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I don't think HBD is keeping Latin America back. Argentina is Whiter than the US, yet is still a shithole due entirely to cultural and political reasons. Meanwhile, El Salvador is now the safest country in the Americas, with a homicide rate well below that of the United States, following a radical shift in policy. It's still poor – that can't change overnight – but having the country run by gangs was a major impediment to growth that has now been removed.
Argentina isn't whiter than the US - most white Argentinians are somewhat mixed, not close to 100% white like white Americans. I won't comment on racial differences, but even cultural differences are pretty sticky and Latin American countries are noticeably dirtier and more dysfunctional than poorer European countries like Moldova and Ukraine, and it would be a shame for the US to become more like that.
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HBD sets the ceiling of a country. It does not set the floor. Retarded communists can wreck any country, no matter the national IQ. Just look at North Korea.
But no country has ever developed an advanced industrial economy without at least a large high IQ cohort.
I mean even North Korea seems a lot better organized than a lot of comparably poor states. I'd rather be the average North Korean than the average Liberian or Haitian assuming I wasn't able to migrate.
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I dare to believe that HBD made the culture and the politics, and that HBD is not « over here » whilst culture and politics is cleanly « over there ».
I don't see how this responds to the fact that Argentina is Whiter than the US.
Do you think HBD is just skin tone?
Right, the Argentinians are a different kind of White people. Mostly Italians and Spaniards. Yet neither Italy nor Spain is anywhere near as dysfunctional as Argentina, and Italian-Americans are well assimilated. As far as I know, New Jersey hasn't been governed by Peronists for the last 80 years.
Argentina used to be much richer relative to the rest of the West. (There was a Reddit post on this topic on a SSC/Motte-type subreddit that I'm unable to find right now.) They literally just came up with one terrible idea, Peronism, and ran with it, destroying their country in the process. But as other places populated by Italians and Spaniards show, this was a historical accident, not the inevitable outcome.
There are two gaps. The one you mentioned is HBD. You said:
Buenos Aires and Chicago received immigrants under the same resources, shipping grain and meat from fertile hinterlands, but Chicago drew Germans and Buenos Aires drew Spaniards and Italians. Chicago was over 95% literate from 1870; Buenos Aires was under half in 1869, 72% in 1895, and passed 90% only in 1939. Campante & Glaeser conclude that human capital explains « the lion's share » of the divergence between the two cities and their countries. Europe is the same. In 1900 the average adult had 1.7 years of schooling in Italy and 3.3 in Spain, against 6.4 in the US (Lee & Lee). The US was very Germanic until very recently (~78% European ancestry).
Now as for Argentina vs Spain or its neighbors. It's not ideas, we know that much. In 1913 Argentina was about 1.5 times as rich as Italy and twice as rich as Spain (Maddison; Glaeser, Di Tella & Llach), and in 1950 it was more literate than Chile or Uruguay. But it declined because of instability: 8 regime changes from 1946 to 2010, vs. 2 each for Chile, Uruguay and Brazil (Geddes, Wright & Frantz). Since 1990 its rule-of-law score has been about 0.57, v.s. 0.96 for Chile and Uruguay (V-Dem).
Perón, obviously, was a man and not an idea. Kind of puts a wrinkle in what you said. And the issue predates Perón. It started with the 1930 coup, but Perón came out of the 1943 coup. The army then banned Peronism from 1955 to 1973, and in 1962 it removed Frondizi eleven days after Peronists won 10 of 14 provinces (source). This instability, not Peron himself, messed up the economy further. But Argentina was still richer than Chile and Uruguay in 1975. It fell behind absolutely between 1975 and 1990, shrinking 1.5% a year while they grew (Maddison).
But there's no research on why Argentina is so unstable. One hypothesis was positive feedback loop, but the effect size does not explain the magnitude of the excess over its neighbors, so that's ruled out.
It could be purely random chance. It could be HBD dark matter we're not seeing. Basic ancestry captures most of the deficit Argentina has vs. Germanic nations but it is in fact useless for explaining the difference from its neighbors. Maybe its immigrants were belligerent in a way not captured by their source countries. We don't know for sure but logic suggests to me it will be something like this, or else bad luck ... one calculation I did suggests it's about 1.5 SD among its peers. So it could be top 10% « bad luck » if you consider all of the variance among the peers (ethnicity and income matched) to be totally random. That is not one bad idea, in general people barely listen to anything, these countries share information lines and languages and yet they differ. So ideas differences are not plausible core drivers IMO.
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