Decadencia educacional: nao, nao e' no Brasil...

Desta vez é na Italia, provavelmente o país europeu mais parecido com o Brasil (ou vice-versa), na corrupção política, na ineficiência estatal, na criminalidade institucional, em grupos mafiosos, no corporativismo sindical, na dificuldade de fazer reformas de fato, na ausência completa de estadistas, enfim, num conjunto de características, que ambos partilham, inclusive a má qualidade da educação e um mercado de trabalho mediocremente qualificado. O Brasil vai um pouco além: agora deu para seguir a Argentina no protecionismo e no dirigismo e intervencionismo estatais.
Pronto, depois de Belíndia, viramos uma Argentália...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Frenzy Over Teaching Test Is Symptom of Italy’s Myriad Woes
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
The New York Times, December 24, 2012

ROME — Luisa Ribolzi, an expert on education in Italy, likened a teaching job at a public school when the economy is bad to “a ship to jump on for everyone who is swimming in the sea.”
Now imagine seeing that ship after a 13-year absence.

When Italy held examinations to fill teaching positions in its public schools last week for the first time since 1999, it set off something of a nationwide frenzy among the country’s despairing, underemployed and unemployed educators. More than 321,000 people applied to take the tests, pursuing just 11,500 job openings.

The ratio said as much about the dim job prospects in Italy, where the unemployment rate is over 11 percent generally and nearly 14 percent for people ages 24 to 35, as it did about the rigidities and territorial mind-set of a public education system that has been dented for years by hiring freezes and budget cuts.

The exam is supposed to be held every three years, but the Education Ministry put it off repeatedly to save money, some critics say. In that time it filled vacancies with temporary hires, making aspiring teachers and unions furious.

Ministry officials say that this year’s exam is intended to right past wrongs and to introduce a new generation of teachers to a work force whose average age is now 50, one of the highest in Europe, after freezing out young applicants for so long. But it was a sign of how widely the country’s economic pain has spread that the average age of candidates taking the test this year was over 38.

Critics of the current system, with its distinction between permanent teachers and temporary hires working precariously for lower wages on contracts of a year or less, say it has become unworkable.

“It essentially kills young people, who are kept on a leash year after year,” said Marco Paolo Nigi, secretary general of the national teachers’ union, Snals-Confsal. “It’s shameful. And it’s a system we’re trying to change.”

The teaching exam last week, though it opened the way for prequalified job seekers to become teachers, became an occasion for new scrutiny of an education and hiring system that many, like Mr. Nigi, say is in need of revamping.

The test itself, the first to be administered on computers, is meant to measure logic, reading comprehension, and math and linguistic abilities. Questions included “What is a touch screen?” and choosing between “would” and “could” on the portion covering English language skills.

Some critics said the exam was a poor hiring tool because it could not measure attributes like a passion for learning and a love of children that are essential in a good teacher.

“There are better ways to determine merit,” said Romina De Cesaris, 37, a teacher of history and philosophy in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast, who has been working for 10 years on temporary contracts. “This mega-quiz is offensive for those of us who have teaching backgrounds. You can pass a quiz and still not have the didactic competence to teach students.”

While Italy’s teacher-to-student ratio is among the highest in Europe, it does not necessarily translate into better education, according to Andreas Schleicher, who advises the head of the 34-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on education matters.

“In terms of student performance, Italy is below the O.E.C.D. norm,” he said. “You have a large number of teachers, but they are poorly paid and have relatively low levels of training. Other systems prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of the classes.”

More than 260,000 candidates sat down to take the test last Monday and Tuesday, trying to answer 50 questions in 50 minutes. Thirty-five correct answers were required to pass and move on to the next phase in the lengthy hiring process; only about 34 percent of those taking the test passed.

Typical among those trying their hand was Valentina, 34, who would give only her first name out of concern for her privacy. She has been practicing law in Rome for the past eight years, but she has not managed to get a full-time job at a law firm. So she dusted off a high school certificate that allowed her to teach primary school to qualify to take the state test and perhaps change careers.

“Maybe this will work,” she said doubtfully as she waited at the gate of a high school in a middle-class neighborhood of Rome.

After the test last week, the next steps are written and oral exams early next year. If she gets through those, Valentina would enter the line for one of 118 nursery school teaching posts open in and around Rome, which pay about 1,200 euros (about $1,580) a month. “How sad,” she said of her overall employment prospects.

Competitions are increasingly rare as Italy’s public service shrinks though cutbacks, so the examination last week drew notable media attention.

“Because there is no regularity in the recruitment of teachers, a selection that in other countries takes place in the normal order of things in Italy assumes a ritual character,” said Ms. Ribolzi, who is vice president of the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes.

Complicating matters in the schools have been repeated budget cuts and several abortive attempts to improve teaching standards.

The Italian job market is so poor, and so infrequently open to competition, that there is “an avalanche of applications for every competition that arises, regardless of whether it is in the private or public sector,” said Arnaldo Agostini, editor in chief of Lavoro Facile, a magazine that lists job openings.

Many critics of the Education Ministry protested its holding the test for new applicants while thousands of qualified teachers were already languishing on lists of eligible candidates.

Massimo Gargiulo, a spokesman for the Schools of Rome Committee, one of several groups working on behalf of teachers on temporary contracts, said, “The education system in Italy has had no overall planning.”

Mr. Gargiulo said that there were already about 200,000 fully qualified teachers waiting to be hired, even before the exam last week. (The Education Ministry was unable to provide official statistics.)

“Right now, I have 50 people ahead of me to teach Greek in Rome, but the test will put tens of thousands of other contenders in the ranking,” Mr. Gargiulo said. “It’s not a competition, it’s a lottery.”

Colombia: vai uma coca espresso ou ristretta?

Matières premières : le cacao cède sa place à la cocaïne en Colombie
Le Monde.fr | 21.12.2012
Par Mathilde Damgé

Il fut un temps, il y a un peu moins de deux ans, où les cours du café et du cacao touchèrent de tels sommets – à plus de 300 cents début 2011 sur le marché new-yorkais pour la livre d'arabica et plus de 2 500 livres sterling la tonne sur le Liffe londonien à la mi-2010 – que les cultivateurs colombiens de coca se laissèrent tenter par le retour à la production d'une denrée légale.
Regarder la vidéo : Colombie : le goût du café

Mais ce temps, à l'image des turbulences de la crise financière et des aléas boursiers des matières premières, est déjà révolu. Car si les prix du café se sont adjugés 75 % en 2010 et ont limité la baisse en 2011 (du moins, ceux de l'arabica, dont la Colombie est l'un des premiers producteurs), le cacao a affiché des variations moins alléchantes.

Les cours des fèves n'ont connu des sommets que pour en retomber aussi sec : ils ont perdu près de 40 % en deux ans, et cabotent aux environ de 1 500 livres livres aujourd'hui. Et pour la banque néerlandaise Rabobank, spécialisée dans les matières premières, les prix du cacao risquent d'être encore instables l'an prochain, écrit-elle dans ses perspectives.

