This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 16, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Triumph over Scarcity has not spread everywhere.

Haiti stands as a stark example of how poverty can turn a devastating natural disaster into a humanitarian

tragedy that goes on and on.

In Arnold Pling's new co-authored book, From Poverty to Prosperity, the age-old questions of why some countries are rich and others

poor often boils down to how easily ideas can move, be adopted, be abandoned, and how easily

markets where they exist are allowed to adapt.

Well, I guess I have kind of three remarks on Haiti,

although I want to say that they applied to poor countries in general.

I think the result of the aftermath of Haiti has been to highlight to the American people

that there are really very poor countries and that there's a very big difference between a very poor country and the United States.

And as you indicated, we think that the sources of poverty are more in intangible factors and intangible factors.

So the traditional economic factors are things like labor, land and capital, things that you can count and touch and so on and yet if we look at the

for the explanation of differences across countries it's typically intangible factors and if you go to a poor country my

predictions you will find a history of predatory government and

cultural resistance to learning and those are both intangible factors.

We're used to a government that where the civil servants take professional pride in doing their jobs.

In a poor country it's more likely that you'll find civil servants who take their positions

as opportunities to prey on people to require bribes and so forth.

So that we take it for granted that ordinary citizens can establish and maintain ownership of businesses and property, but in poor countries

those processes are very difficult.

...