Haiti Is Not Collapsing. It Is Being Held in Place

In the Haitian debate, the word “elites” serves as a national distraction, a convenient catharsis that spares us from questioning the institutional framework itself. We blame families, clans, individuals, but we forget that it is neither their origins, nor their wealth, nor their personalities that determine their behavior. It is the architecture of incentives, which precedes them, shapes them, selects them, and above all rewards them. Haiti’s elites are not a moral anomaly. They are the optimal product of an institutional order that mechanically manufactures extraction, fragmentation, and predation.

Who are the elites we are talking about?

The elite is not a single caste. It includes anyone with the capacity to block or steer resources. The civil servant who has a lock on a strategic directorate and sells his sign-off for a fee. The businessman who exploits a logistics monopoly by controlling access to the port or to customs. The gang leader who controls a corridor and levies his tax on every truck that passes. The member of parliament who holds budgets hostage and sells his vote to the highest bidder. The customs officer who can hold up or speed up a container. The technician who holds a piece of the fragmented state and charges for access to it.

This network, heterogeneous but coherent in its underlying logic, produces a dynamic in which individual strategies converge on a single point: maximize extraction before being overthrown, replaced, or eliminated. And in this structure, the people are not actors. They are the sacrificial material. While the elites bargain over their shares, mothers give birth without anesthesia in hospitals without electricity. Children die of cholera because clean water does not reach them. Entire families flee their neighborhoods with nothing but what they can carry on their heads.

What exactly is extraction?

Let us be concrete. Extraction is not simply stealing. It is capturing wealth without creating any. It is organizing the economy so that income comes not from production but from control of the chokepoints.

Take a simple example. An importer who controls access to the port thanks to his political connections. He does not build more efficient warehouses. He does not cut processing times. He improves no service. He simply captures a rent on every container that passes through, because he holds a de facto monopoly. If a competitor tries to enter, he mobilizes his networks to have the newcomer blocked by the administration. The system rewards him not for creating value but for locking down a checkpoint.

Another example: the member of parliament who blocks the budget vote until he or his allies are awarded public contracts in his constituency. He produces no legislation in the public interest. He proposes no reform. He cashes in on his nuisance value. Here again, the system rewards obstruction rather than construction.

A final example: the gang that controls a neighborhood and imposes a tax on every economic activity (transport, trade, money transfers). It secures nothing. It provides no public service. It takes its cut. And if the state tries to regain control, the gang has enough weapons and fighters to make the operation so costly that the state gives up. Once again, the system validates predation.

In all three cases, the logic is the same: the one who captures the resources is not the one who creates them. That is what an extractive economy is. An economy in which positions of power pay more than productive activities. An economy in which becoming a middleman is worth more than being an entrepreneur. An economy in which blocking is worth more than building.

How does the system manufacture this behavior?

Moral criticism fails because it analyzes individuals instead of analyzing the system that produces them. Douglass North had anticipated this: institutions work like a machine for selecting behavior. They produce elites adapted to their environment. In an order where institutions are extractive, to use Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s term, the dominant elites have no objective interest in transforming the economy. Their interest lies in keeping it in a semi-organized state that allows rents to circulate.

Let us look at how the system carries out this selection. In an environment where the rules shift with the balance of power, where no contract is upheld by the courts, where violence can erupt at any moment, where the state reliably protects no one, what kind of economic actor survives?

Not the one who invests in a factory for the long term. His initial investment is considerable, his first profits will come only after several years, and nothing guarantees that in the meantime a competitor will not receive preferential treatment that ruins him. Not the one who trains skilled staff. Once trained, his employees will leave for a competitor or emigrate, and he will have no legal recourse to recover his investment. Not the one who plays by the official rules. His competitors, for their part, get around the standards by paying off officials, and he finds himself at a disadvantage.

The one who survives is the one who knows how to navigate instability. The one who cultivates political networks to secure his positions. The one who can move his assets quickly when the wind turns. The one who diversifies his sources of protection by funding several camps at once. The one who, at bottom, has understood that in such a system, banking on stability is suicidal and betting on chaos is rational.

