“Some countries fail spectacularly, with a total collapse of all State institutions. However, most countries that fall apart, do so not with a bang but with a whimper. They fail, not in an explosion of war and violence, but by being utterly unable to take advantage of their society’s huge potential for growth, condemning their citizens to a lifetime of poverty.” Thus argued Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James A Robinson in their 2012 work Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.

Many Jamaicans have this sense of things slowly falling apart. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but it’s hard to escape what one feels and sees and what the data say. One of the things that I find disconcerting is the difference between the perception formed from mediated communication and the reality on the ground. It works in two ways: Sometimes things are not as bad as they seem, and sometimes they are much worse. The issue of child welfare falls into the second category. It unsettled me deeply because I thought, given the rhetoric around the issue, more tangible efforts were being made to reduce child vulnerability. The gaps are huge.

If I could, I would cut the public relations budget of many of our State agencies and use the funds to do some actual work. Communication is a critical function of government. It involves connecting with the public and building mutual understanding, respect and trust as it relates to the functions and performance of government. It must, therefore, be ethical and not be confused with propaganda which is biased, misleading and distorts reality.

A part of our challenge is that so many of us are so wedded to the propaganda that we cannot distinguish it from actual reality. We twist information to serve our own purposes, write press releases on the basis of that manipulated information and dispatch it to the media, which too often runs them without question. The senders end up fooling the least discerning, most noticeably themselves. Ministers and heads of State agencies wind up convincing themselves that they are doing something, but they truly are not. This, in part, makes up the gap between talk and action.

Too many of us think that talking and doing are the same thing. Many more do not understand how a project goes from idea to reality. It is for this reason the observation by Acemoglu and Robinson has particular resonance for Jamaica. On the one hand, there is the wonderful potential that we all know abounds in the country — a combination of a naturally well-endowed environment and the creativity, ambition and resilience of the people; we are sometimes treated to brilliant flashes of this from our athletes, musicians, academicians, market vendors, and others. On the other hand, there is the reality obvious in our onerous debt burden, an economy that is generally stagnant and with subpar standards in all our social services. Progress has been neglible in these areas or standards have actually got worse. The public consistently records its dissatisfaction, particularly now that they have a better sense of how differently things work elsewhere.

The late distinguished academic and visionary Professor Norman Girvan, in a 2012 analysis, cited three primary indicators of where Jamaica stood 50 years after Independence. First, he said, Jamaicans voted with their feet, with roughly one-third of the annual output of secondary graduates and three-quarters of tertiary graduates choosing to migrate. Second, voter participation had declined gradually over the past 20 years, with just about 50 per cent of qualified electors voting in the 2011 General Election, resulting in the current Administration holding office on the basis of the votes of less than one-third of the electorate — a fact that the Government should do well to remember. Third, and “most embarrassing of all,” Girvan said, “a poll taken in mid-2011 found that 60 per cent of respondents said they believed Jamaica would have been better off had it remained a British colony”.

The failure to effectively harness the potential of our people has meant persistent poverty, growing inequality, and an increasing and palpable malaise about the future of the country, among the majority. Acemoglu and James A Robinson argue, too, that: “Sustained economic growth requires innovation…and innovation cannot be de-coupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilises established power relations in politics.”

Our economy has not grown because there is no innovation and no creative destruction of the forces and institutions that keep people in poverty. That includes the failure of leadership to deliver on institutional reform or implementing projects to enhance the country’s natural resources and generate economic activities for the majority of our people.

Twenty-five years ago, for example, Marguerite Curtin, under the auspices of the Toursim Action Plan, edited a work in which a few visionaries (Marcus Binney, John Harris and Kit Martin) — who clearly had the interest of Jamaica at heart, combined with an extraordinary understanding of our history and culture and a highly accurate projection of the future — crafted a clear and thoughtful roadmap of how Jamaica’s tourism product should be developed and enhanced.

I am especially fascinated by the proposal for a National Heritage Trail. It would have made the entire island of Jamaica a tourist attraction, rather than a few “resorts” carved out around white sand beaches and a few modern hotels. From the many proposals presented therein, the only one that seemed to have been partly implemented is the development of Falmouth. I took the book with me when I left Jamaica, and I pull it out every now and then to show my children — to explain Jamaica’s failures and missed opportunities. Port Royal, naturally, featured prominently in that proposal. And, I hear from people with vague recollections that proposal for the stillbirth logistics hub was first made by Edwin Allen, somewhere in the 1960s.

Grace Virtue, PhD, is a social justice advocate.