Economic models tend to assume a government that wants development and simply needs the right technical advice. Lundahl argues that Haiti disproves the assumption. Population growth on eroding hillsides and stagnant farming technique explain part of the poverty, but the decisive factor is a state whose rulers have treated the country as something to be extracted from.

Reading the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 and the disorder that followed, he finds continuity rather than rupture: predation reproduced itself because rent-taking through the state machinery had become the point of politics, and because parties grounded in social interests had never been permitted to form. Borrowing terms from Tullock and Leijonhufvud, he casts autocracy as a stable global equilibrium and democracy as a narrow corridor Haiti has never occupied. Removing a particular dictator, on this account, leaves the equilibrium intact; only much larger shocks would dislodge it.