The system naturally selects predators and eliminates builders. It is not a question of morality. It is a question of adaptive survival. The “good” elites, those who would like to invest, produce, and respect the rules, are systematically eliminated by competition. The “bad” elites, those who understand that the real game has nothing to do with the stated rules, prosper.

The feedback loop: how the system locks itself in

Causality and responsibility are often confused. The country is not weak “because the elites are bad.” It is because the system is weak that only elites capable of thriving in chaos survive. That is the fundamental feedback loop of underdevelopment.

Here is how the circle closes, step by step.

A weak state cannot collect taxes effectively. Civil servants are not paid regularly, the administration lacks resources, the security forces are underequipped. To make up for this shortfall in revenue, the state sells monopolies to private actors. It grants generous tax exemptions. It hands out exclusive import licenses. It awards concessions without transparent tendering.

Once installed in their rent-yielding positions, these actors use their wealth to weaken the state further. They bribe officials to block any reform that would threaten their privileges. They finance compliant politicians who will defend their interests. They capture the regulatory agencies meant to oversee them. They bypass the courts that could sanction them.

The state grows weaker still. Its capacity to collect taxes shrinks further: why would ordinary taxpayers pay when the richest do not? Its legitimacy crumbles: why would the people respect a state that does not protect them? Its civil servants, poorly paid and demoralized, become even more susceptible to corruption.

To survive, the state sells even more privileges. Monopolies grow stronger. Rents accumulate. The productive economy shrinks. And the cycle starts again, each turn of the loop sinking the country a little deeper into the low-level equilibrium.

This is what is called an institutional trap. A system in which individually rational behavior produces a collectively disastrous outcome, and in which every actor finds it advantageous to perpetuate the very system that traps them. The problem, then, is neither “the elites” as individuals nor “the system” as an abstraction. The problem is the equilibrium between the two, a perverse equilibrium in which the weakness of the state has become the invisible infrastructure through which every form of power reproduces itself.

The countries that broke the loop

To understand how to get out, we have to look at the countries that broke with their stagnation. Rwanda, Chile, Costa Rica, Botswana, South Korea. None of them advanced through virtue. All of them advanced through a brutal transformation of incentives.

Paul Kagame’s Rwanda built one of the most disciplined states in Africa, not because its leaders were somehow morally superior, but because the system relentlessly punishes administrative failure. In practice, every official, from minister to technician, signs an annual performance contract with precise, measurable targets. If the targets are not met, the official is dismissed. No negotiation, no excuses, no political protection. This brutal discipline turned a corrupt administration into an efficient machine in less than a decade. The system changed; behavior followed.

Pinochet’s Chile imposed technocratic discipline under authoritarian constraint. A team of economists trained at the University of Chicago, the famous “Chicago Boys,” restructured the entire economy, relying on dictatorial power to neutralize resistance. Massive privatizations, trade liberalization, strict fiscal discipline, central bank independence. The economic results were spectacular, even if the political and human cost was considerable. The crucial point: these technocrats could act without fearing short-term electoral pressure. Their time horizon was long because they were shielded from immediate political turbulence.

Costa Rica made a radical decision in 1948: to abolish the army. The decision was not idealistic. It was strategic. Without an army, power cannot be seized by force. Coups become impracticable. The only route to power becomes the ballot box, which forces elites to build lasting coalitions rather than bet on violence. The result: Costa Rica became the most stable and most prosperous country in Central America, with robust democratic institutions and a broad middle class.

Park Chung-hee’s South Korea built a productive capitalism by imposing on the conglomerates, the chaebols, a logic of export performance on pain of economic death. The government granted preferential credit, tariff protection, and tax exemptions. But in exchange, it demanded precise results: export targets, investment in research, job creation. If a chaebol failed, its privileges were withdrawn and handed to a competitor. This discipline turned family businesses into global champions. Samsung, Hyundai, LG: all were forged in this system, in which the state rewarded investment and penalized rent.

