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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.
That's a result of policy, and a policy that was fairly simple to change at that. I don't think a few more years of education would have broken either of the banks if the will had been there.
Likewise, regarding literacy, Southern Europeans are not much harder to teach how to read than Germanic peoples. After the Cuban revolution, the new government launched a literacy campaign that reduced the illiteracy rate from 23.6% to 3.9% in a year. If communists, not generally very good at achieving their objective of improving society, can do this, anyone can. All that is needed is for the government to care about it. Evidently Argentina's didn't.
What prevents the US from having coups all the time? Its military is the world's strongest; it could certainly pull it off. But there's a widespread belief – an idea – that constitutional government is good and coups are bad.
Attributing Argentina's woes to just Peronism is a bit reductive, but Peronist economics is braindead, which is a major factor, and Peron's personal authoritarian streak and the fact that he was the product of a coup certainly didn't help.
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