Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
Hi Rex,



I'll admit, I'm enough of a particularist to dislike generalist terms like the "third world". I've actually looked at a fair bit of the development work, although mainly in Africa, but I do have some problems with the indicators.



Which is all well and good. we saw exactly the same type of drop in child mortality 100 years ago in Nigeria, but what is not generally talked about is two things. First, is the drop brought about by permanent changes in the environment (e.g. swamp draining, massive but long last infrastructure, etc.) or is it brought about by external applications (e.g. vaccines)? The source of the change is crucial since external changes cannot be assumed to be lasting, while local changes, especially environmental, can be.

The second key point is that there is a culture lag relating to perceptions of how many children are "acceptable" and "necessary", and this is where the time element in the changes leading to drops in infant mortality becomes critical. It usually takes about 60 years for cultural perceptions of the required number of children per family to change to meet the "new" environment (BTW, as a point of clarification, I'm talking about population-level here).

Once you start to get these culture level changes going, usually 30-40 years and solidified by 60-70, you have a related problem which is controlling the birth rate via non-environmental factors (e.g. birth control). That's another culture lag problem, so you end up with a fairly big population bulge.

You mentioned changes in nutrition, education and real disposable income, so let me take up some of these. Nutrition is especially important, especially in early childhood, but it requires a number of different factors in your food production / distribution cycles - i.e. a fair diversity of foods being widely available and affordable. Education may or may not be useful as an indicator, it depends on education for what and the quality of the education, and Tom's point about setting up a diasporic brain drain is well taken (consider the Canada - US relationship on this one, and when it flips).

Let's talk about real disposable income, then. What resource potentials does it actually indicate and what will it be spent on? This is critical, especially if it is combined with a culture that tends towards kinetic "answers" to political problems. Consider, by way of example, the Muslim Brotherhood - well educated, fairly decent disposable income and a tendency to use it in kinetic terms, at least for the first 40-50 years of the operation. Nutrition, education and income do not automatically equate to a peaceful nation state .

Tom touched on the slave country problem, and it really is at the root of a lot of the cultural problems Haiti is facing. I'm not (quite) as pessimistic as Tom about there being a solution, but it isn't going to be easy at all, and would require some pretty massive socio-cultural engineering. Let's just take the familiarism that Tom raises which, BTW, is the only same response in that type of situation. How do you expand people's moral "inner curcle" to include people who are in the country, but not of your or an allied bloodline?

Historically, this has only been done via some form of cross-cutting (across bloodlines) allegiance system. Examples include secret societies, religions, "class consciousness" (although that tends to degenerate into alliance groups of bloodlines), fictive kinship systems and external enemies ("we either hang together or hang separately).

The latter, an external enemy, won't work in Haiti because it is what actually established a large part of the current culture in the first place (fear of invasion and re-enslavement, extensive militarization early on, invasion of the DR, etc.). Secret societies and fictive kinship systems are already a part of Haitian society and have a rather checkered past (tonton macoute anyone?); at any rate, they have tended to be too localized to effectively cross bloodlines unlike the lodge systems in west Africa, the north-west coast of BC or the Masons et alii.

This leaves us with religions (iffy) and class consciousness (quite fragmented and highly diverse). And, as a note, the type of class consciousness that operated to stabilize many of the western European countries was a fairly broad one with significant size in the population (look at the development of the middle class figures for western Europe in the 17th - 19th centuries), and most of them were formed around a pseudo-feudalist model which would have problems in Haiti.

One system that might work is some form of a cantonment system (think Switzerland in the mid-16th to mid-17th century with shades relating to France in the late 19th century) with cross-cuts for certain industries, religious groups and ideological groups. That, however, would require that the "national government", and pardon me while I laugh my guts out, agree to decentralize a large amount of its power and shift its electoral system. It would also require that development work be conducted at the canton level which for some groups would be fine, while others wouldn't get the necessary ROI to support their "deserving", lavish life style .

As I said, I can see some potential, but not much.

Cheers,

Marc
Interestingly enough, in 1980 I went to the Infantry Officer Basic Course (IOBC; it has a different name now) with two Haitians, one of them from TonTon Macout.

Yes, I found that rather odd, too.