Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned on Wednesday that not enough has been done to prepare for the rainy season and the corresponding surge in cholera that is expected. The international humanitarian organization stated:

While Haiti’s Ministry of Health and Populations claims to be in control of the situation, health facilities in many regions of the country remain incapable of responding to the seasonal fluctuations of the cholera epidemic. The surveillance system, which is supposed to monitor the situation and raise the alarm, is still dysfunctional, MSF said. The number of people treated by MSF alone in the capital, Port-au-Prince, has quadrupled in less than a month, reaching 1,600 cases in April.

Data from the Ministry of Health (MSPP) backs up this increase noted by MSF. While the average daily case load reported by the MSPP was around 50 throughout March and early April, in the last two weeks of reporting (April 10-23) the average number of daily cases has increased to over 150. MSPP reports that 25 people have died due to cholera through in the first 23 days of April. While these numbers are still lower than last year, they point to an increasing caseload as the rainy season begins. Last year, just as cases were spiking, many NGOs were winding down their operations as donors pulled funding. MSF notes that the same phenomenon may be occurring this year as well:

“Too little has been done in terms of prevention to think that cholera would not surge again in 2012,” said Gaëtan Drossart, MSF head of mission in Haiti. “It is concerning that the health authorities are not better prepared and that they cling to reassuring messages that bear no resemblance to reality. There are many meetings going on between the government, the United Nations and their humanitarian partners, but there are few concrete solutions,” he said.

An MSF study in the Artibonite region, where approximately 20 percent of cholera cases have been reported, has revealed a clear reduction of cholera prevention measures since 2011. More than half of the organizations working in the region last year are now gone. Additionally, health centers are short of drugs and some staff have not been paid since January.

“Rain is just one of the risk factors for contamination. But as soon as the rains end, cholera subsides, and funding stops until the next rainy season, instead of money being channeled towards cholera prevention activities. As a consequence, people are still highly vulnerable when cholera comes back,” said Maya Allan, MSF epidemiologist.

An article by Tate Watkins in The American Interest attempts to explain some of the reasons why, as the title puts it, Haiti’s rebuilding “is…taking so long?”Among the factors Watkins details are the often quick staff turn-overs at NGO’s and agencies, the

Dean Baker
The Guardian Unlimited, May 7, 2012

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian Unlimited, 4 de mayo, 2012Página/12, 15 de mayo, 2012En Inglés

May 2012, Dean Baker and Nicole Woo

Just in case you thought that the failure of austerity in the United Kingdom and across the euro zone, and its rejection by voters in France and Greece, might be cause for changing course, David Brooks has a column to tell us otherwise. He says that there are two different arguments going on over economic policy which unfortunately don't intersect.

First, we have the cyclicalists who worry about silly things like 25 million people who are unemployed, underemployed or out of the workforce altogether. These people are also likely to worry about the millions of people who are losing their homes and probably also the children of the unemployed, underemployed and displaced homeowners.

Then we have the far-sighted structuralists like Brooks who worry about the long-term. They worry about fixing government deficits and getting us the labor force that we will need in the future.

This is a great division that has considerably less to do with reality than Middle Earth and the Munchkins. What could Brooks possibly be drinking when he thinks that he has identified a group of economists/policy wonks who are only concerned about the cyclical problem of high unemployment and not the structural problems that created them?

For my part, I have been yelling about the structural problems for more than a decade. I have written books on the structural problems of the economy, like Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy and The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive (free download available). I made the argument (unlike Brooks and his structuralists) that the underlying structural problems in the economy would create the sort of cyclical problems that we are now seeing as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble.

I don't know anyone who looks like cyclicalists that Brooks writes about. It would be good if he could toss out a few names for readers so that we know such people actually exist in the world and are not just Brooks' hallucinations.Since the views Brooks attributes to the cyclicalists are sufficiently bizarre, it is hard to believe that such people exist.

For example, he tells us that the cyclicalists believe:

"the level of government spending is the main factor in determining how fast an economy grows."

I have never come across anyone who had a view anything like this. I do know many economists who argue that in a downturn more stimulus will lead to more economic growth, but this is nothing like the view that Brooks attributes to the cyclicalists. Does Brooks really think it is the same thing to say that more stimulus leads to more growth in a downturn and saying that government spending is the main factor determining growth in general? This is scary.

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Adam Davidson writes about Ed Conard, a friend of Mitt Romney's and a defender of extremely wealthy investors. Conard argues that investors contribute far more to society than their own bank accounts. In a guest post on NPR's Planet Money blog, Dean Baker disagrees.

In his new book, Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong, Mitt Romney's former business partner Ed Conard claims that for each dollar of wealth pulled in by investors, society gets up to $20. I took issue with this claim, saying that the ratio is closer to 5 to 1. However even this lower number caught many by surprise, thinking it to be an endorsement of Conard's view of the economy, albeit in a bit toned down form. It's worth clarifying what is at issue.

First, the 5 to 1 number is simply a reference to the ratio of labor income to capital income (after taxes). For example, in 2011 after-tax corporate profits were just under $1.1 trillion, while labor compensation was over $5 trillion. If we add the corporate tax revenue to the labor income side, the total is more than $5.5 trillion. The take-away from this is that when companies have productive investment and it actually leads to economic growth, then everyone can benefit.

Even when we talk about productive investment, much of the individual investors' gain is at the expense of other investors. For example in the case of Apple, perhaps the country's most innovative company, we would still have smart phones, tablet computers, and downloadable music if Apple never existed. The products just would not be quite as good. Much of Apple's profit would simply show up elsewhere in the tech sector if the company did not exist. While Apple's innovations have clearly benefited society it would be inaccurate to say that the benefit is five times Apple's profits.

Dean Baker
Truthout, May 7, 2012

May 2012, Jake Johnston and Juan Antonio Montecino