So how come the roads are so bad in the richest part of the country? Can’t even the rich people get the government to do things for them in Haiti? Actually they can and do, that’s not the problem here. Here is a hypothesis that was independently proposed by three different people last summer to Jim when he was in Port-au-Prince: rich people like having roads so terrible outside their houses that you need a four wheel drive to drive on them. This has a number of advantages. First, it makes it less obvious that rich people are living there to potential criminals. Second and more important, it makes it difficult to make a get away after a robbery unless you yourself have a four wheel drive!
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