Botswana turned a potentially destructive mineral rent (diamonds) into robust institutions through an elite pact in which the cost of individual predation exceeded the immediate gain. The traditional chiefs, who could have fought for control of the mines, accepted a compromise: centralization of revenue at the national level, transparent redistribution under constitutional rules, and above all, mechanisms of mutual oversight among ethnic groups. No group could capture the rent on its own, so all had an interest in maintaining the system of fair sharing.

In every one of these cases, the key was never the morality of the elites. The key was a change in the rules of the game that was violent, clear, and irreversible enough to force the elites to redirect their intelligence toward building rather than extracting. Institutional transformation always begins with a phase of constraint, never with a moral consensus.

Note the pattern: in each case, someone or something radically altered the cost-benefit calculation of the dominant actors. In Rwanda, immediate dismissal made corruption too risky. In Chile, authoritarian protection made it possible to carry out reforms that were unpopular in the short term. In Costa Rica, abolishing the army closed off the path of the coup. In Korea, performance discipline made rent less profitable than exporting. In Botswana, mutual oversight prevented individual capture.

Each time, the system stopped rewarding destructive behavior and began rewarding productive behavior. The elites did not change morally. They changed strategically, because the structure of incentives had flipped.

What Haiti must do, in practice

Haiti will be able to move forward only if it creates a system in which predation becomes costly and cooperation becomes profitable. That requires a constitutional revision establishing a strong but time-limited executive. Concretely: a single, non-renewable twelve-year presidential term, with broad powers to reform the administration, reorganize the security forces, impose fiscal discipline, and target priority economic sectors. Twelve years is the minimum time it takes for a generation now in school to enter the labor market, for newly built infrastructure to pay for itself, for a reform to produce visible results. But twelve non-renewable years mean that the president cannot organize his reelection. His only interest is to leave a lasting mark.

These powers must be bounded by unalterable safeguards: no amendment of the constitution during the term; an obligation to publish the public accounts every quarter, on pain of removal from office; an independent constitutional court kept in place, able to strike down abuses; protection of fundamental freedoms; a fixed electoral calendar for the return to a regime with strengthened parliamentary checks and balances.

At the same time, rebuilding the state begins with reconstituting its territory. The strategic corridors must be secured first. A functioning port where containers are not held up by mafia networks. A disciplined customs service where tariffs are applied uniformly. A secure logistics corridor where trucks can travel without paying illegal taxes to gangs. These zones immediately generate more wealth. An importer can calculate his costs with certainty. An exporter can meet his deadlines. An entrepreneur can plan his investments. If these zones show that order pays more than chaos, the economic elites change their calculations. The system is turned around by demonstration, not by moralizing.

Finally, sectoral targeting. Haiti cannot develop everything at once. It must choose three or four sectors in which it has real advantages and concentrate all its resources there. High-value-added agriculture: mangoes, cocoa, and coffee, processed locally for export. Light assembly industries, taking advantage of proximity to the US market. Offshore digital services: call centers, data processing, software development.

For each sector, the state grants clear advantages but demands precise, measurable results: export targets, job creation, training of local staff, technology transfer. If a company enjoys advantages without producing results, it loses its privileges, which are immediately reassigned to a competitor. This discipline gradually transforms the economic elite: those who prosper are no longer those who capture rents, but those who produce and export.

What is really at stake

Haiti is not the prisoner of fate. It is the prisoner of a strategic equilibrium. As long as predation is rational, it will prevail. As long as cooperation is a dangerous gamble, no one will risk it. Transformation begins when the rules of the game reverse this equation.

What is really at stake is clear: destroying the institutional equilibrium that makes the elites indispensable. Destroying the structures that turn their private interests into the logic of national governance. Ensuring that the elites no longer have either the opportunity or the incentive to reproduce chaos.

Haiti no longer needs catharsis. It needs institutional engineering. It needs a system that punishes predation, rewards investment, protects the long term, reins in arbitrary power, and makes a return to chaos impossible.

Haiti will climb out of the abyss on the day it becomes rational to build. And on that day, the people will once again be not a victim but the very purpose of the political order.