Haiti

You probably have heard the news about the terrible earthquake in Haiti.

The tragic aspects of this event are too numerous to count. But one of them is that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. As some have said, this makes it almost "the worst place" this could have happened, in terms of the number of people affected and the extent of the anguish. I don't want to "use" the tragedy to make a "comparative analysis" point, but it is worth noting that the ability of the Haitian government to respond to the tragedy is probably less than any other country in our hemisphere where this might have happened. (It is noticeably less, for instance, than even in the Dominican Republic, which shares an island with Haiti.)

It goes to show, in a sense, that trying to understand the politics, economies, and societies of different countries does indeed have real-world impacts for real people: if this had happened somewhere else, it is likely the scope of the tragedy would have been somewhat less.