Gros treats Haitian poverty as a consequence of a state that has repeatedly failed to work, and treats that failure as an institutional problem with a long history. Borrowing path dependence from the New Institutional Economics, he traces the Haitian state back to precolonial African institutions, to French colonial ones, and to geography and population growth, arguing that critical junctures set the terms for everything after. Duvalierism gets a rational-choice treatment: predation was the reasonable strategy for rulers facing the incentives before them. The January 2010 earthquake serves as demonstration, since a working state enforcing building codes and mounting rescue would have kept many of the dead alive. Foreign intervention, military and financial alike, has managed symptoms while sometimes causing them, and aid agencies that outperform ministries create rival centres of authority. His remedy is sequenced institutional transfer, beginning with technical functions donors can supply and leaving contested ones to Haitians.