BrianGarst.com

It’s rare that I find a David Brooks column that I enjoy, but the New York Times’ faux conservative recently took a well-informed look at understanding why Haiti is poor and just what development aid can do different to help.

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. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.

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The rest is worth reading.

For some possible answers, I’d recommend Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid and Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital.

foreign aid Haiti