A few musings brought on by the aftermath of the terrible earthquake in Haiti.... As David Brooks pointed out in a recent New York Times.... A few musings brought on by the aftermath of the terrible earthquake in Haiti....

As David Brooks pointed out in a recent New York Times column, an earthquake of similar force struck San Francisco in 1989, yet only 63 persons were killed, and infrastructure damage was much less.

In this era of knee-jerk distrust of government services and regulation, it pays to think about some of the reasons for this difference.

• In Haiti, building codes and regulations are nonexistent or widely ignored. This laissez-faire attitude towards construction means that only the bottom line counts--and that counts for nothing when the real bottom line becomes significant. Even the houses of the rich, even government buildings themselves, collapsed.
• Water, sanitation, and most security are provided through informal networks of private entities, uncoordinated, uncaring, and uncontrolled. At the first hint of trouble this all fell away.
• The poor are left to themselves, and the social structure ensures that there are plenty of poor to ignore. Now they are dying, because there are no networks of what I might call "structured neighborliness" to help them out.
• Transport is haphazard, and is utterly dependent on the automobile. If roads are blocked, nothing can get through. In San Francisco in '89, lanes collapsed on the Oakland Bay Bridge, but BART was running four hours after the first temblor.

Some of this is a result of political and economic restrictions imposed on Haiti by "privatiziation jihadis" over the last half century or so. Writing in the Guardian recently, Seumas Milne observes:

The same goes for the lending and aid conditions imposed over the past two decades, which forced Haitian governments to privatise, hold down the minimum wage and cut back the already minimal health, education and public infrastructure. The impact can be seen in the helplessness of the Haitian state to provide the most basic relief to its own people. Even now, new IMF loans require Haiti to raise electricity prices and freeze public sector pay in a country where most people live on less than two dollars a day.

What this saga translates into in real life can be seen in the stark contrast between Haiti, which has taken its market medicine, with nearby Cuba, which hasn't, but suffers from a 50-year US economic blockade. While Haiti's infant mortality rate is around 80 per 1,000, Cuba's is 5.8; while nearly half Haitian adults are illiterate, the figure in Cuba is around 3%. And while 800 Haitians died in the hurricanes that devastated both islands last year, Cuba lost four people.

This of course compares two extremes, a totally chaotic system in Haiti with a rigidly centralized one in Cuba; but both are poor and practically within sight of each other, both are subject to repeated natural disasters. Leaving everything to the privateers in Haiti seems not to have done most Haitians much good.

Of course, you could go a lot farther than even California cities have in preparing for earthquakes and other disasters without having to set up a dictatorship. For example, imagine that, instead of trucks blockaded by rubble so that driving a mile takes three hours and then you're stuck, Port au Prince routinely employed cargo bikes for delivery functions, as is common in Northern Europe: all of a sudden, there's no need to wait for fuel, or for electricity to pump the fuel, or for heavy equipment to move rubble out of the streets so that trucks can pass. Supplies can move through any gap large enough for a single person to step through, but in quantities of 200 to 400 pounds, much more than a single person can carry.

Neither free-market madness nor the iron hand of an overblown paternalism are the answer, but a coherent balance of government and enterprise each providing what it is very good at, and which the other handles clumsily.

And some imaginative thinking, in short supply in the US and the countries within its sphere of influence these days, but more necessary than ever as the world strives for physical, social, and financial balance in the years to come.