De son côté, l'Organisation internationale du cacao (ICCO) anticipe un excédent de production sur la saison 2011-2012 (achevée en septembre), ce qui pourrait noyer le marché sous une offre trop abondante, alors qu'en face, la consommation ne fait pas preuve d'un appétit marqué. Une tendance confirmée par le recul persistant des concassages de fèves – baromètre de la demande – en Europe et en Amérique du Nord, ainsi que par la reprise des exportations en Côte d'Ivoire, premier fournisseur de la gourmandise.

Et encore, le prix des contrats futurs sur les marchés n'est pas celui que touchent les fermiers colombiens. D'après Bloomberg, les prix des baies cacaotées auraient reculé, répercutant un mouvement identique à celui des marchés, de 5 000 à 3 000 pesos (de 2 à 1,2 euro environ).

STABILITÉ DES PRIX DE LA COCA

De son côté, le prix de la coca est remarquablement stable, même s'il a connu une légère baisse en 2011 : le kilo de feuilles se négocie environ 2 400 pesos (environ 1 euro), tandis que le kilo de pâte de coca peut valoir jusqu'à près de 1,85 million de pesos (758 euros), selon les chiffres du dernier rapport de l'Office des Nations Unies contre la drogue et le crime (UNODC).


De quoi hésiter avec des cultures plus lucratives. Sans compter que la guérilla aide souvent les producteurs de coca à démarrer, leur prêtant semence et engrais. Assurant le transport et payant "cash". Pas de quoi s'étonner, donc, que le nombre d'hectares de coca ait augmenté de 3 % en 2011, soit plus rapidement que le rythme de plantations de cacao.

Lire : Pour les dealers colombiens, rien ne vaut un sous-marin (lien Abonnés)

Résultat, la coca fait son grand retour, sur des terres au climat chaud et humide où les deux cultures se font concurrence. A l'inverse, l'arabica qui pousse en Colombie ne tolère qu'une fourchette de températures restreinte, et s'épanouit davantage dans les hauteurs plutôt que dans les vallées, comme le cacao. Il a également besoin de lumière, alors que le cacao est un amateur d'ombre et peut coexister avec d'autres espèces (caoutchouc, palme...).

LUTTE CONTRE LA GUÉRILLA

La production de coca a certes reculé de 1,4 % à 345 tonnes l'an dernier, mais les sacs de cacao ont maigri de près de 7 % en 2011, après une chute de 20 % en 2010. D'après l'Organisation des Nations Unies pour l'alimentation et l'agriculture, ils devraient perdre encore 3 % tous les ans. Et le nombre de familles cultivant l'arbre fruitier ne dépasse pas les 20 000, tandis que la plante interdite en nourrit près de trois fois plus.

Cette glissade des prix du cacao constitue une menace au moins aussi importante sur les dix ans de campagne des autorités pour éradiquer la production de drogue que les mouvements de la guérilla. Pour le gouvernement, la lutte contre la plantation de coca n'est pas une question symbolique, mais permet d'assécher directement les finances des rebelles et, gagnant en sécurité, d'attirer les investissements étrangers. Soit 13,2 milliards de dollars l'an dernier, selon Bloomberg.

Autre atout, la plantation de cacao correspond à une stratégie clé pour fournir un revenu aux agriculteurs. Les programmes de reconversion agricole sont même en partie dirigés par l'Etat. L'instabilité des prix, qui ont connu des épisodes de volatilité extrême depuis 2008, fait donc craindre le pire aux autorités.

AMBITION CACAOTIÈRE

La coca compromet aussi les projets des producteurs de monter en puissance : en termes de volume de production, les cabosses colombiennes se classent au 3e rang du continent sud-américain, mais seulement au 11e rang mondial. Or, la Colombie ambitionne de dépasser l'Equateur voisin : le président de la fédération des producteurs, Jose Omar Pinzon, vise 250 000 tonnes en 2018, alors qu'il n'en a produit que 37 000 en 2011.

Pour Cesar Guedes, de l'UNODC, "la hausse des prix a rendu la culture de la coca plus attractive, mais les paysans ont besoin d'alternatives durables si nous limitons sa culture illégale sur le long terme". D'autant que le marché local intéresse de plus en plus les narcos : ainsi, l'un des dérivés de la cocaïne, le bazuco, fabriqué avec des "restes", a été promu récemment.

La Colombie pèserait plus de 40 % dans la production mondiale de cocaïne. Quelque 8 milliards de dollars, soit l'équivalent de 3 % du PIB sont blanchis chaque année en Colombie en dépit du Plan Colombie de lutte contre la drogue, lancé fin 1999 par Bogota avec le soutien de Washington.

Alors que, dans l'un des pays les plus inégalitaires en matière de distribution des terres, 32 % des habitants vivent ou travaillent encore en zones rurales, la culture du cacao est, plus qu'une douceur dans un processus de paix encore chaotique avec les rebelles, un véritable enjeu pour la santé économique de la Colombie. Autosuffisant il y a encore vingt ans, le pays importe aujourd'hui près de la moitié de ses denrées alimentaires.


Lire : Petite histoire de la coca

Lire aussi : En Colombie, les paysans font échec à l'éradication des plants de coca

Mathilde Damgé

O que emperra a economia? Ora, e' o governo, CNI. Elementar, meu caro...

O que emperra a economia
23 de dezembro de 2012
Editorial O Estado de S.Paulo

Nada parece justificar o otimismo da Confederação Nacional da Indústria (CNI) que prevê que a economia brasileira poderá crescer 4% em 2013, se a crise internacional não se agravar. Na mesma edição especial de seu boletim Informe Conjuntural, em que faz essa previsão, a CNI aponta vários obstáculos que prejudicam o desempenho do setor produtivo, já fazem o Brasil ficar atrás de outras economias emergentes em vários aspectos e poderão comprometer o futuro do País. Por isso, mais do que um estudo de conjuntura, o documento deve ser entendido como um alerta que precisa ser levado em conta pelos governantes e também pelos dirigentes de empresas. Há muito o que fazer para assegurar o crescimento futuro do País.

Ao considerar insustentável o modelo de crescimento baseado no consumo - que resultou no frustrante desempenho da economia em 2012, quando, em sua avaliação, deverá crescer apenas 0,9%, um terço da projeção que fazia no início do ano -, a CNI chama a atenção para a necessidade de buscar o equilíbrio entre o aumento dos investimentos e o do consumo das famílias. "Não se sustenta crescimento só com consumo", afirmou o presidente da entidade Robson Braga de Andrade.

O mau desempenho da economia brasileira em 2012 não se deve apenas - talvez nem se deva principalmente - à crise mundial. "Países emergentes, inclusive da América Latina, irão crescer mais do que o Brasil", diz o Informe da CNI. São países que investem mais do que o Brasil, o que explica parte da diferença de desempenho.

