The people who currently live in Haiti are utterly incapable of self government. They try to move illegally to the neighboring Dominican Republic but are deported back when caught. US politician make a lot of noise about the deportations. So basically we have a situation where white people tell brown people not to deport black people. But the brown people in the Dominican Republic don't care and don't want their country turning into Haiti. So they keep deporting the blacks.
It's amazing what can be accomplished by Dominicans when they have just a bit more European genetic admixture: a functioning peaceful society.
Aren't we tired of seeing this. Societies with Europeans do well. The rest don't, with varying degrees of brutality and poverty. North East. Asia being an exception and f course.
What is wrong with liberals they won't look at reality and accept it?
Then why are Dominicans poorer, less educated, and have a lower employment rate compared to Haitians in the U.S.? I just look at the data and Dominicans are the poorest and least educated immigrant group in the U.S., despite having been in the country far longer. Why didn’t your ‘white genetics’ help you do better than these Haitians?
The Dominican Republic is only doing better than Haiti because elite American and European businessmen invest extensively in the country and own all your major industries. Most Dominicans remain poor, driven by prostitution, child marriage, and a pimp culture.
Capital is not unfair: it invests in Dominica because the human capital is better there, it is a safer investment. The melanin content of the Haitians is a perfect illustration of the cause of their misfortune...
What about the other Black/African descent countries in the Caribbean that are doing fine? Hati seems like the only one in the region that's dysfunctional.
Actually, no matter the country in the region, the white elite decide who gets ahead and who falls behind, investing heavily in one country while sabotaging another. This is what American and European elites have done for centuries. The Dominican Republic isn’t doing better because they are more productive—most of their industries are dominated by Haitian workers. They’re only doing better because white American and European businesses invest heavily there.
You mean like Aruba where white Europeans (Dutch) still run the country? Or Saint Kitts and Nevis where blacks are the majority but there are still a lot of Europeans running the businesses and bureaucracy?
Well, for your second point, that's everywhere in Latin America/Caribbean. But still, for every country in that region with 85%+ Black African, Hati is the only one that seems dysfunctional.
Haitian independence was birthed by genociding almost all the smartest people in the country out of existence two centuries ago. No other post-Colombian country in America has a comparable origin story. Though as bad as things were after that, they only got worse when the Duvaliers and their gruesome black-magic regime came to power and led to yet further braindrain via their systemic tyrrany and massacre.
More than that, the U.S. invaded Haiti in 1915 and initiated a Bolshevik-style land grab that dispossessed most of the peasants from their land to build large American plantations. This led to a revolt, resulting in the U.S. bombing Haitian rebels between 1915-1920 and occupying the country, while concentrating all power in Port-au-Prince.
Haiti is the first country in the world where the U.S. led a mass aerial bombardment campaign to take control of a nation that led to the killing of more than 20k Haitians
We have done a tremendous amount of good, especially addressing embedded cultural issues with education and sanitation. Still some ways to go, but compared to the mid 80s it’s akin to going from medieval times to the Industrial Revolution.
It goes to show that the valid critiques below of inadequate education and corruption are not innate to the people. Have faith.
The best way I have found to address the systemic inadequacies is to give those affected agency over their progress. This is true of every instance. The patronizing and paternalistic route employed by those who virtue signal their charitable works simply puts those “helped” in a state of perpetual dependency.
Once those who benefit have personal ownership in the process of their own aid, that’s when you see effective change.
Unfortunately the West suffers from “Bwana Syndrome” and expects the lucky recipients to bow to the ivory throne.
You got it. I tended to ignore those other things that are related to low IQ—also a part of the population’s race characteristics. Behavioral tendencies are not to be overlooked, but heck you’d need to pen a book to discuss them all adequately. Gay, seems to be pointed out as “one of the bright ones”, but is she? One of the things discovered when she was placed under the magnifying glass was 1) gross plagiarism, and 2) an academic resume that was unworthy of an assistant professor in the Ivy Leagues—much, much less an Ivy League President! I’d say she was an AA product rather than a discovered “talent” from Haiti.
