by Rushworth M. Kidder

In a fine think-piece on the underlying causes of Haiti’s tragedy, New York Times columnist David Brooks begins with a simple comparison. In 1989, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the Bay Area of Northern California, and 63 people died. Last week a magnitude 7.0 quake shattered Haiti, and as many as 200,000 people died.

His point, paraphrased, is that Haiti’s tragedy was not seismic but economic: It was abject poverty, not plate tectonics, that caused so many deaths. Nations that can afford thoughtful zoning, good engineering, and quality construction can build to last and withstand such shocks. Nations forced by demographics and penury into haphazard sprawl must build for the moment and can’t survive natural disasters.

All of that is true, as far as it goes. But behind poverty lies a deeper cause: corruption. If we’re to compare Haiti and the Bay Area, let’s add one more set of facts. On the latest Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International, the United States stands among the world’s least corrupt nations — 19th of the 180 countries ranked. That’s not as high as it should be, but it’s leagues apart from Haiti, which stands at 168, down there with Afghanistan and Somalia.

How is that relevant? Take the construction trades. In a culture where bribery, fraud, and extortion are endemic, it would be bizarre to imagine that you could build a five-star hotel or a slant-sided hovel without paying off somebody. Some of those payments help you get permits to build in unsafe areas. Some insure that building inspectors don’t look too closely at how much cheap sand you’re mixing with expensive cement to dilute its strength or how much steel you’re selling off under the table rather than using to reinforce your concrete. And some bribes go for protection, to keep thugs — or public officials — from attacking your building site, your home, or your business.

Corruption, say those who study it, is one of the world’s most regressive taxes, slamming the poor far harder than the rich: The poor pay more bribes, and the percentage of their income going to bribery is higher. Whether the corrupt cop stops the driver of a Lexus or a motor scooter, the sum he extorts will probably be tolerable for the former — and potentially disastrous for the latter.

If Haiti’s fatal poverty is a function of corruption, the question is what to do about it. Anti-poverty efforts alone, as Brooks points out, have been disappointingly ineffective. The reason, I suspect, is that they have too often accepted corruption as part of the embedded cultural landscape rather than as an imposed and correctible offense. It may be that you simply can’t defeat poverty without erasing corruption.

But how can you erase corruption in a place like Haiti? An encouraging hint comes from Hong Kong, which 35 years ago was arguably as bad as Haiti. Riddled with corruption, it was so rancid that the police superintendent himself kept meticulous hand-penciled notebooks detailing every street-corner business that had paid him off so that his officers would leave it alone. The notebooks are now on display at the new headquarters of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), founded in 1974 to clean up Hong Kong.

The turn-around wasn’t pretty, involving public protests, police strikes, and the extradition of the superintendent, who had slipped away to England. Nor was it inexpensive: The ICAC, whose 900 investigators have the power to arrest, detain, interrogate, and bring to trial those suspected of public- or private-sector corruption, currently absorbs $800 million a year, or 0.3 percent of Hong Kong’s budget. But look at the results. Hong Kong, this year, sits in 12th place on Transparency International’s scale, well above the United States, Great Britain, and much of Europe. It’s a thriving financial center, where global investors trust that their funds will be safe. What’s more, as Hong Kongers will happily tell you, it essentially has no poverty.

I’m not saying that Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, will become the next Hong Kong. There’s a world of difference between the entrepreneurial culture of southern China and the slave-trade colonialism of the Caribbean. But there’s also a powerful similarity that binds people everywhere: a set of shared moral values that includes honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion. Ask people which values most matter to them, we’ve found, and even in the deepest cultures of corruption, this list emerges — not as a description of their circumstances but as a testament to their aspirations. Do they experience corruption? Yes. Do they like it? No. Do they want something better? Absolutely.

Could an anti-corruption agency work in Haiti? Maybe not in the past. But if there’s any blessing lurking in last week’s awful tragedy, it’s that the past has ended. Old habits die hard, of course. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, graft flourished, and it may do so again in Haiti as millions of dollars pour in. But we also may see a new determination to link corruption to poverty — and to fight both. If so, the global community may find that 0.3 percent of the budget is a modest price for cleaning up, permanently, the mental and moral rubble from this disaster.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

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