Pelo menos nos discursos, o tema parece preocupar também o governo federal. "Os investimentos públicos e privados são a chave para nosso crescimento sustentável, pois essa parceria entre público e privado amplia nossa capacidade de produzir, escoar, exportar, importar, traz inovação, eficiência, gera emprego, gera renda", disse a presidente Dilma Rousseff, há dias, ao participar de uma solenidade no Porto de Itaqui.

De fato, esses são alguns dos resultados positivos dos investimentos. Sem investimentos, acrescenta a CNI, são escassos os ganhos de produtividade. A produtividade, de sua parte, é essencial para assegurar maior competitividade, e, se não se tornar mais competitivo, o setor produtivo brasileiro, sobretudo o industrial, perderá espaços para a concorrência internacional, inclusive no mercado interno.

Por isso, a CNI considera a competitividade essencial para o crescimento vigoroso da economia brasileira. Além do aumento dos investimentos, a recuperação da produtividade e da competitividade da economia requer ambiente regulatório adequado, mais atenção à inovação, infraestrutura que atenda às necessidades do setor produtivo, redução da burocracia, reforma do sistema tributário e melhora do ensino, entre outros fatores.

Há problemas cujas soluções dependem exclusivamente do governo, outros que podem ser resolvidos apenas pelo setor privado, outros, ainda, cujas soluções dependem dos dois setores da economia. Cada vez mais determinante para a conquista e a preservação de mercados, a inovação, por exemplo, depende da decisão da empresa em investir. Mas essa decisão está condicionada à existência de ambiente adequado, de políticas públicas que estimulem e apoiem os investimentos privados e de disponibilidade de mão de obra qualificada, o que envolve a ação do governo.

A escassez de mão de obra preparada já é sentida em vários setores e resulta da ineficiência do sistema educacional. Para a CNI, a baixa qualidade do ensino - resultante de políticas do governo - dificulta a preparação da mão de obra e afeta a produtividade de dois modos. Com a contratação de profissionais não adequadamente qualificados, a produtividade cai imediatamente, pois os novos trabalhadores terão de aprender o ofício. Mas a baixa qualidade da educação dificulta o aprendizado, o que retarda ou impede a recuperação da produtividade perdida.

A criação de ambiente adequado para investimentos, sobretudo em inovação, requer mais do que discursos. Necessita de políticas públicas eficientes, algumas de longa maturação e que exigem, além de competência, perseverança do governo.

Internet: governos (inclusive o brasileiro) restringem as liberdades individuais

Espiritos totalitarios estao sempre buscando restringir a liberdade de informacao.


Guerra fria digital
23 de dezembro de 2012
Editorial O Estado de S.Paulo

Uma "cortina de ferro" pode estar sendo baixada para dividir a internet em duas - a aberta e a fechada. Essa perspectiva sombria, que lembra o cenário da guerra fria, inclusive com os mesmos protagonistas, surgiu como resultado da recém-encerrada conferência da União Internacional de Telecomunicações (UIT), órgão da ONU, realizada em Dubai.

Dos 144 países com direito a voto, 89 aprovaram um novo tratado sobre os ITRs, como são chamados, na sigla em inglês, os regulamentos internacionais de telecomunicação. Os Estados Unidos, seguidos de todos os países da Europa, além de Canadá e Japão, recusaram-se a assinar o documento, sob a alegação de que ele confere aos governos o poder de interferir no livre fluxo de informações na internet. Do lado dos que firmaram o texto estão Rússia e China, além do Irã e de países árabes, todos interessados em impor alguma limitação à web.

O Brasil alinhou-se a esse grupo, com a justificativa, segundo o ministro Paulo Bernardo (Comunicações), de que o novo acordo é uma forma de combater o "monopólio" dos Estados Unidos em relação à governança da internet.

É uma referência ao fato de que o governo americano integra as instâncias decisórias na Icann (Corporação da Internet para Atribuição de Nomes e Números), entidade privada sediada na Califórnia cuja função básica, desde 1998, é administrar os domínios da rede no mundo todo, algo essencial a seu funcionamento, mas que não exerce controle nenhum sobre o tráfego de dados na internet.

Já os acordos resultantes da conferência de Dubai, ao abrigarem uma resolução que cita a internet, na prática abrem caminho para que a UIT, uma organização intergovernamental, tenha condições de regulamentar a web.

Trata-se de uma distorção, porque a UIT é responsável por normatizar os serviços de telecomunicações, e a internet não é se não apenas um cliente desses serviços. Um exemplo desse problema é a parte da resolução que aborda o chamado "spam", isto é, a mensagem eletrônica não solicitada, enviada em massa. Para os opositores do acordo, a definição do que é um spam, se deixada aos governos, será sempre arbitrária e muito possivelmente contrária à liberdade de expressão. Além disso, uma UIT com mais poder sobre a internet seria muito útil para as grandes empresas de telecomunicações interessadas em participar das novas formas de ganhos com a web. Por outro lado, uma vez que deixem de ser apenas meio de transmissão e passem a ter influência sobre o tráfego de dados, essas empresas poderão romper a neutralidade da rede, impondo tarifas diferenciadas para cada tipo de serviço. Tais pedágios contrariam os princípios de igualdade da internet.

Não se discute que os governos devem agir para garantir a segurança, a proteção de dados e o respeito à propriedade intelectual na internet. No mais, a atuação deve ser indireta, tal como no sistema adotado pelo Brasil, em que o Comitê Gestor da internet, do qual o governo é apenas uma parte, serve como órgão consultivo sobre a web, sem ter qualquer poder executivo sobre ela. Além disso, desde 1995 a internet está formalmente fora da Lei Geral de Telecomunicações, sendo considerada apenas um "serviço de valor adicionado". É justamente a ausência de controles oficiais que torna a internet dinâmica, capaz de inovar continuamente, e o modelo brasileiro está entre os melhores do mundo para mantê-la assim.

Contudo, a título de tirar dos Estados Unidos o suposto controle político da internet, países com tradição autoritária tentam legitimar internacionalmente um controle do tráfego de informações na web. O resultado é que a própria UIT, entidade que interfere em questões básicas das telecomunicações, como a coordenação de recursos de telefonia e do uso do espectro de radiofrequência, sairá enfraquecida desse confronto, algo que não aconteceu nem durante a guerra fria propriamente dita. E o governo brasileiro, movido por seu eterno objetivo ideológico de se contrapor aos Estados Unidos, assinou o tratado e aprovou a resolução sobre a internet sem reservas, legitimando esse atentado.

Nacionalismo: essa velha forca reacionaria e anti-democratica - Robert Kaplan (WSJ)

OPINION
The Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2012
The Return of Toxic Nationalism
The spread of universal values is being rolled back on many fronts, from Russia to the Middle East.
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

Western elites believe that universal values are trumping the forces of reaction. They wax eloquent about the triumph of human rights, women's liberation, social media, financial markets, international and regional organizations and all the other forces that are breaking down boundaries separating humanity.

