Saving Haiti, building a safety net

American empathy is evident in our response to the catastrophe in Haiti.

Empathy can motivate people to act during a crisis. That's good, but it's not good enough to address deeply entrenched problems. That requires a different kind of thinking.

People are short-term thinkers. The headlines from Haiti will recede over time and some other trouble will take the world stage, but whether something lasting and beneficial comes of this crisis depends on our helping Haitians develop politically and economically. That requires structure, discipline and a long-term plan.

But most of us don't get excited by institutions or lengthy structured programs. It's not our nature.

So it is essential in a large, complex society and an interconnected world that we know when and how to compensate for our natural tendencies.

Shankar Vedantam makes that argument in a new book, "The Hidden Brain." Vedantam is a science reporter for The Washington Post.

The title refers to evidence that the unconscious mind has more control over our decisions than we think.

One of the topics Vedantam deals with is how we respond to tragedies. He revisits that old Stalin quotation that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions is a statistic. Experiments by University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic show that people are more willing to help when they are told a single person is in trouble than when a large number of people need help, and the larger the number the less empathy people feel.

It's not coldness. Our brains are tuned for a different world than the one we live in now. Face to face, we know what to do, but big numbers and complex problems require more than instinctive behavior.

Vedantam tells the story of a dog left behind when the crew was rescued from a damaged freighter adrift in the Pacific in 2002. People around the U.S. and from several other countries donated money and pressured officials to mount a rescue effort. Eventually, the dog was saved.

Eight years before, news of the Rwandan genocide left people shocked, but initially immobile.

Over the years, journalists and aid groups have learned the power of presenting a photograph of a single child or the story of one family to move people to action.

But that doesn't solve fundamental problems.

We can't control nature, but Haiti's poverty, its shaky infrastructure and ineffective government made the earthquake a much bigger disaster than it should have been. And this isn't the first time that has been the case.

Instead of periodic surges in money and effort, what Haiti needs is a structured plan that improves governance and boosts the economy. Maybe it would cost as much as responding to a couple of disasters, but long term it would be better for them and better for us.

We can't change the mountainous terrain or the country's location in the path of hurricanes and on a fault line, but we can be a better, more consistent partner.

Being the richest country in the world living next to the poorest country in the hemisphere doesn't feel good, especially given our often harmful role in Haiti's history, something that gets underplayed in coverage of the country.

I imagine that in his State of the Union address next week, President Obama will, as presidents always do, say that the world needs America's leadership.

Our hearts have been touched; now we need to put our minds to the task.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.