The primitive paintings in the living room remind me of beautiful Haiti of years ago. The water magazines say that the Artibonite river has been contaminated by virulent Asian strains of Vibrio cholera introduced by UN Nepalese soldiers. The spring is starting and people is already falling like flies, dying in one or two days. Best to postpone the summer holiday you scheduled in Port-au-Prince.
7 comments:
We sometimes consider here how racial differences lead to different outcomes - why say Swaziland is not like Switzerland. But how does one account for the vastly different outcomes among countries that are racially similar (and with similar geography, etc.)? Why is Barbados vastly richer than Haiti?
K
Barbados has good golf clubs.
Barbados tries to be a large English country club from the Edwardian era. Haiti is a socialist hellhole made worse by Santeria. The social freamework is the decisive factor when it comes to the long term health of a nation. In the US they would have done well to take the late DP Moynihan's advice to give the issue of race a rest. Instead they allowed the race hustlers, the Marxists from the SPLC and guilt-mongers to set the tone. Predictably the blacks have become more dependent than before with its middle class largely a creation of the government. Hence they vote lockstep with the Democrats who had always wished that they stayed at the plantations. I don't believe all this nonsense about IQ being the determining factor since if they had tested the denizens of my village and its surroundings in India, say 30 to 40 years back, they would have found a people with low IQ. But that has not prevented the descendents of those same people from becoming engineers and tradesmen. There is little doubt that their children in turn will aspire to greater things. This is solely because of the great interest they take in the education of their children.
Ivan
Barbados has a large admixture of white blood. Most Haitians, aside from a very few mulattos, are of pure West African stock.
Apparently, Barbados does manifest one of the highest average IQs in the Caribbean.
Of the many places I have been to in the Caribbean, I felt least nervous in Barbados.
Anon.
I don't think it is purely racial - rather there is a large cultural component as well. Race and culture may reinforce each other. E.g. Jews and Chinese are fairly intelligent to begin with so that they find education to be rewarding and their cultures evolved to give the greatest yicchus (prestige) to scholarship. For other groups, making education the highest value may not be a rational choice because their efforts will lead to naught in most cases. In modern American black cultures academic achievement gets you zero (even negative) yicchus among your peers and there is usually no strong parental (esp. father) figure to counterbalance the peer pressure. Recent black immigrants (yes even Haitians) tend to do much better and many of the "affirmative action" spots in American schools are ironically filled with Nigerians, bi-racial Kenyans, etc. - why they should be more favored than say New Guineans or Sri Lankans is a mystery. My son had a friend at college who had a Haitian father (who took off soon after she was born as is not untypical) and a Jewish mother who raised her. If you spoke to her on the phone, you would have sworn that she was a typical haymish Long Island Jewish girl but in person she looks just like many American blacks - i.e. a black/white mix. Maybe her success is partly due to genetics but it didn't hurt that an attentive Jewish mother raised her instead of a crack addict. Even Obana's mother who was a lost soul took care to send him to the best private schools.
K
Pictured is the Cap Haitien Club Med,
Duvalier Annexe.
Anon.
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