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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2870 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 8, 2024

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Why is Haiti so much worse than other overwhelmingly-African Caribbean countries? Is the difference between 80% African DNA and 90% African DNA the difference between a functional and non-functional society? Is it because the other countries have residual institutions left over from colonialism, while Haiti blew everything up in the revolution and started from zero?

Why is Haiti so much worse than other overwhelmingly-African Caribbean countries? Is the difference between 80% African DNA and 90% African DNA the difference between a functional and non-functional society?

If you want to look for a genetic explanation, I'd bet the brain drain during the dictatorship of Duvalier is actually more important than that 10 percentage points difference. The human rights abuse of the dictatorship caused most of Haiti's wealthy class to flee the country, taking their material, cultural and genetic wealth with them. And it's hard to rebuild after a dictatorship if most of your doctors, engineers, scientists and teachers have fled the country.

There's also a large number of other factors, the most prominent ones that are completely independent of the genetic angle are:

  • poverty spiral: Haiti is so poor/dangerous, it can't even get its tourism industry off the ground
  • climate: especially compared to the Dominican Republic, Haiti's side of the island is significantly more arid and less well suited for agriculture. The classic West Coast problem.
  • deforestation: the previous point is made much worse by the massive logging operation Haiti executed while trying to pay of its debt to France by exporting timber

Let's compare Haiti to West African countries.

Haiti: GDP per capita PPP: $3185, HDI: 0.552

Liberia: GDP per capita PPP: $1789, HDI: 0.487

Ivory Coast: $6960, 0.534

Togo: $2767, 0.547

Ghana: $6905, 0.602

Nigeria: $6340, 0.548

Burkina Faso: $2682, 0.438

Haiti is a standard-issue West African country in a different hemisphere. Jamaica is in a totally different place: 12K GDP per capita and HDI at 0.7. Dominican Republic: 27K, 0.766 (which seems rather high but they do have gold, tourism and agriculture). Jamaica and the Dominican Republic are less African demographically, there are plenty of mixed and whites, especially in Dominican Republic.

The most important thing seems to be demography, not history. What external problems did Liberia have? The US protected them the whole time but they're worse off than Haiti today. The Liberians were very good at producing their own problems, they didn't need any external threats.

Lots of countries have had external problems and institutional problems. But they don't fall to Haiti levels and stay there. Ukraine has suffered a lot in history, they're at $15K and 0.734 today, during a major war! Vietnam is at a similar level of prosperity and they've done plenty of fighting, plenty of communism. China had about a century where they were constantly pummelled by the world's great powers, by eachother and then by an unusually damaging brand of communism. They blew everything up in a series of revolutions and civil wars, fought half the UN in Korea and skirmished with most of their neighbours: GDP 25K, 0.788.

I did a little research and it looks like Haiti might have Venezuela-tier oil and gas wealth. I don't fully believe it myself, nobody seems to have properly explored it because why would you, Haiti is a shithole. All kinds of crazy stuff happens there, zombies, cannibal gangs. The problem is with the people.

Jamaica

Jamaica is pretty black, where are you getting a huge difference? The main one seems to be that the biracial elite (partially) stayed in Jamaica while they almost all left Haiti between about 1930 and 1965.

A more precise study conducted by the local University of the West Indies - Jamaica's population is more accurately 76.3% African descent or Black, 15.1% Afro-European ( or locally called the Brown Man or Browning Class) , 3.4% East Indian and Afro-East Indian, 3.2% Caucasian, 1.2% Chinese and 0.8% Other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Jamaica

Haiti is 95% black, 5% mixed.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Haiti/Climate#ref54461

That seems like a fairly substantial difference, they still have the mixed whereas in Haiti they're mostly gone.

What external problems did Liberia have?

Americo-Liberians are the colonizers. Despite the country having very few whites, they still wound up with internal political strife akin to Rhodesia, just with the descendants of American expatriates as the elite class rather than European colonists. Liberia is sufficiently odd from an outsider's perspective that it's hard to compare to other countries.

There were no major war debts, no foreign invasions. What European country can say that? Liberia inherited a successful constitution from the USA and continual foreign aid.

In its 1930 report, the league admonished the Liberian government for "systematically and for years fostering and encouraging a policy of gross intimidation and suppression" by "[suppressing] the native, prevent him from realizing his powers and limitations and prevent him from asserting himself in any way whatever, for the benefit of the dominant and colonizing race, although originally the same African stock as themselves."

They made the decision to suppress the natives all by themselves. They made the decision to fall into foreign debts all by themselves. They were blessed with natural resources: rubber, iron and diamonds. They squandered one of the most fortunate geopolitical/geoeconomic positions in world history.

Not an expert on this issue, but my impression is that conditions there were exacerbated by

  • neighboring slaveholding nations discouraging trade with them in the decades after the revolution -- a de facto embargo being especially hard on an island nation.

  • huge reparations they had to pay to France under threat of military attack, which were such a large fraction (or perhaps initially, multiple) of their economic output for so long that successive governments could only focus on extracting enough wealth from the populace to service the debt

  • early lack of economic development and limited trade led to low-tech dependence on burning wood for fuel, which in turn led to extensive deforestation, erosion, and desertification of the productive lands. Supposedly neighboring DR avoided a corresponding environmental catastrophe during the mid 20th century by having a stronger central government that could, for instance, execute illegal loggers in their territory (while outsourcing their supply of illegally-logged fuel to Haiti).

Don't know if any of these fully explain the difference from majority-black baseline, but the onerous debt -- which they kept having to pay into the 20th century to US investors who eventually purchased it from France -- may have contributed to setting them off on the wrong foot institutionally.

I wonder if a communist takeover in the 1950s would have been a net gain for Haiti. They could've defaulted on their debt while at the same time receiving both education and development aid from the USSR.

I can’t speak authoritatively on the subject, but it seems like corruption in Haiti was simply unmatched anywhere else. That, coupled with the fact that Haiti was essentially a pariah nation from the time of the revolution (1800) until after the Civil War AND the incredible level of sovereign debt they agreed to, left Haiti an incomparably poor country.

Here is a good, quick podcast on the history of Haiti since the revolution. I recommend listening to the entire series, but this is a good, quick recap:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/4-19-the-history-of-haiti/id703889772?i=1000367035057

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