She wasn't a discovered talent her parents were wealthy and successful. She went to the top high school in the US. She did get into Stanford and Harvard in the 1990s which even with AA would mean she has to have gotten over 1200 on SATS/GRE so it is more than likely she has an IQ north of 120. She is pretty clever and could seriously damage others (i.e. Roland Fryer). It is sad she used her talent and education for evil and for for good but a lot of people would be tempted to do the same in her situation.
Imagine you grow up with an IQ around 120. That will make you a big fish in most small ponds. You get good grades. You may be valedictorian in your school, with scholarship offers.
You apply to Harvard. You get accepted, an AA admission. There you meet some _really_ smart people. The courses move too fast, with material too difficult for you.
That can make a person bitter. Some people will conclude that _everyone_ is cheating, somehow. They will be particularly vicious toward people of their own category who got in on merit.
She can be an AA product and discovered talent at the same time--there is no contradiction.
Let's say Gay has an IQ of 120 (completely made-up number). Then she would be the below the mean for an Ivy League professor. But she would be well above the mean for Haitians--and would probably be a useful person to have running some city-level function.
Doubtful. You seem to have passed over two very revealing aspects of “President” Gay’s record: Plagiarism and mediocrity wrt academic work. But I suppose she could be a “bright one” in a country of mean IQ of 70-75, but I doubt 120. Which would put her in the top 10% in this country.
You want to help Haiti, colonize it. Complete take over of all institutions. Expect to run Haiti for 100 years (4 or so generations). Rule of law and social stability will create a Haiti “elite” to form—similar to America’s “talented tenth” W. E. B. Du Bois used to talk about. All things (good things) follow from rule of law and social stability.
Of course, social activists won’t do this because their main interest is in virtue signaling while tearing down the very society that gave them the ability to virtue signal in the first place.
"Of course, social activists won’t do this because their main interest is in virtue signaling while tearing down the very society that gave them the ability to virtue signal in the first place."
Virtue signaling is the favorite response of our time, by almost everybody about everything. It takes no time, money, or investment.
I'm up for that "experiment." Think of all the other social "improvements" we could try out on Haitians to see why they don't work before screwing up our own country making them the law of the land. We'd save billions!
They resolutely didn't try this in Iraq. If anything, our quarter-assing of our mission there, as well as our refusal to recognize the significant differences between Gulf Arabs and ourselves, is part of why the country became such a mess so quickly.
Though Iraq is still honestly way better off than Haiti. Even now, as a fiefdom of Iran.
Well, this is true. The suggestion is to show just how tough it is to change a culture, much less a gene pool that produced that culture. However, I disagree with the Iraq example. The reality is that we did not spend the time, nor extend the control that we did after WWII in Japan and Germany. Rather, we picked a puppet government as quickly as possible, reverted to our “green zones” and left most of the non-western institutions in place. The assumption being that within each Iraqi was an “American” dying to emerge. Of course, that was non-sense. But we are in agreement, nation building is a fool’s errand.
I know many US Haitians and they are good people, smart and creative. Seeing the media spin what's happening as a series problems made by external actors is frustrating though. This is maybe their 36th coup if you include this and the last assassination. It's incoherent for people to explain such a deficit in cooperation and organization on a series of unfortunate events blamed on "meddling". Even the details of recent history are being spun exclusively in terms of external causation. This feeds into the conspiratorial populism that Both Americans and Haitians now default to, at least online. It shows how stilted our collective perception of reality has become now that behavioral genetics in populations is unthinkable to most people.
We should look back in history to the last time Haiti was governable and in good national order. Then we should encourage similar social, economic, and political relations to produce similar results. Anyone got that date handy?
At first glance, it sounds plausible to see the brain drain as human-capital lowering effects behind Haiti's decline. Then, suddenly, you realise that brain drain affects Dominica in the same way. And you enters the average IQ of 75 into the normal distribution calculator, and looks at how many out of 1000 students fall into the range above 120 IQ. Well 1 of them! This is the real reason for Haiti's decline...
A couple of decades ago, a scholar wrote a book on the etiology of Haiti's trouble. (I do not remember the name of the scholar or his book.) The island endured the harshest slavery on the planet. The French utterly depleted the island of its natural resources, including vegetation that left the soil and land in ruin. Right now Haiti is an indictment of humanity.