Tragically, they are really observing a self-referential world of global cosmopolitans like themselves. In country after country, the Westerners identify like-minded, educated elites and mistake them for the population at large. They prefer not to see the regressive and exclusivist forces—such as nationalism and sectarianism—that are mightily reshaping the future.

Take Cairo's Tahrir Square in early 2011. Western journalists celebrated the gathering of relatively upper-income Arab liberals with whom they felt much in common, only to see these activists quickly retreat as post-autocratic Egypt became for many months a struggle among the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist Salafists—with the Coptic Christians fearing for their communal survival.

Though secular liberals have resurfaced to challenge Egypt's Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, do not be deceived. The military and the Muslim Brotherhood both have organized infrastructures. The liberals have only spontaneous emotion and ad hoc organizations. An Islamist-Nasserite regime-of-sorts is likely to emerge, as the military uses the current vulnerability of the Muslim Brotherhood to drive a harder bargain.

Egypt and the Middle East now offer a panorama of sectarianism and religious and ethnic divides. Freedom, at least in its initial stages, unleashes not only individual identity but, more crucially, the freedom to identify with a blood-based solidarity group. Beyond that group, feelings of love and humanity do not apply. That is a signal lesson of the Arab Spring.

An analogous process is at work in Asia. Nationalism there is young and vibrant—as it was in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Asia is in the midst of a feverish arms race, featuring advanced diesel-electric submarines, the latest fighter jets and ballistic missiles. China, having consolidated its land borders following nearly two centuries of disorder, is projecting air and sea power into what it regards as the blue national soil of the South China and East China seas.

Japan and other countries are reacting in kind. Slipping out of its quasi-pacifistic shell, Japan is rediscovering nationalism as a default option. The Japanese navy boasts roughly four times as many major warships as the British Royal Navy. As for Vietnam and the Philippines, nobody who visits those countries and talks with their officials, as I have, about their territorial claims would imagine for a moment that we live in a post-national age.

The disputes in Asia are not about ideology or any uplifting moral philosophy; they are about who gets to control space on the map. The same drama is being played out in Syria where Alawites, Sunnis and Kurds are in a territorial contest over power and control as much as over ideas. Syria's writhing sectarianism—in which Bashar Assad is merely the leading warlord among many—is a far cruder, chaotic and primitive version of the primate game of king of the hill.

Nationalism is alive and thriving in India and Russia as well. India's navy and air force are in the process of becoming among the world's largest. Throughout most of history, India and China had little to do with each other, separated as they were by the Himalayas. But the collapse of distance by way of technology has created a new strategic geography for two big nations. Now Indian space satellites monitor Chinese military installations, even as Chinese fighter jets in Tibet have the possibility of including India within their arc of operations. This rivalry has further refined and invigorated nationalism in both countries.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin's nationalism is a large factor in his high popularity. President Putin's nationalism is geographical determinism: He wants to recreate buffer states in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, like in the old Soviet Union. So he does everything he can to undermine the countries in these regions.

Western elites hope that if somehow there were truly free elections in Russia, then this foreign policy might change. The evidence is to the contrary. Race-hatred against Muslims is high among Russians, and just as there are large rallies by civil-society types, there are also marches and protests by skinheads and neo-Nazis, who are less well-covered by the Western media. Local elections in October returned a strong showing for Mr. Putin's party. Like it or not, he is representative of the society he governs.

Nor can Europe be left out of this larger Eurasian trend. A weakening European Union, coupled with onerous social and economic conditions for years to come, invites a resurgence of nationalism and extremism, as we have already seen in countries as diverse as Hungary, Finland, Ukraine and Greece. That is exactly the fear of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee, which gave this year's award to the European Union in order to make a statement against this trend.

Fascists are not about to regain power anywhere on the Continent, but the age of deepening European integration is likely behind us. Get ready to see more nasty and thoroughly frightening political groupings like Greece's Golden Dawn emerge across the Continent.

We truly are in a battle between two epic forces: Those of integration based on civil society and human rights, and those of exclusion based on race, blood and radicalized faith. It is the mistake of Western elites to grant primacy to the first force, for it is the second that causes the crises with which policy makers must deal—often by interacting with technology in a toxic fashion, as when a video transported virtually at the speed of light ignites a spate of anti-Americanism (if not specifically in Benghazi).

The second force can and must be overcome, but one must first admit how formidable it is. It is formidable because nations and other solidarity groups tend to be concerned with needs and interests more than with values. Just as the requirement to eat comes before contemplation of the soul, interests come before values.

Yet because values like minority rights are under attack the world over, the United States must put them right alongside its own exclusivist national interests, such as preserving a favorable balance of power. Without universal values in our foreign policy, we have no identity as a nation—and that is the only way we can lead with moral legitimacy in an increasingly disorderly world. Yet we should not be overturning existing orders overnight. For it is precisely weak democracies and collapsing autocracies that provide the chaotic breathing room with which nationalist and sectarian extremists can thrive.

Mr. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm, and author of "The Revenge of Geography" (Random House, 2012).

A version of this article appeared December 24, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Return of Toxic Nationalism.

Haiti: o fracasso da assistencia internacional ao desenvolvimento

O Haiti parece condenado a viver durante pelo menos 50 anos mais sob a tutela da assistencia publica, estrangeira, ao seu processo de (sub)desenvolvimento, com milhoes sendo desviados para outras coisas que a ajuda aos mais pobres. Assim sao os Estados falidos...

In Reviving Haiti, Lofty Hopes and Hard Truths
By DEBORAH SONTAG
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A few days after the Jan. 10, 2010, earthquake, Reginald Boulos opened the gates of his destroyed car dealership to some 14,000 displaced people who settled on the expansive property. Seven months later, eager to rebuild his business, he paid the families $400 each to leave Camp Boulos and return to their devastated neighborhoods.

At the time, Dr. Boulos, a physician and business magnate, was much maligned for what was portrayed as bribing the homeless to participate in their own eviction. But eventually, desperate to rid public plazas of squalid camps, the Haitian government and the international authorities adopted his approach themselves: “return cash grants” have become the primary resettlement tool.

This represents a marked deflation of the lofty ambitions that followed the disaster, when the world aspired not only to repair Haiti but to remake it completely. The new pragmatism signals an acknowledgment that despite billions of dollars spent — and billions more allocated for Haiti but unspent — rebuilding has barely begun and 357,785 Haitians still languish in 496 tent camps.

“When you look at things, you say, ‘Hell, almost three years later, where is the reconstruction?’ ” said Michèle Pierre-Louis, a former prime minister of Haiti. “If you ask what went right and what went wrong, the answer is, most everything went wrong. There needs to be some accountability for all that money.”

