulated for the resources available? Is the endemic use of heroin marring the countries ability to govern itself? Is it being exploited by outsiders who are creaming off the benefit of the natural resources for themselves? ...

Those are good questions. I defer to some theories aired on the MarginalRevolution blog -- none definitive, some quite arguable, but most plausible enough to consider:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01...

And an essay on the topic also relayed via that blog:

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/misctopic/leftover/wh...

There has been no government, in effect, to date, or worse, a corrupt government that was hurting its own people.

Well then that's the problem, isn't it?

Look, my point is that something could have been done to prepare, and was not. Mahmud's talking like it's a no-fault act of god that's going to bring everyone together in a solidarity of fellow suffering - I'm saying, if I was Haitian and I'd somehow managed to survive this disaster, I'd compare to how other countries deal with this kind of thing and probably be more angry than ever.

Update: I am evidently not stating my point very well. I'm not looking for a scapegoat. I'm trying to raise the possibility that these low expectations of government, this disregard for accountability, and this willingness to dismiss gross negligence and incompetence as somehow inherent in these "other" societies are a big part of the problem.

"No-one to blame" indeed. Let me tell you what would happen to the mayor of a Japanese town if he let this happen and then just shrugged his shoulders and claimed there was "no-one to blame".

I don't think the Haitians have that sense of 1st World, consumer rights, entitled mindset. Most construction is done by the local guys, up to the budget and specs of the owner. Really. Safety or aesthetics play very little role; you just build what you can afford and you're done with it.

They have been hit with a 7.0 Richter earth quake; even the U.N. and government buildings were floored. Sometimes you just don't have anyone to blame and this is one of those times.

"you just build what you can afford and you're done with it"

So if you can't afford a 2 story townhouse with earthquake and hurricane proofing you build a one-story that does have proofing and live in 2 rooms instead of 4 but have 2 rooms that are likely to stay standing. If you go for the 4 rooms then the consequences are yours to live with.

There are provisos, if earthquakes and hurricanes haven't ever happened where you live for example.

This sounds incredibly harsh and I, like most, would probably go with the group and build whatever anyone else was building assuming the worst wouldn't happen to me.

God have mercy.

>>I don't think the Haitians have that sense of 1st World, consumer rights, entitled mindset.

If you want to see something fun regarding this type of mindset, go check Sweden in Malthus' book on population (added in some later edition).

Sweden is today the poster child of the cradle-to-grave nanny state. For good and bad.

Malthus wrote about how self sufficient the Swedes were, compared to the rest of Europe, not blaming and demanding help from the state/nobility... :-)

I may be wrong, and would appreciate anybody from a third world country educating me, but I don't believe that building code standards are typically on top of the list of properties by which the citizens of those third world companies evaluate their government.

Civil Order, Access to Water, Food, Jobs, lack of corruption are probably much, much higher on their minds than "Are proper seismic standards being enforced."

I don't suspect the Haitians will be hating their government because earthquake resistance wasn't built into their building code.

I grew up in Brazil 20 years ago, when the economy was pretty bleak (at one point my allowance was worth half as much after a week or so due to hyperinflation). I'd move Jobs to #2 (money buys water and food) and replace Civil Order by the more general Security.

If anything, non-wealthy people in a place like Brazil (roughly 95% of the population) probably resent any attempt at building code enforcement by their government as merely another pretense to receive bribes. As much as we complain about politics in the US, rest assured that politicians and thus governments in the less human-capital dependent parts of the world are orders of magnitude worst.

I also lack this elusive "Third World Perspective" but considering the alarming regularity with which earthquakes shuffle several hundred thousands of their friends, family and neighbours off this mortal coil, perhaps those citizens should, in fact, start encouraging their governments to make building codes and disaster preparation more of a priority.

Your "perhaps they should" reasoning verges a bit into "no bread? let them eat cake" territory.

You can't make buildings safer by decree. It takes resources. Haiti is the poorest country in this hemisphere, by far. (The next poorest countries, Guyana or Nicaragua, are each twice as productive by per capita GDP.)

Even with an accurate idea of the chances (but not certainty) of such a major earthquake, the people and government could quite rationally have decided other more pressing needs deserved all of their meager expenditures.

I'm not sure that you quite understand how poverty works. There are no resources in Haiti, not even arable land. No human capital, nothing to trade. Even if it were possible to build earthquake-resistant buildings, without engineers, out of mud, they couldn't--because the mud was literally all they had to eat:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/29/food.internation...

You're over egging it a little - if they didn't even have building materials to try and eat ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagy ) then they wouldn't have buildings that could fall on them.

A mud hut may fall down in an earthquake or blow away in a hurricane but is less likely to kill you when it falls over then a brick or concrete building.

Isn't this more about living within the societal means than simply about poverty: If where I live all cars crash or blow up because we lack resources to produce quality cars then one must accept a bicycle or horse and cart for family transport or suffer the consequences, no?

In a third world country you do not build with what you should build with, you build with what you have, and in any way that it will hold out the elements.

Building codes do not enter in to the equation.

I think you should question the strength of your analysis when you appear to be comparing Haiti to not just a First world country, but a G-7 Nation.

"Let me tell you what would happen to the mayor of a Japanese town if he let this happen and then just shrugged his shoulders and claimed there was "no-one to blame". "

So which way does the causality flow? Do those Japanese citizens have high expectations because they are from a G7 nation? Or did Japan get to be a G7 nation because of the fact its residents have high expectations?

Anyway, Japan just sprang to mind as a country with lots of earthquakes, it was not central to my thesis. Feel free to substitute the name of any well-run country in an earthquake zone.

So which way does the causality flow?

You seem to think that the answer is obvious. Everyone knows that Haiti has severe systemic problems, but it's just not clear what can be done about it in a self-sustaining way.

.. which is exactly my original point, restated. So the "severe systemic problems" are to blame, then. But there is blame, there is cause, it's not just some unavoidable random thing.

Look, one last time. Mahmud was saying that no-one's to blame, it was an act of god, can't be helped. I was trying to say that the systemic problems killed those people, poverty killed those people, bad government killed those people. That's what I think and that's all I was trying to say.

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