Haiti
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• It is a country of 8.2 million people.
• 6.2 million of them live in poverty.
• One out of eight children die before the age of five.
• Seventy percent are unemployed.
• Life expectancy is 54 years.
• It has been deforested and environmentally degraded for years.
• 7.2 million Haitians do not have access to reliable energy.

1. Of course we’ve heard these kinds of statistics many times before – about Haiti and the other desperately poor developing countries of the world. This week an international donors conference meets in Washington, DC that will have an enormous impact on the future of Haiti. But at a time like this, when our own economy itself is a basket case, what’s wrong with a little “donor fatigue”? Why shouldn’t we wait to focus on countries like Haiti until we’ve taken care of our own problems? The reason is simple: because what happens to the people of Haiti affects us in at least four critical ways. Our own long-term economic well-being. The world economy is not a zero sum game. For us to be richer, someone else doesn’t have to be poorer. In fact just the opposite is true. If you think of the earth as a huge space vehicle — or a ship at sea — it just doesn’t make sense that a big proportion of the crew isn’t able

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   to pull its weight because they are undereducated, unproductive and constantly in need of handouts from the rest of us. The Navy wouldn’t tolerate it, neither should the world community. The more skilled, the more educated, the more productive, the more efficient every one of us is, the more successful we will all be in our common mission of forging a better life for future generations. Every kid in Haiti who grows up to be a surgeon or an engineer instead of a stoop laborer contributes to the common store of our wealth. If a woman is sentenced by the accident of her birth to spend hours each day cleaning clothes in a Haitian stream instead of going to school, all of us miss out on the possibility that she might contribute to finding a cure for cancer. Millions of minds are indeed a terrible thing to waste. And the effect of this waste plays itself out in the terms of pure economics. Several years into the Great Depression, the New Deal began to close the gap between supply and demand in the American economy. Roosevelt began to use public sector demand to fill the demand gap and move the economy toward full employment. But Emperor Hirohito’s attack on Pearl Harbor was necessary to give America the political will to fully utilize the tools of the New Deal - to stop worrying about short term deficits - and create full employment. After all, it was do or die. There was great concern at the end of World War II that demobilization