An analysis of all that money — at least $7.5 billion disbursed so far — helps explain why such a seeming bounty is not more palpable here in the eviscerated capital city, where the world’s chief accomplishment is to have finally cleared away most of the rubble.

More than half of the money has gone to relief aid, which saves lives and alleviates misery but carries high costs and leaves no permanent footprint — tents shred; emergency food and water gets consumed; short-term jobs expire; transitional shelters, clinics and schools are not built to last.

Of the rest, only a portion went to earthquake reconstruction strictly defined. Instead, much of the so-called recovery aid was devoted to costly current programs, like highway building and H.I.V. prevention, and to new projects far outside the disaster zone, like an industrial park in the north and a teaching hospital in the central plateau.

Meanwhile, just a sliver of the total disbursement — $215 million — has been allocated to the most obvious and pressing need: safe, permanent housing. By comparison, an estimated minimum of $1.2 billion has been eaten up by short-term solutions — the tent camps, temporary shelters and cash grants that pay a year’s rent.

“Housing is difficult and messy, and donors have shied away from it,” said Josef Leitmann, manager of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund.

Benefactors and Dysfunction

Beyond the numbers, the sluggish reconstruction has been the latest dispiriting chapter in the chronically dysfunctional relationship between Haiti and its benefactors.

After the earthquake, with good will and money pouring into Haiti, international officials were determined to use the disaster as a catalyst for transforming not only the intractably poor country but the world’s ineffectual strategies for helping it.

Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy for Haiti, invoked the “build back better” mantra he had imported from his similar role in South Asia after the tsunami. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cautioned donors to stop working around the government and instead work with it, and to stop financing “a scattered array of well-meaning projects” rather than making “deeper, long-term investments.”

But an examination by The New York Times shows that such post-disaster idealism came to be undercut by the enormousness of the task, the weakness and volatility of the Haitian government, the continuation of aid business as usual and the limited effectiveness of the now-defunct recovery commission that had Mr. Clinton as co-chairman.

With no detailed financial plan ordering reconstruction priorities, donors invested most heavily in the sectors that they had favored before the earthquake — transportation, health, education, water and sanitation — and half their financing for those areas went to projects begun before 2010.

“One area where the reconstruction money didn’t go is into actual reconstruction,” said Jessica Faieta, senior country director of the United Nations Development Program in Haiti from 2010 through this fall.

Moreover, while at least $7.5 billion in official aid and private contributions have indeed been disbursed — as calculated by Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office and by The Times — disbursed does not necessarily meant spent. Sometimes, it simply means the money has been shifted from one bank account to another as projects have gotten bogged down.

That is the case for nearly half the money for housing.

The United States, for instance, long ago disbursed $65 million to the Haiti Reconstruction Fund for the largest housing project planned for this devastated city. The fund, which issued a January 2011 news release promising houses for 50,000 people, then transferred the money to the World Bank, which is executing the project. And there almost all of it still sits, with contracts just signed.

“Building takes time; it’s destruction that’s rapid,” said President Michel Martelly at a recent end-of-construction ceremony for the new teaching hospital. But building is only half the battle; the gleaming white structure, erected by the nonprofit Partners for Health in the provincial city of Mirebalais, has not yet secured its first-year operating budget of $12.5 million to $13 million.

In contrast, here in the disaster zone, where the devastated National Palace has only just been demolished and destroyed federal buildings have yet to be replaced, the country’s largest medical center remains in a strikingly dilapidated state. More than two years ago, Mrs. Clinton and Bernard Kouchner, then the French foreign minister, signed an agreement to reconstruct it, but the shattered General Hospital, with some temporary renovations keeping it functional, still awaits its $70 million overhaul. Like that hospital, many recovery projects have lingered on the drawing board or gotten delayed by land and ideological disputes, logistical and contracting problems, staffing shortages and even weather. The United States still has more than $1 billion allocated for Haiti sitting in the Treasury, and the global Red Cross movement has more than $500 million in its coffers.

“It’s not a problem of the availability of money but of the capacity to spend it,” said Rafael Ruipérez Palmero, a Spanish development official in Haiti.

Spain has disbursed $100 million to Haiti’s water authority for infrastructure desperately needed during the continuing cholera epidemic, but the authority has only spent $15 million of it thus far. It has disbursed millions to build and renovate 21 schools but only one has been completed.

In the minority of cases where donors let the Haitian government take the lead, the volume and complexity of new projects has strained the resources of the agencies that they are working to strengthen. This sometimes causes frustrating problems.

The Inter-American Development Bank, for instance, is spearheading a multiyear school rebuilding program that a Haitian public institution is executing. The bank was hoping that as many as 21 new schools, which are being built by Haitian firms, would open this fall.

But a bank inspection last spring detected serious design flaws and construction errors. A fuller audit then found that the schools, despite being bankrolled after the earthquake, did not comply with anti-seismic or anti-hurricane standards.

How much beyond the $15.4 million cost it will take to make them safe has yet to be determined, said Pablo Bachelet, a bank spokesman. But construction has been halted.

In the mountain town of Furcy, meanwhile, the children study in a couple of plywood structures without plumbing or electricity planted in the midst of one of the construction sites. Surrounded by half-built cinder-block walls, jutting rebar and piles of stone and sand, some 480 students cram into 10 makeshift classrooms illuminated only by the natural light that seeps through the gap between the partial walls and the tin roofs.

Then, no strangers to life’s setbacks, they trudge miles home over muddy, treacherous mountain roads as darkness descends.

Foreigners Take Over

In the months after the earthquake, foreigners, arriving by the planeload, took over. They did not mean to; nobody in the humanitarian world wanted to sharpen Haiti’s dependency on foreign assistance. But Haiti’s government was as shattered as its people, and old patterns of interaction are hard to break.

Coordinating the disaster response, foreign humanitarians met on the isolated, gated United Nations logistics base and divided into clusters dealing with issues like shelter and health. Something was missing, though: “In the initial confusion and loss of life after the earthquake, the clusters effectively excluded their Haitian counterparts,” Nigel Fisher, humanitarian coordinator for the United Nations, said. “Little by little, we brought them in.”

Still, many Haitians never shook the feeling that they were an afterthought and that their institutions and businesses were being bypassed and undermined. Many of the best-educated Haitians were lured away from government and private-sector jobs by the far higher salaries offered by foreigners.

“We called it the second earthquake,” said Jean-Yves Jason, mayor of Port-au-Prince at the time.

In retrospect, the numbers tell the story: Donors provided $2.2 billion of humanitarian aid in response to the earthquake. The United States Department of Defense got nearly a fifth of that aid to carry out its relief operation, which involved 22,000 troops. The Haitian government got less than 1 percent.

More of the recovery aid — 15 percent — has been channeled through the Haitian government, and the United States ambassador to Haiti, Pamela A. White, says that a shift in approach has led international donors to align “our investments with Haiti’s priorities in a truly country-led manner.”

