What to do about very poor countries

Matt Taibbi translates David Brooks:

[Brooks]: Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.
As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book “The Central Liberal Truth,” Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.
We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

TRANSLATION: Although it is true that Haiti was just like five minutes ago a victim of a random earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people, I’m going to skip right past the fake mourning period and point out that Haitians are a bunch of lazy niggers who can’t keep their dongs in their pants and probably wouldn’t be pancaked under fifty tons of rubble if they had spent a little more time over the years listening to the clarion call of white progress, and learning to use a freaking T-square, instead of singing and dancing and dabbling in not-entirely-Christian religions and making babies all the fucking time. I know I’m supposed to respect other cultures and keep my mouth shut about this stuff, but my penis is only four and a third inches long when fully engorged and so I’m kind of at the end of my patience just generally, especially when it comes to “progress-resistant” cultures.

In defense of Brooks, the countries that Brooks cited as more successful than Haiti - Barbados and the Dominican Republic - are also populated entirely by black people. So Brooks is not being racist here (though he might privately think that race is a factor).

And Taibbi goes on to say:

I admit it — I’m not exactly in the habit of sending checks to Abkhazian refugees, mainly because I’m not interested in buying some local Russian gangster a new Suzuki Samurai to tool around Sochi in. And I’ve actually seen what happens to the money people think they’re giving to Russian orphanages goes, so no dice there, either.

But you know what? Next time there’s an earthquake in Russia or Georgia, I’m probably going to wait at least until they’re finished pulling the bodies of dead children out of the rubble before I start writing articles blasting a foreign people for being corrupt, lazy drunks with an unsatisfactorily pervasive achievement culture whose child-rearing responsibilities might have to be yanked from them by with-it Whitey for their own good.

So Taibbi is basically saying: "Yes, I put my money exactly where Brooks' mouth is by not giving diddly squat to the Third World, but he's a racist asshole and I'm just being pragmatic, which you can easily see by the fact that the timing of his column was insensitive, plus deep down we all know that conservatives like Brooks are racist and liberals like me aren't in the slightest."

Gotcha.

But, silly as Taibbi's logic might be, Brooks' prescription for Third World problems is even sillier:

Fourth, it’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.
These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.
It’s time to take that approach abroad, too. It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.

This seems unlikely to work, for several reasons. Reason 1: We have no incentive to do things like this on a large scale, because the Age of Imperialism is over. Hence, we will not. Reason #2: There isn't a lot of evidence that this kind of thing works at all; it's just another pie-in-the-sky proposal. Reason #3: Countries with no history of self-governance probably do not benefit in the long run from having richer, more powerful countries come in and utterly dominate their institutions. The record of former imperial colonies is not amazingly good.

So what should we, the U.S., do about very poor countries? Very little, I say. Give them money when they have earthquakes. Respect their sovereignty. Allow their smart people to study here. Let them see our country and our culture.And let them carve out a future for themselves, or not.