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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> Puerto Rico in general has been damaged and neglected to a criminal extent - this particular situation will get media attention for a bit, maybe be fixed but that's likely about it.

Its an issue fraught with peril. Puerto Rico has no statehood, so they're a lesser property within the US as a whole. They have very little economy besides tourism to speak of, enormous amounts of corruption through the various governmental levels, and a populace that is rapidly aging. They plugged budget wholes with debt until it reached levels requiring an independent oversight board stepping in to take over. If you're able to find work on the mainland, you bounce, and only stick around on the island if you can't.

I'm not sure what the solution is. You can't write blank checks to a broken government forever.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/puerto-rico-us-territory-cr...

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Tourism is only about 5-7% of Puerto Rico's economy. The majority is pharmaceutical manufacturing and services. It's true there is a lot of corruption. Colonialism seems to select for opportunistic and unprincipled public servants. If you want to learn about the island, I recommend you read War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson A. Denis. It does a good job of summarizing Puerto Rico's history with the United States. Best of luck.

Expanding on Puerto Rico's primary export...

Per the FDA, Puerto Rico produced (pre-Maria) $40B of pharmaceuticals for the US alone. 40 of those products and devices were deemed critical as they're the only producer or there's no viable alternative [1].

The largest (in terms of unit count) production was Normal Saline with Baxter's P.R. factory supplying 50% of U.S. hospitals with small volume saline bags (<=250mL as opposed to the more common 1L) prior to Hurricane Maria which took out their production facility [2]. The hurricane is widely credited as the cause of our national saline shortage (though as [2] details, it exacerbated a shortage that already existed for several other reasons).

[1] (PDF warning): https://www.fda.gov/media/108975/download

[2]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1800347

I was not aware pharma was still a significant part of the PR economy after the IRS Code Section 936 phase out. Thanks for the book suggestion, purchased, looking forward to the read.

Yes, the pharmaceutical tech there has decades of experience; one of the first companies I worked for was a Bay Area biotech firm. They moved a big chunk of manufacturing to Puerto Rico and seemed very impressed by the transition. It wasn't just a matter of lower expense. The tech experience in industrial chemistry was very good. Early 1990s.

I mean the obvious solution is statehood, but that's currently impractical for political reasons. Maybe an accident of fate will allow it within some years.

Not that it would fix all woes even, but it'd be a good start.

Agree statehood is the only fix, with a close second being NGO and similar efforts to get folks off the island to the mainland for better opportunities and quality of life. Anything else is a slow train wreck of despair over decades.

I live in Puerto Rico. Moving from here to the mainland is not a step up in quality of life, I can assure you.

That has not been the experience communicated to me by several Puerto Rican’s who relocated to central Florida. No work, crumbling infrastructure, and incompetent government was what I was told why they left.

To each their own (really; I wish you well if you have a good life there), but the emigration pattern is clear [1] [2].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/21/us/puerto-rico-migration-data...

[2] https://nacla.org/news/2018/02/22/puerto-rico%E2%80%99s-fore...

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