In his book The Negro Around the World, journalist and probable spy Willard Price blamed voodoo for Haiti's woes, and compared the nation unfavorably with its island neighbors, some of which he highly praised. Little seems to have changed in the 99 years since the book was published.
"Data published by the World Bank indicate that real GDP per capita is lower now than it was in 1960 – meaning the country hasn’t seen sustained economic growth in more than half a century."
That's not right; Haiti underestimated its economic growth and is now considered (since 2021) by the World Bank a lower middle income country. It is poor, but it is not a mere tenth as rich as the Dominican Republic.
Not sure we should compare Haiti to any other country, but pretty sure not the DR since the land both reside upon was once the same, only the people and their genetic root stock have varied. Haiti looks from the air like a picture of the moon. DR still has forests and wildlife. Haiti is as the people made it—deforested and barren. That’s why the DR brooks no Haiti refugees. Import Haitians, become like Haiti.
Haiti is an example of just how—at some point—a country’s low national IQ fails to support a thriving environment and civilized society. At some point, your society breaks into warlord control/strife or undergoes such civil distress as to simply disappear. There is a chapter in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed ”, by Jered Diamond (IIRC) describing something similar with Easter Island going down the tubes much like Haiti has been for years. It just went faster in Easter Island because they lacked any aid from outside do-gooder nations once they had destroyed their ecosystem.
Ah yes, let's blame brain drain as the main reason why Haiti is such a mess because it fits our "IQ supremacy" narrative while ignoring the punitive reparations the country has to pay to France for over 70 years for gaining freedom from slavery. The inability to look beyond your own assumptions and preconceived notions prevents you from seeing what is and that, ironically, subtracts from your intelligence.
How many generations ago was France collecting “punitive” reparations. What year is it now? Why did the GDP go down after 1960 after such reparations stopped?
Here we go again, grasping at straws to explain Haiti’s dysfunction on anything *but* IQ. You and I both have “preconceived” notions as you put it. The difference mine are supportable your’s are not.
A well managed country would have been able to negotiate an agreement with France; surely whites could have come to an agreement with the French government to end that “peculiar institution.” The rest of the world succeeded to do so, but those countries were run by whites. It’s amusing to see your “preconceived notion “ that 70 years of payments was the only reason that created the miserable present day Haiti . Different races exhibit different traits and one difference is IQ. They also metabolize certain pharmaceutical compounds differently. No, no one comment can “subtract from your intelligence “ as you stated. It’s more complex than that.
"A well managed country would have been able to negotiate an agreement with France; surely whites could have come to an agreement with the French government to end that “peculiar institution.” The rest of the world succeeded to do so, but those countries were run by whites."
I understand your point, but Germany was unable to after WWI, and since WWII, all of the Western world has been subservient to the United States.
"They can’t explain why fast-tracking visas for highly qualified Russians would be an effective way to destabilise Russia’s economy"
Is that so clear? In the case of the Soviet Union, it was very plausible, after all, the Soviet Union prevented people from emigrating for exactly that reason. But in the Soviet Union, highly qualified people could not earn much, that is quite different from today's Russia. Of course, they cannot earn as much as in the United States, but a) in purchasing power, the difference is smaller and b) for many people, the difference would have to be very large for them to be ready to live in a foreign country with a different language and significant cultural differences.
Apart from the question of Russia, recently I saw claims that the US could easily brain drain even Western European countries. I am quite skeptical. On one hand, for many Western Europeans who are really highly qualified, it is not that difficult to emigrate to the US if they want under current rules, and on the other hand, many Europeans would not want to even if they could, many would not want to even if they would have higher purchasing power in the US.
I think it is hardly an accident that the European countries the US brain drained most after WWII were the UK and Ireland - culturally closer countries where English is spoken.
Some European countries the US may brain drain more easily would be countries from which there is much emigration (now mainly to more affluent European countries), anyway, e.g. Romania, Bulgaria, or the Baltic states.
Of course, there would also be Russians who would be interested, but it is less clear than in the case of some smaller poor European countries, Russia does offer quite some opportunities for highly qualified people. Furthermore, if a serious attempt was made to attract Russians, current sanctions policies would be a hindrance - currently, they make it more difficult for Russians to be economically active in other countries. Some might be ready to cut economic ties with Russia, but many wouldn't.
