Could Robertson be right about a curse on Haiti?
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010If you have not heard it yet, Pat Robertson said something that was almost surprising about Haiti’s horrible disaster, that Haiti’s founding fathers made a pact with the devil to help them throw off the bonds of slavery with the French, and so God cursed the Haitian people. I say “almost surprising” because Robertson has said some pretty crazy things in the past, such as calling for the assassination of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. Here is a more reasoned discussion of the myth by the Haitian theologian, Jean Gelin.
While thinking about Robertson’s remarks on a drive to north Louisiana, I came to the conclusion that on Haiti, Pat Robertson is correct, figuratively, though not literally. On a disaster that has claimed the lives of thousands upon thousands of mostly good and innocent people of Haiti, that sounds about as outrageous as Robertson’s remarks.
While a Haitian pact with Satan himself is absurd, people often support or at least abide and enable corruption among their public officials. Haiti has long had very corrupt leadership, and corruption in Haiti is widespread. The Haitians may, from time to time, get rid of corrupt leaders, but they have always seemed to replace corrupt leaders with other corrupt leaders. (There is an excellent discussion of this phenomenon in a memorable chapter in Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, “Why the worst get on top.”) While many Haitians are sure to be good, moral people, their feelings of helplessness and fatalism have left them very apathetic, allowing corruption to be pervasive in their society.
In surveys of perceptions of corruption, Haiti ranks near the bottom of all countries as shown by the rankings from Transparency International “Corruption Perceptions Index”, where Haiti ranks 168th out of 180 countries ranked by TI, tying with 5 others. It is also the lowest of the Americas, ranking ahead of only Uzbekistan, Chad, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Somalia, meaning that Haiti is perceived to be more corrupt than the notoriously corrupt Nigeria.
In a paper that came out in July of 2007 in the interdisciplinary social science journal, Public Choice, Monica Escaleras, Nejat Anbarci and Charles Register examine the interaction of natural phenomenon, earthquakes, with the social phenomenon of public sector corruption and show how when these two occur together, the death tolls are higher. They develop a theoretical model and then examine 344 quakes between 1975 and 2003 and find more deaths from earthquakes that occur in more corrupt countries. Their result holds even after the researchers account for other factors related to deaths from earthquakes, such as the magnitude of the quake, its proximity to population centers, the country’s level of development or how poor people are in the country, and several other factors. Their main explanation is that inspectors of buildings and other infrastructure are more likely to take bribes in such societies and look the other way with some cash in an envelope. Poorer building code enforcement (for buildings, roads, bridges, port facilities and airports) results in more deaths from a given quake.
So, due to apathy, people allow venality to survive and spread, especially among those in the public sector, Haiti’s pact with or surrender to the devil. The corruption leads to more deaths from earthquakes, just as if there had been some sort of curse. I am not suggesting that Pat Robertson is literally correct, just that venality is to allowed to survive, people curse themselves, their loved ones and their fellow citizens.
Hmmm. I seem to recall voter acceptance and support for corrupt public officials leading to more deaths from a natural disaster somewhere. Could that have been here in Louisiana?
-MC
Opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily represent the views of Nicholls State University.

