Hacker News Reader

Comment by dunstad | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com