At one point in my last university dept, 50% of the tenure track faculty were not native Americans. Someone lost, we won. I’ve seen other universities as well with numbers of such faculty. However, these people were leaving (except for Russia at the time) from countries that could not by classified as dysfunctional, simply not able to supply the necessary facilities/opportunities for employment.
Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing.
---
Worrying we have well funded NGOs desperate to get more of them in western countries.
I searched in the entire piece for "remittances" and didn't find anything.
It's quite possible that "brain drain" is hurting Haiti, but how can you not mention one of the biggest factors in the other direction? Remittances are 21% of Haiti's GDP.
Educated people have orders of magnitude more productivity in functional US/Canada than dysfunctional Haiti. If they even send back a little money, it could swamp the positive externalities of these people staying in Haiti. I'm not saying I know which direction the effect will eventually come out.
In the analogy made by Conor Bohan, remittances are cash infusions by the employees who left the company.
The people who currently live in Haiti are utterly incapable of self government. They try to move illegally to the neighboring Dominican Republic but are deported back when caught. US politician make a lot of noise about the deportations. So basically we have a situation where white people tell brown people not to deport black people. But the brown people in the Dominican Republic don't care and don't want their country turning into Haiti. So they keep deporting the blacks.
It's amazing what can be accomplished by Dominicans when they have just a bit more European genetic admixture: a functioning peaceful society.
Aren't we tired of seeing this. Societies with Europeans do well. The rest don't, with varying degrees of brutality and poverty. North East. Asia being an exception and f course.
What is wrong with liberals they won't look at reality and accept it?
"What is wrong with liberals they won't look at reality and accept it?"
Conservatives are just as bad.
Then why are Dominicans poorer, less educated, and have a lower employment rate compared to Haitians in the U.S.? I just look at the data and Dominicans are the poorest and least educated immigrant group in the U.S., despite having been in the country far longer. Why didn’t your ‘white genetics’ help you do better than these Haitians?
The Dominican Republic is only doing better than Haiti because elite American and European businessmen invest extensively in the country and own all your major industries. Most Dominicans remain poor, driven by prostitution, child marriage, and a pimp culture.
Capital is not unfair: it invests in Dominica because the human capital is better there, it is a safer investment. The melanin content of the Haitians is a perfect illustration of the cause of their misfortune...
What about the other Black/African descent countries in the Caribbean that are doing fine? Hati seems like the only one in the region that's dysfunctional.
Actually, no matter the country in the region, the white elite decide who gets ahead and who falls behind, investing heavily in one country while sabotaging another. This is what American and European elites have done for centuries. The Dominican Republic isn’t doing better because they are more productive—most of their industries are dominated by Haitian workers. They’re only doing better because white American and European businesses invest heavily there.
You mean like Aruba where white Europeans (Dutch) still run the country? Or Saint Kitts and Nevis where blacks are the majority but there are still a lot of Europeans running the businesses and bureaucracy?
Well, for your second point, that's everywhere in Latin America/Caribbean. But still, for every country in that region with 85%+ Black African, Hati is the only one that seems dysfunctional.
Haitian independence was birthed by genociding almost all the smartest people in the country out of existence two centuries ago. No other post-Colombian country in America has a comparable origin story. Though as bad as things were after that, they only got worse when the Duvaliers and their gruesome black-magic regime came to power and led to yet further braindrain via their systemic tyrrany and massacre.
More than that, the U.S. invaded Haiti in 1915 and initiated a Bolshevik-style land grab that dispossessed most of the peasants from their land to build large American plantations. This led to a revolt, resulting in the U.S. bombing Haitian rebels between 1915-1920 and occupying the country, while concentrating all power in Port-au-Prince.
Haiti is the first country in the world where the U.S. led a mass aerial bombardment campaign to take control of a nation that led to the killing of more than 20k Haitians
This is painful to read. I have been involved with charity work in Haiti for forty years. Your piece just reminds me how dire it is.