But thus far almost all contracts have been awarded to foreign agencies, nonprofit groups and private contractors who, in turn, subcontract to others, with each layer in the process adding 7 to 10 percent in administrative costs, as noted in a paper published by the Center for Global Development.

“All the money that went to pay the salaries of foreigners and to rent expensive apartments and cars for foreigners while the situation of the country was degrading — there was something revolting about it,” Ms. Pierre Louis said.

In a sentiment that many Haitians share, Dr. Boulos said that foreigners in Haiti “do everything at a cost five times higher.”

Dr. Boulos said he spent $780,000 to close Camp Boulos and 6 percent went to administrative costs — essentially the salary of a pastor who oversaw the resettlement. Following in his footsteps more than a year later, international groups have done things more carefully, inspecting apartments before handing out rental subsidies and conducting follow-up visits. But they are ringing up operational costs of about 35 percent.

It is difficult to ascertain precisely what the hundreds of nongovernment groups in Haiti spent on their response to the earthquake — at least $1.5 billion, probably much more — and how they spent it.

Among the more visible and transparent groups, Oxfam, its name emblazoned on thousands of latrines, provided water and sanitation to the camps and Doctors Without Borders ran field hospitals, mobile clinics and cholera treatment centers.

The services they provided were vital, but, as both groups make clear in their public reporting, they were costly, too. Oxfam spent $96 million over two years and devoted a third to management and logistics. Doctors Without Borders spent 58 percent of its $135 million in 2010 on staff and transportation costs.

Not all costly foreign initiatives were equally valuable — or appreciated.

One American taxpayer-financed program, scrutinized by the Agency for International Development’s inspector general, was intended to provide short-term jobs for Haitians and to remove significant rubble. But the program, and in particular the work carried out by two Beltway-based firms, was less than successful on both fronts, the inspector general said: It generated only a third of the jobs anticipated and it appeared to demonstrate that using manual labor to clear debris was so inefficient as to slow the rebuilding effort.

One of the firms, Chemonics International, which was awarded $150 million in post-earthquake contracts, built a $1.9 million temporary home for the Haitian Parliament. The American ambassador presented it as a gift to Haitian democracy, but many legislators were more irked than thankful because the building was delivered devoid of interior walls and furnishings, as The Global Post reported, and it took almost half a year to scrounge together the money to finish it.

Occasionally toward the end of that first year after the earthquake, the Haitian government succeeded in pushing back against internationally imposed agendas it did not like.

The American Red Cross had pledged to spend $200 million of the nearly $500 million raised for Haiti by the first anniversary of the disaster. That presented a real challenge for an organization with limited experience in the country . So it operated primarily as a financier, issuing grants to other organizations with greater capacity here.

But a linchpin of its own programming was a plan to dispense $50 million in cash, no strings attached, to 400,000 household heads in the camps.

Other humanitarian leaders considered the idea of a broad, unconditional cash distribution misguided. But it was not until the Haitian government formalized its opposition in a letter — “It would unfortunately encourage a massive exodus from the provinces, thus increasing the number of people living in the camps and making conditions even worse” — that the Red Cross dropped the plan.

Dr. Boulos said he proposed an alternative. “I told the head of the American Red Cross, in front of Bill Clinton, ‘Let’s put the entire money in housing construction. Let’s repair the houses.’ But they had all kinds of reasons why not.” Shortly after the earthquake, international advisers proposed different ways that Haiti could manage its reconstruction, including a Haitian-owned recovery agency embedded in the government. But a United States proposal to establish a stand-alone commission jointly led by the Haitian prime minister and “a distinguished senior international figure engaged in the recovery effort” won out.

Bill Clinton Steps In

In April 2010, Mr. Clinton was named co-president of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, referred to as the I.H.R.C. Two months later, at a luxury hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince, the commission held its first meeting. It would hold only six more, though, before the Haitian Parliament declined to renew its mandate and it faded into history, its Web site decommissioned and its public records erased with it.

“As a tool for Bill Clinton, the commission was good; it helped him attract attention to Haiti,” said Dr. Boulos, a commission member. “As a tool to effectively coordinate assistance and manage the reconstruction, it was a failure.”

Alexandre V. Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, disagreed. “Everybody badmouths it, but I miss it,” he said. “It created a level of coordination, with everybody around the same table, which you find in few countries. I think people had unreasonable expectations that it would be an implementing agency.”

Given that so much time and money was invested in creating it, people did, in fact, expect that the commission would take charge of the reconstruction process and deliver tangible results. But by the end many believed it had been little more than an exercise in assembling and then dismantling what one United Nations official called a pseudo-institution. “It was like in a play — the facade of a reconstruction project,” said Priscilla Phelps, an American consultant who served as the commission’s housing expert.

“We never took a proactive role in deciding what the country needed to get back on its feet and then asking the donors to finance those priorities instead of doing their own thing,” she said. “The way reconstruction money got spent was totally chaotic, and the I.H.R.C. was emblematic of that.”

From the start, the commission faced two major challenges. First, President René Préval did not really support it, seeing it as a usurpation of power, several former commission members said. Second, it had no money of its own to hand out — although the separate Haiti Reconstruction Fund, a pot containing 14 percent of the reconstruction dollars, could not make grants without its approval.

The commission’s secretariat worked out of a giant white inflatable tent on the grounds of the old United States Embassy compound, crisply air-conditioned and lined with banks of desktop computers. For a long while, the spacious tent was almost eerily empty because the commission, with a budget of $8.79 million its first year, got off to a slow start.

The commission did not engage an executive director until five months into its 18-month existence. The director, Gabriel Verret, moved haltingly to hire other key employees. The vacuum, meanwhile, was filled by William J. Clinton Foundation staff members and volunteer consultants from McKinsey & Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

As pro bono consultants to the commission, PricewaterhouseCoopers designed a performance and anticorruption office, and the firm subsequently won a $2.4 million contract to run it over the objections of France’s board member, who called it “a pure conflict of interest which damages the integrity of the office.”

Their first — and last — monitoring report was the only real record of the commission’s work. It summarized the 75 projects valued at over $3 billion that had been approved. The numbers themselves are not very meaningful because they included projects without any or enough money — a $1 billion “funding gap” existed, an international official said.

Still, the report indicated just how broadly recovery was being defined. At least $1.4 billion represented big-ticket, multiyear projects that were not directly related to the earthquake, among them improving the education system, developing agriculture in central Haiti and building roads all over the country

Katherine Gilbert, aid policy adviser in Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office, said, “The argument for those activities being recovery is that the whole country was affected economically and every initiative is in a sense helping the country rebuild.”

But, she added, “Another definition of recovery would be assisting those affected by the earthquake.” Although the commission’s bylaws called for it to “conduct strategic planning, establish investment priorities and sequence implementation of plans and projects,” its mode of operation was to respond, project by project, to those who sought the commission’s approval.

