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Comment by PontifexMinimus | Hacker News Reader

You say it was a huge amount; the article says it was a small amount. Unfortunately neither of you states the amount, so it is hard for me to assess how big it was.

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> After reviewing thousands of pages of archival documents, some centuries old, and consulting with 15 of the world’s leading economists, our correspondents calculated that the payments to France cost Haiti from $21 billion to $115 billion in lost economic growth over time. That is as much as eight times the size of Haiti’s entire economy in 2020.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/takeaways-...

Not only that range is wildly imprecise, it also happens to not answer the question.

That's not the actual size of Haiti's reparations to France though - it's completely imaginaary, hypothetical money that the New York Times is claiming Haiti would've made if not for the evil colonialists ruining their economy through reparations. The actual total reparations according to that article were $560 million in today's dollars, or between a fortieth to a two hundreth of how much the NYT is claiming it really cost Haiti. That claim should probably be taken with a massive pinch of salt given the quality of their reporting on race, slavery and colonialism of late.

Just the way they seem to be comparing the supposed cost of those reparations over all time to one year of GDP here seems pretty slimy. The part you quoted is clearly intended to make an inattentive reader think Haiti's GDP would've been eigth times larger if not for reparations, but not only is that not what it actually says, it's impossible to tell how big the supposed loss is compared to the size of their economy - the two are stated in incomparable ways.

> But the loss to Haiti cannot just be measured by adding up how much was paid to France and to outside lenders over the years.

> Every franc shipped across the Atlantic to an overseas bank vault was a franc not circulating among Haiti’s farmers, laborers and merchants, or not being invested in bridges, schools or factories — the sort of expenditures that help nations become nations, that enable them to prosper.

The cost of reparations versus the impact is different. The impact is a guesstimate, the cost isn’t.

In fact, the money not paid to France would be simply stolen by local kleptocrats

The debt with France does not have any explanatory power as to why the DR's and Haiti's economic fates diverged though. Even if the debt held Haiti back from the glory it would have otherwise seen, or stagnated its economic development by many decades, we would still expect Haiti's economy to grow AFTER the debt was paid off to a much greater extent than it did.

There to me, is clearly more afoot here than the evils of France.

It’s not like the entire country worked weekends to pay this off.

The debt skimmed the cream from the country, and the political maneuvering by various parties introduced pliant, corrupt leadership. Haiti has been a failed state for a long time.

No we wouldn't, if the debt caused destruction of the local environment (which it did) there's no way how they could've started making money. Just importing food and other basic goods would starve their resources and give them no room for investment.

Looking into the stats, Haiti had 60% of forest cover in 1923 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Haiti. If the debt made deforestation inevitable, why did Haiti have so many forests far into the servicing of the debt? I feel there MUST be something which happened in the 20th century which really accelerated deforestation aside from the debt.

I just don't buy the "debt destroyed all future economic/agricultural output" angle at all. If you just showed people a bunch of chart of different countries economic information and agricultural output devoid of broader context, nobody would probably EVER come to the conclusion that the debt led to the stagnation in agricultural output in Haiti from the numbers alone. If you compared the debt vs deforestation, again, nobody would conclude the debt caused the deforestation from the actual data. People would only ever conclude that if they're being shown unblinded data.

Let me stress here - I'm not even saying this must all be Haiti's fault, or that debt didn't have a profound impact which have shrunk Haiti's economy many times over. I'm saying the debt doesn't explain what happened. I feel like I'm getting a fraction of the picture here. All sorts of wild shit happened in Haiti in the 20th century, the United States occupied the country for instance and the deforestation correlates MUCH more strongly with this occupation than it does the debt.

I will post here the first paragraph of [1], as it directly provides this bit of information:

"The Haiti indemnity controversy involves an 1825 agreement between Haiti and France that included France demanding a 150 million franc indemnity to be paid by Haiti in claims over property – including Haitian slaves – that was lost through the Haitian Revolution in return for diplomatic recognition, with the debt costing Haiti $21 to 115 billion of economic growth over a period of two centuries and affecting the nation to this day. The payment was later reduced to 90 million francs in 1838, comparable to US$21 billion as of 2004, with Haiti paying about 112 million francs in total.[4] Over the 122 years between 1825 and 1947 the debt severely hampered Haitian economic development as payments of interest and downpayments totaled a significant share of Haitian GDP yearly, constraining the use of domestic financial funds for infrastructure, public services and ultimately making the nation ungovernable."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy

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