Here’s a link to the charity I am involved with
We have done a tremendous amount of good, especially addressing embedded cultural issues with education and sanitation. Still some ways to go, but compared to the mid 80s it’s akin to going from medieval times to the Industrial Revolution.
It goes to show that the valid critiques below of inadequate education and corruption are not innate to the people. Have faith.
https://www.haitianhealthfoundation.org/
Thank you
The best way I have found to address the systemic inadequacies is to give those affected agency over their progress. This is true of every instance. The patronizing and paternalistic route employed by those who virtue signal their charitable works simply puts those “helped” in a state of perpetual dependency.
Once those who benefit have personal ownership in the process of their own aid, that’s when you see effective change.
Unfortunately the West suffers from “Bwana Syndrome” and expects the lucky recipients to bow to the ivory throne.
Lack of intelligence is not the only positive trait missing in Haitian people; integrity is also lacking, as Claudine Gay amply demonstrates.
You got it. I tended to ignore those other things that are related to low IQ—also a part of the population’s race characteristics. Behavioral tendencies are not to be overlooked, but heck you’d need to pen a book to discuss them all adequately. Gay, seems to be pointed out as “one of the bright ones”, but is she? One of the things discovered when she was placed under the magnifying glass was 1) gross plagiarism, and 2) an academic resume that was unworthy of an assistant professor in the Ivy Leagues—much, much less an Ivy League President! I’d say she was an AA product rather than a discovered “talent” from Haiti.
She wasn't a discovered talent her parents were wealthy and successful. She went to the top high school in the US. She did get into Stanford and Harvard in the 1990s which even with AA would mean she has to have gotten over 1200 on SATS/GRE so it is more than likely she has an IQ north of 120. She is pretty clever and could seriously damage others (i.e. Roland Fryer). It is sad she used her talent and education for evil and for for good but a lot of people would be tempted to do the same in her situation.
Imagine you grow up with an IQ around 120. That will make you a big fish in most small ponds. You get good grades. You may be valedictorian in your school, with scholarship offers.
You apply to Harvard. You get accepted, an AA admission. There you meet some _really_ smart people. The courses move too fast, with material too difficult for you.
That can make a person bitter. Some people will conclude that _everyone_ is cheating, somehow. They will be particularly vicious toward people of their own category who got in on merit.
She can be an AA product and discovered talent at the same time--there is no contradiction.
Let's say Gay has an IQ of 120 (completely made-up number). Then she would be the below the mean for an Ivy League professor. But she would be well above the mean for Haitians--and would probably be a useful person to have running some city-level function.
Doubtful. You seem to have passed over two very revealing aspects of “President” Gay’s record: Plagiarism and mediocrity wrt academic work. But I suppose she could be a “bright one” in a country of mean IQ of 70-75, but I doubt 120. Which would put her in the top 10% in this country.
You want to help Haiti, colonize it. Complete take over of all institutions. Expect to run Haiti for 100 years (4 or so generations). Rule of law and social stability will create a Haiti “elite” to form—similar to America’s “talented tenth” W. E. B. Du Bois used to talk about. All things (good things) follow from rule of law and social stability.
Of course, social activists won’t do this because their main interest is in virtue signaling while tearing down the very society that gave them the ability to virtue signal in the first place.
"Of course, social activists won’t do this because their main interest is in virtue signaling while tearing down the very society that gave them the ability to virtue signal in the first place."
Virtue signaling is the favorite response of our time, by almost everybody about everything. It takes no time, money, or investment.
I'm up for that "experiment." Think of all the other social "improvements" we could try out on Haitians to see why they don't work before screwing up our own country making them the law of the land. We'd save billions!
They tried that in Iraq. They didn’t stay 100 years, and Haiti doesn’t have malevolent neighbors trying to wreck the project, but still.
We can’t fix other people. We can at best help people who want to fix themselves.
They resolutely didn't try this in Iraq. If anything, our quarter-assing of our mission there, as well as our refusal to recognize the significant differences between Gulf Arabs and ourselves, is part of why the country became such a mess so quickly.
Though Iraq is still honestly way better off than Haiti. Even now, as a fiefdom of Iran.