The large board consisted of foreign diplomats and representatives of the Haitian government and society. Early on, the Haitian members felt excluded when they learned about Mr. Verret’s appointment from the media. Their frustration deepened, culminating in a confrontation with Mr. Clinton and Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister, at their December 2010 meeting.

An account was pieced together from the meeting’s minutes and interviews with participants.

When Mr. Clinton was delayed in arriving at the Santo Domingo Hilton, where the meeting was taking place because of post-electoral violence in Haiti, a dozen Haitian board members crowded into a hotel room to prepare a written statement.

Rising to read it at the meeting, Suze Percy Fillipini, an elegant former diplomat, described how the Haitian members felt like “bit players” and “tokens” who were called on to “rubber stamp” a hodgepodge of projects that “collectively do not respond to the urgency of the situation or provide the foundation for the sustainable rebuilding of Haiti.”

Attending by Skype, Mr. Bellerive appeared livid and said the board members were merely “individuals,” which, in a Haitian context, meant they were nobodies, according to several members. Ms. Fillipini, her eyes flashing with tears, defended herself and the other appointees. Another member, Jean-Marie Bourjolly, a Haitian-Canadian business professor, complained that the executive director and chairmen did not respond to e-mails, saying it was neither good manners nor good governance.

After the meeting, Professor Bourjolly recounted, Mr. Clinton approached him, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You embarrassed me.”

“It was really tough,” said the professor, summarizing the commission’s work as “such a waste.”

Again, Dr. Abrantes disagreed. “They created a formal mechanism to receive proposals, and a vetting system that was important. Eventually, they developed sector strategies, some sketchy but others well-developed, that guide us to this day.”

When the recovery commission died, the Haiti Reconstruction Fund was paralyzed, unable to make new grants. The fund, created to set aside at least some money to support the Haitian government, had “ended up significantly focused on two areas where the donors don’t have standing expertise — debris removal and housing,” Ms. Gilbert said.

“No one wanted to do debris removal,” Mr. Leitmann, the fund’s manager, said. “It’s not sexy. There are no ribbons to cut. The results disappear. So we filled that niche. Housing is another example. Half our resources are going there.”

Though as much as $104 million remains available for allocation, it has taken the Haitian government more than a year to create and convene a successor entity to the commission. The group, in Mr. Martelly’s words, will “restore to Haiti its sovereignty in aid management and especially its priorities.”

By late last week, its priorities for the remaining funds had yet to be established.

In the summer of 2011, when President Martelly, a Haitian musical star with no political experience, was struggling to put together a government, he was also grappling with the unavoidable fact that a smattering of housing reconstruction projects existed only on paper while a humanitarian crisis lay at his doorstep in the form of a huge, wretched tent camp in the central Champ de Mars.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers report, then just released, contained a telling if understated aside: “The ‘build back better’ approach does not always align with the objective of quickly finding housing solutions for camp residents.”

A New Pragmatism

The new pragmatism was born. Mr. Martelly secured international assistance to close six highly visible tent camps and repair 16 neighborhoods and to shut down the Champ de Mars settlement. Some Haitians felt he was just trying to sweep the homelessness problem from view without resolving it — indeed the neighborhood repairs have lagged far behind the camp closings — but others expressed relief that he was taking action because a temporary solution was better than none at all.

From the start, grand ambition had gotten in the way of tackling what was doable.

“Early on, it seemed fairly clear that the only viable approach was to rebuild existing neighborhoods,” Ms. Phelps said. “But it took six to eight months to get the government used to that, and another four to six months to make the donors comfortable. Nobody wanted to think reconstruction might be a giant slum-upgrading project. They wanted little pastel houses and kids with ribbons in their hair to put on the cover of their annual report.”

Idealistic discussions after the disaster were not just about building back better. President Préval expressed a keen interest in using the initial exodus to the countryside to decongest Port-au-Prince permanently, and decentralization became the second mantra, guiding early commitments to spend significant reconstruction money outside the disaster zone.

“There were all sorts of fantasies about shutting down the mess that is Port-au-Prince before people started to understand that there is a huge amount of capital built up in the city and chaotic as it is you don’t throw it out,” Mr. Leitmann of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund said. “Another fantasy was, ‘Oh, we’ll just invest in export processing zones and that will keep people from migrating back to Port-au-Prince.’ ”

That first year, the United States government and the Inter-American Development Bank set aside $220 million to finance the new Caracol Industrial Park, which is 175 miles north of the disaster area, and to build a power plant, port and housing development nearby.

Mr. Clinton, who joined Mrs. Clinton at the Caracol inaugural ceremony this fall in a rare public fusion of their diplomatic roles, has long emphasized Haiti’s need for jobs. Some here applaud his support for subsidies to private companies; others, though, question what they see as a trickle-down theory of development, pointing skeptically to decisions like those of the private Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund to make a $2 million equity investment in a new luxury hotel, the Royal Oasis.

Initially, Mr. Clinton and Haitian leaders thought the private sector would play a larger role in rebuilding Haiti’s devastated housing stock, and they were courting international firms to design innovative tract housing for tracts of land that never materialized.

One relic of those aspirations is the abandoned site of a 2011 housing exposition held in Zoranje, where scores of colorful prototype homes now sit empty, some padlocked, others plundered and used as toilets.

Dreamed up at a meeting at Mr. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, the expo cost millions in public and private money. Competing firms spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in the hopes of winning sizable contracts. But by the time the exposition took place, the thinking about housing had already shifted and most contracts were going to be awarded for urban fix-it work instead.

Adjacent to the expo site in Zoranje is the only large new housing project completed so far. With $8.3 million in financing, mostly from the Inter-American Development Bank, most of its 400 small pastel houses remained unoccupied for half a year, except in some cases by squatters, because the authorities could not figure out how to connect the complex to water. Eventually, the beneficiaries were allowed to move in anyway.

Fertilia Bien-Aimé, a wiry, scrappy, 65-year-old, said she won the keys to her house by accosting President Martelly during a public event in October. “I went up to him and said, ‘Mr. President, I’m too old for a tent. What are you going to do for me?’ ”

Squatters had ripped out the electrical wiring, sinks and toilets, she said, and rain leaks into her house as into others. Some homes lost their roofs during Tropical Storm Isaac, and the complex has had unreliable electricity since Hurricane Sandy.

“But even with all the problems here,” she said, “it’s still so much better than being a displaced person.”

The largest new settlement under construction takes the same exurban approach. A $48 million Haitian government initiative, located about 10 miles east of Port-au-Prince in Morne à Cabri, the project’s thousands of houses are rising on a barren, isolated site. Ms. Pierre-Louis, the former prime minister, described it as looking like “little tombs in the desert.”

Critics have also questioned the location of the American-subsidized new housing settlement in rural Caracol, far from the disaster, as well as the high cost of its one-bedroom homes. They are being built by a Minnesota company on a site prepared by a Maryland firm for $31,400 a house.

