Why do some societies have a harder time prospering than others? There are many reasons. Noah Smith and Craig Palsson examine a natural experiment: Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Both share the same island. Both derive from a common heritage as sugar-and-coffee-producing slave colonies, although Haiti’s European cultural inheritance is French, and the Dominican’s is Spanish. Yet, while the Dominican is hardly a rich country, Haiti is much poorer. One can list a number of reasons why Haiti is poor: unstable government and misrule, the legacy of slavery, natural disasters, and meddling by the United States and international institutions such as the United Nations. But while it can be argued that Haiti has had the worse of these things, several of them have affected the Dominican as well. Yet, a popular graph illustrates how the two societies have diverged in GDP growth since about 1960, and especially since 1990:
The Haitian economics Substack, Vodou Economics, argues that the graph is misleading and that the divergence has earlier roots, but nobody seems to dispute the general trend and timeline, only the extent to which the imprecise data underlying the graph make it seem so stark and dramatic. For what it’s worth, Vodou Economics also quibbles significantly (as does Palsson) with the recent New York Times argument that Haiti has been uniquely crippled by French indemnities imposed on the island to pay off its former slaveholders, a symptom of how badly the white worlds of Europe and America treated the Western Hemisphere’s second republic in the decades after it threw off slavery.
At any rate, you can read the explanations proffered by Smith and Palsson for the divergence and judge for yourself. I would add one factor that is hardly a full explanation, but might well be a marginal contributor that Smith and Palsson are overlooking. The two nations’ fate diverges at the precise moment when Felipe Alou and Juan Marichal arrived in Major League Baseball in 1958 and 1960, beginning their careers with the San Francisco Giants (Marichal ended up in the Hall of Fame; Alou managed in the majors until 2006, and saw two brothers, two sons, a cousin, and a nephew play and/or manage in the majors). One player from the Dominican (the elder Ozzie Virgil) had preceded them, as well as seven Dominicans who played in the Negro Leagues. But from 1960 on, counting Marichal, 847 Dominicans have played in the majors. Many became major stars and earned tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, including Albert Pujols, Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, Vladimir Guerrero, Adrian Beltre, Sammy Sosa, and Manny Ramirez, just to name a few.
It wasn’t just the talent pipeline. The Dominican Professional Baseball League, played in the winter, has brought major league players and managers to the Dominican since the 1960s. All 30 MLB teams maintain baseball academies in the Dominican, some of them dating back to the 1950s. In 2013, Alicia Jessop of Forbes argued that the deep ties between American baseball and the Dominican were a factor in the economy: “The country’s 2012 exports of $9.467 billion ranked it as 97th worldwide for export totals. However, chances are that if baseball players’ salaries were factored into that export total, the Dominican Republic would see a steady rise in its export value. 20 current MLB players were featured on the Dominican Republic’s World Baseball Classic roster. Their combined 2013 salaries amount to $104,590,000.”
Is baseball alone enough to explain why the Dominican is not as poor and dysfunctional as Haiti? Surely not. But it has to be counted in the visible differences between the economies of the two halves of the island.