Well, this is true. The suggestion is to show just how tough it is to change a culture, much less a gene pool that produced that culture. However, I disagree with the Iraq example. The reality is that we did not spend the time, nor extend the control that we did after WWII in Japan and Germany. Rather, we picked a puppet government as quickly as possible, reverted to our “green zones” and left most of the non-western institutions in place. The assumption being that within each Iraqi was an “American” dying to emerge. Of course, that was non-sense. But we are in agreement, nation building is a fool’s errand.
Japan is a civilized country. Alien, but civilized.
Iraq, as with most of the Middle East, is an arbitrary region with tribes and clans fighting for the top spot.
I know many US Haitians and they are good people, smart and creative. Seeing the media spin what's happening as a series problems made by external actors is frustrating though. This is maybe their 36th coup if you include this and the last assassination. It's incoherent for people to explain such a deficit in cooperation and organization on a series of unfortunate events blamed on "meddling". Even the details of recent history are being spun exclusively in terms of external causation. This feeds into the conspiratorial populism that Both Americans and Haitians now default to, at least online. It shows how stilted our collective perception of reality has become now that behavioral genetics in populations is unthinkable to most people.
"I know many US Haitians and they are good people, smart and creative."
Define 'many'.
Personally about 10. How many do you know?
"Personally about 10."
Why are you unable to give an accurate number? Is it nine? Is it eleven?
I know zero Haitians, but the number of Haitians one knows is not germane.
We should look back in history to the last time Haiti was governable and in good national order. Then we should encourage similar social, economic, and political relations to produce similar results. Anyone got that date handy?
At first glance, it sounds plausible to see the brain drain as human-capital lowering effects behind Haiti's decline. Then, suddenly, you realise that brain drain affects Dominica in the same way. And you enters the average IQ of 75 into the normal distribution calculator, and looks at how many out of 1000 students fall into the range above 120 IQ. Well 1 of them! This is the real reason for Haiti's decline...
A couple of decades ago, a scholar wrote a book on the etiology of Haiti's trouble. (I do not remember the name of the scholar or his book.) The island endured the harshest slavery on the planet. The French utterly depleted the island of its natural resources, including vegetation that left the soil and land in ruin. Right now Haiti is an indictment of humanity.
This is really unconvincing. Brain drain is a feedback effect of many forces, not a single factor explanation of anything.
In his book The Negro Around the World, journalist and probable spy Willard Price blamed voodoo for Haiti's woes, and compared the nation unfavorably with its island neighbors, some of which he highly praised. Little seems to have changed in the 99 years since the book was published.
https://archive.org/details/negroaroundworld00pric/page/50/mode/2up
"Data published by the World Bank indicate that real GDP per capita is lower now than it was in 1960 – meaning the country hasn’t seen sustained economic growth in more than half a century."
That's not right; Haiti underestimated its economic growth and is now considered (since 2021) by the World Bank a lower middle income country. It is poor, but it is not a mere tenth as rich as the Dominican Republic.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/new-world-bank-country-classifications-income-level-2021-2022
Not sure we should compare Haiti to any other country, but pretty sure not the DR since the land both reside upon was once the same, only the people and their genetic root stock have varied. Haiti looks from the air like a picture of the moon. DR still has forests and wildlife. Haiti is as the people made it—deforested and barren. That’s why the DR brooks no Haiti refugees. Import Haitians, become like Haiti.
Haiti is an example of just how—at some point—a country’s low national IQ fails to support a thriving environment and civilized society. At some point, your society breaks into warlord control/strife or undergoes such civil distress as to simply disappear. There is a chapter in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed ”, by Jered Diamond (IIRC) describing something similar with Easter Island going down the tubes much like Haiti has been for years. It just went faster in Easter Island because they lacked any aid from outside do-gooder nations once they had destroyed their ecosystem.
Ah yes, let's blame brain drain as the main reason why Haiti is such a mess because it fits our "IQ supremacy" narrative while ignoring the punitive reparations the country has to pay to France for over 70 years for gaining freedom from slavery. The inability to look beyond your own assumptions and preconceived notions prevents you from seeing what is and that, ironically, subtracts from your intelligence.
How many generations ago was France collecting “punitive” reparations. What year is it now? Why did the GDP go down after 1960 after such reparations stopped?
