08 Mar Bad questions, bad answers

It’s Week 10 of the quarter. The students are panicking. We’ve spent the quarter preparing them for a paper that, if they’ve done the lead up assignments well, the paper is done and already written. If they haven’t, we’ve given them enough prompts that they should be able to flesh out the rest of the analysis. I’m surprised, however, given the prompts and the guidance they’ve had that when we sit down for one-on-ones about the paper, many of them do not know what their thesis is. Although the question has been laid out in the syllabus, i sit with them and let them struggle to the answer – they find it, of course (they’re all delightful and brilliant!).

So how is it that i have Freshmen who can come up with a better thesis than a major (and funded) study? I’m referring to the severally-quoted study that finds that “corrupt societies have the largest death tolls from earthquakes” – released on the anniversary of the Haitian earthquake and printed by multiple media outlets (in Canada, anyway).

My attention was first turned toward an article in The Gazette in Montreal, Corrupt societies have greater death tolls from quakes: Report. It’s difficult not to get angry at reports on reports – the sort of half-cocked reporting on reports that doesn’t even begin to question the premise of the argument and blithely prints the fantastical bits for sensationalist coverage. It’s worth putting in chunks from the article:

The construction industry — worth $7.5 trillion annually and expected to double in the next decade — “is recognized as being the most corrupt segment of the global economy,” says the report by Roger Bilham, a seismologist at the University of Colorado, and Nicholas Ambraseys, a quake hazard specialist at Imperial College London.

“During earthquakes, the consequences of decades of shoddy construction are revealed on a catastrophic scale,” they say, noting that bribes can subvert inspection and licensing processes, and covert cost-cutting can compromise the quality of structures.

…To get a read on the impact of corruption, Bilham and Ambraseys compared quake fatalities in buildings, with gross national income per capita and country’s ranking on the corruption perception index generated annually by Transparency International, an organization working to reduce corruption.

…He says corruption is “endemic” in Haiti. But when you look at the buildings that collapsed, he says it is apparent they were put up by “people who didn’t know what they were doing.”

“And even if they did know what they were doing, they didn’t have the money to do anything better,” he says. “And the government didn’t have the will power to impose on them some kind of code that would have prevented this kind of disaster.”

Adding insult to injury: the photo that was pasted along with the article was of the ruins of Notre Dame Cathedral in Port-au-Prince, built in 1749. Erm…you don’t need to be an expert in cathedrals – oh, never mind!

So i went hunting for the original article in Nature (469, Pages: 153–155). The article, “Corruption Kills” was a followup to a UNESCO report from 1976 written by one of the authors:

Earthquake-resistant construction depends on responsible governance, but its implementation can be undermined by corruption or by poverty, through the use of substandard materials and assembly methods, or through the inappropriate siting of buildings.The effects of these forces are difficult to tease apart, because the poorest nations are often also the most corrupt. To try to isolate these influences, we quantified a global relationship between national corruption and a nation’s per capita income. It showed that some nations are more corrupt than anticipated. It is in these countries that about 83% of all deaths from earthquakes in the past three decades have occurred.

So let’s return to insult on injury. The photo pasted into the article is of the collapsed housing units in Cite Soleil. Many of these homes have been built by the people living in them – built from left over building supplies or even non-building supplies. I have a hard time imagining how corruption really fits into this schematic, unless the authors are actually referring to the corruption at the scale of international economics.

There is a whole-sale lack of critical analysis of the root cause of the extra-ordinarily high death toll in Haiti. Both articles are quick to point to the Haitian people – to blame them for the massive death and injury toll not only meted on them on that day one year ago, but also before and since then. There are tropes and refrains that are readily supported by institutions which calculate and nominate, measure and label.

Nicholas Ambraseys and Roger Bilham, the authors of the report in Nature, rely on Transparency International, a global civil society organization headquartered in Berlin, using a Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). I wonder where the US fits on that scale? Oh – right – we don’t have corruption, per se – we just have lobbying and tax loopholes. Given the correct name, anything can be made to smell of roses or donkeys, depending on your take.

So what was their thesis? I tried following up on the 1976 report, but couldn’t find a citation. Foiled! Working from just this particular piece, however, their thesis seems to be “Are more corrupt societies more death-prone in earthquakes?” I can’t resist but to dump in another large chunk from the Nature article:

Sadly, these figures have no predictive value. Moreover, even if corrupt practices were eliminated, many present-day impoverished nations will have inherited a building stock that to some degree incorporates the products of corrupt practices. The problem of what to do about these existing poorly built constructions is particularly difficult, if not economically insoluble.But our analyses suggest that international and national funds set aside for earthquake resistance in countries where corruption is endemic are especially prone to being siphoned off. The structural integrity of a building is no stronger than the social integrity of the builder, and each nation has a responsibility to its citizens to ensure adequate inspection. In particular, nations with a history of significant earthquakes and known corruption issues should stand reminded that an unregulated construction industry is a potential killer.

Thank you, my dear sirs, for that kindly yet stern lecture. Let’s call ourselves “reminded.”