That includes site preparation, internal wiring, individual water hookups and flush toilets. But current thinking among humanitarian officials is that those are all extras. A small, simple one-family house in Port-au-Prince can be built for $6,000, they say, and more people can be helped.

Although the Caracol houses were supposed to be occupied by December, only 70 of 750 had been finished by the end of November because of severe weather and logistical problems, an American aid official said.

Progress has been even slower on the other American-built settlement, which is on a large, flat swath of gravel in Cabaret. Only about a dozen of the 156 houses there had a completed structure, minus doors and windows, in early December.

“Lots of money, few results,” said the deputy mayor of Cabaret, Pierre Justinvil. “Look, I personally, with my own hands, have just built a whole school for less than the cost of one of those houses and more quickly. I think we Haitians need to take the wheel.”

In the earthquake-ravaged slum neighborhood of Campeche in Port-au-Prince, Dieudonne Zidor, an elected official, agreed. Gliding gracefully up a rocky pathway, she pointed out the anarchic jumble of condemned homes, makeshift shanties and corroding shelter boxes. “As you can see, conditions are calamitous,” she said. But it is not rocket science to figure out what is needed, she added: houses, streets, electricity, water, health clinics, schools, women’s centers.

Yet, though the local authorities have already approved an urban plan for the neighborhood, the American Red Cross has engaged in a lengthy process to determine how best to spend its $20 million budget to improve Campeche.

Sandrine Capelle Manuel, the organization’s representative in Haiti, said it had been a productive process. “We prioritized all the issues and created a consultative group that is representative of the community fabric,” she said. “We did a strong and deep assessment, and now we need to do a master plan with the community.”

But Ms. Zidor said: “All they do is hold meetings and hand out juice. In the end, they will have spent the whole $20 million giving juice to the people.”

Many other neighborhood reconstruction projects have gotten stuck in the planning stages, too. The reconstruction adviser to President Martelly, in fact, recently asked a World Bank official if millions of dollars could be diverted from that slow-moving $65 million reconstruction program to pay for additional return cash grants.

“He said, ‘Can you help us because we don’t want to go to the third anniversary with so many people still in camps?’ ” Dr. Abrantes said.

Although so much money allocated for reconstruction languishes in the bank, humanitarian financing for Haiti has all but dried up while needs remain acute, said Mr. Fisher, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator.

“The donors have made it clear that they feel the humanitarian crisis is over and that development is their focus,” Mr. Fisher said. “But it’s a false dichotomy. Of course, the country needs long-term solutions but until they are in place we still need resources to deal with the problems at hand.”

Current projections, he added, are that 200,000 Haitians will still be living in camps a year from now, on the fourth anniversary of the earthquake.

André Paultre and Damon Winter contributed reporting.

Santo Darwin: a selecao natural das religioes, ou porque elas sobrevivem

The Moral Animal
By JONATHAN SACKS
The New York Times: December 23, 2012

IT is the religious time of the year. Step into any city in America or Britain and you will see the night sky lit by religious symbols, Christmas decorations certainly and probably also a giant menorah. Religion in the West seems alive and well.

But is it really? Or have these symbols been emptied of content, no more than a glittering backdrop to the West’s newest faith, consumerism, and its secular cathedrals, shopping malls?

At first glance, religion is in decline. In Britain, the results of the 2011 national census have just been published. They show that a quarter of the population claims to have no religion, almost double the figure 10 years ago. And though the United States remains the most religious country in the West, 20 percent declare themselves without religious affiliation — double the number a generation ago.

Looked at another way, though, the figures tell a different story. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion’s imminent demise. Yet after a series of withering attacks, most recently by the new atheists, including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, still in Britain three in four people, and in America four in five, declare allegiance to a religious faith. That, in an age of science, is what is truly surprising.

The irony is that many of the new atheists are followers of Charles Darwin. We are what we are, they say, because it has allowed us to survive and pass on our genes to the next generation. Our biological and cultural makeup constitutes our “adaptive fitness.” Yet religion is the greatest survivor of them all. Superpowers tend to last a century; the great faiths last millenniums. The question is why.

Darwin himself suggested what is almost certainly the correct answer. He was puzzled by a phenomenon that seemed to contradict his most basic thesis, that natural selection should favor the ruthless. Altruists, who risk their lives for others, should therefore usually die before passing on their genes to the next generation. Yet all societies value altruism, and something similar can be found among social animals, from chimpanzees to dolphins to leafcutter ants.

Neuroscientists have shown how this works. We have mirror neurons that lead us to feel pain when we see others suffering. We are hard-wired for empathy. We are moral animals.

The precise implications of Darwin’s answer are still being debated by his disciples — Harvard’s E. O. Wilson in one corner, Oxford’s Richard Dawkins in the other. To put it at its simplest, we hand on our genes as individuals but we survive as members of groups, and groups can exist only when individuals act not solely for their own advantage but for the sake of the group as a whole. Our unique advantage is that we form larger and more complex groups than any other life-form.

A result is that we have two patterns of reaction in the brain, one focusing on potential danger to us as individuals, the other, located in the prefrontal cortex, taking a more considered view of the consequences of our actions for us and others. The first is immediate, instinctive and emotive. The second is reflective and rational. We are caught, in the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrase, between thinking fast and slow.

The fast track helps us survive, but it can also lead us to acts that are impulsive and destructive. The slow track leads us to more considered behavior, but it is often overridden in the heat of the moment. We are sinners and saints, egotists and altruists, exactly as the prophets and philosophers have long maintained.

If this is so, we are in a position to understand why religion helped us survive in the past — and why we will need it in the future. It strengthens and speeds up the slow track. It reconfigures our neural pathways, turning altruism into instinct, through the rituals we perform, the texts we read and the prayers we pray. It remains the most powerful community builder the world has known. Religion binds individuals into groups through habits of altruism, creating relationships of trust strong enough to defeat destructive emotions. Far from refuting religion, the Neo-Darwinists have helped us understand why it matters.

No one has shown this more elegantly than the political scientist Robert D. Putnam. In the 1990s he became famous for the phrase “bowling alone”: more people were going bowling, but fewer were joining bowling teams. Individualism was slowly destroying our capacity to form groups. A decade later, in his book “American Grace,” he showed that there was one place where social capital could still be found: religious communities.

Mr. Putnam’s research showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers were more likely to give money to charity, do volunteer work, help the homeless, donate blood, help a neighbor with housework, spend time with someone who was feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger or help someone find a job. Religiosity as measured by church or synagogue attendance is, he found, a better predictor of altruism than education, age, income, gender or race.

Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology. This may go to show that God has a sense of humor. It certainly shows that the free societies of the West must never lose their sense of God.

Jonathan Sacks is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and a member of the House of Lords.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 24, 2012, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: The Moral Animal.