Here we go again, grasping at straws to explain Haiti’s dysfunction on anything *but* IQ. You and I both have “preconceived” notions as you put it. The difference mine are supportable your’s are not.
Stupid is as stupid says...
A well managed country would have been able to negotiate an agreement with France; surely whites could have come to an agreement with the French government to end that “peculiar institution.” The rest of the world succeeded to do so, but those countries were run by whites. It’s amusing to see your “preconceived notion “ that 70 years of payments was the only reason that created the miserable present day Haiti . Different races exhibit different traits and one difference is IQ. They also metabolize certain pharmaceutical compounds differently. No, no one comment can “subtract from your intelligence “ as you stated. It’s more complex than that.
"A well managed country would have been able to negotiate an agreement with France; surely whites could have come to an agreement with the French government to end that “peculiar institution.” The rest of the world succeeded to do so, but those countries were run by whites."
I understand your point, but Germany was unable to after WWI, and since WWII, all of the Western world has been subservient to the United States.
I once read that there was not a single native-born college graduate living in Haiti. Is that really true? Was it ever true?
"I once read that there was not a single native-born college graduate living in Haiti. Is that really true? Was it ever true?"
There are damn few living anywhere else, either.
"They can’t explain why fast-tracking visas for highly qualified Russians would be an effective way to destabilise Russia’s economy"
Is that so clear? In the case of the Soviet Union, it was very plausible, after all, the Soviet Union prevented people from emigrating for exactly that reason. But in the Soviet Union, highly qualified people could not earn much, that is quite different from today's Russia. Of course, they cannot earn as much as in the United States, but a) in purchasing power, the difference is smaller and b) for many people, the difference would have to be very large for them to be ready to live in a foreign country with a different language and significant cultural differences.
Apart from the question of Russia, recently I saw claims that the US could easily brain drain even Western European countries. I am quite skeptical. On one hand, for many Western Europeans who are really highly qualified, it is not that difficult to emigrate to the US if they want under current rules, and on the other hand, many Europeans would not want to even if they could, many would not want to even if they would have higher purchasing power in the US.
I think it is hardly an accident that the European countries the US brain drained most after WWII were the UK and Ireland - culturally closer countries where English is spoken.
Some European countries the US may brain drain more easily would be countries from which there is much emigration (now mainly to more affluent European countries), anyway, e.g. Romania, Bulgaria, or the Baltic states.
Of course, there would also be Russians who would be interested, but it is less clear than in the case of some smaller poor European countries, Russia does offer quite some opportunities for highly qualified people. Furthermore, if a serious attempt was made to attract Russians, current sanctions policies would be a hindrance - currently, they make it more difficult for Russians to be economically active in other countries. Some might be ready to cut economic ties with Russia, but many wouldn't.
At one point in my last university dept, 50% of the tenure track faculty were not native Americans. Someone lost, we won. I’ve seen other universities as well with numbers of such faculty. However, these people were leaving (except for Russia at the time) from countries that could not by classified as dysfunctional, simply not able to supply the necessary facilities/opportunities for employment.
Nigeria and Ghana are both ranked below Haiti on that World Bank test score database. Interesting.
This account of working in Haiti with Haitian medical staff has been making the rounds via Drukpa Kunley, but apparently it's written by Scott Alexander? https://web.archive.org/web/20150407223525/http://squid314.livejournal.com/297579.html
Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing.
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Worrying we have well funded NGOs desperate to get more of them in western countries.
I suggest you read Hesketh Prichard's "Where Black rules White"; Haiti throughout the 19th century was set up as something like a Black North Korea.
I searched in the entire piece for "remittances" and didn't find anything.
It's quite possible that "brain drain" is hurting Haiti, but how can you not mention one of the biggest factors in the other direction? Remittances are 21% of Haiti's GDP.
Educated people have orders of magnitude more productivity in functional US/Canada than dysfunctional Haiti. If they even send back a little money, it could swamp the positive externalities of these people staying in Haiti. I'm not saying I know which direction the effect will eventually come out.
In the analogy made by Conor Bohan, remittances are cash infusions by the employees who left the company.