Food for thought: dealing with poverty in the world

David Brooks has a column today in which he makes the case that the tragedy in Haiti is as much due to poverty as it is to the earthquake itself:

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

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.

He goes on to look at the developed world's poor track record in tackling poverty in the rest of the world:

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.

In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.

The best we can hope for, Brooks writes, is that the world acknowledges that what's been tried up until now hasn't been successful and moves toward a new approach. He suggests that a workable solution needs to be based on an acceptance of the fact that some cultures are better than others at climbing out of poverty and that hard-nosed paternalism may be necessary, especially if it's driven by local leaders.