Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
And the effect of more Haitians is to be precisely what, do you think? Other than further deforestation of an already largely deforested country, said deforestation leading to top soil erosion and the killing of fish on the coast, said deforestation caused by the trees being turned into charcoal, so that the already excessive numbers of Haitians (excessive for what their third of the island can support) can cook, I mean.

Further, what improvement would you expect increased but still limited opportunities for education to do for Haiti, other than to make that fraction talented enough to qualify for the education high-tail it for a better place? Yes, they'll send remittances back, for a generation or so. But after that, the place will be the poorer for its more talented people having left, and the remittances will have stopped.
Deforestation tends to also be an issue of poor access to alternative energy supplies (including sparse rural electrification), land tenure and inequality, education, disposable income and government policy—not merely population density. Moreover, in Haiti we've seen a significant decline in population growth rates since the 1980s (1.7% in 2007, down from 2.3% in 1984), hopefully indicating that the usual demographic transition is slowly underway.

My broader point, however, was that infant mortality rate (one of the best indicators of average living conditions, since it is affected by income, education, shelter, nutrition, access to safe water, etc.) has steadily declined even in Haiti, and much more rapidly in other places. Methodologically, an even better measure of the slow but significant improvement in Haitian living conditions in recent years is its Human Development Index score (an amalgam measure of quality-of-life indicators):



I'm not saying that reconstruction and development in Haiti will be easy. It won't--it will be enormously difficult, challenging, and prone to setbacks. We might even fail.

I am suggesting, however, that it is not impossible.