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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25391 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Buenos Aires had a homicide rate about the same as NYC in 2022 (so post-Floyd).

From a HBD perspective it seems safe to say Italians have proven themselves to be incapable of managing a central bank.

One of the truly interesting things about Argentina is that they actually got many more of the good kind of Italian (northern) than the US did. Only about half, possibly far fewer, of Italian Argentines were from the South - more than 40% were from the north, 10% from the middle. Meanwhile almost all Italian Americans are from Campania, Calabria and Sicily.

It’s Italian-Americans who, if you look at the regional performance of Italy, should be in the shit. Yet the Italian Argentines, many of whom are descended from northern farmers and merchants who left in the mid-19th century, seem to have been unable to arrest the decline of their country.

The Spanish genetics are also broadly from the highest quality regions of that country (still with the highest incomes), like the Basque Country. Argentina doesn’t merely have mediocre PIGS EU handout genetics, it actually has cradle-of-the-Renaissance, competent-Milanese-industrialist genetics. It shouldn’t just be first-world, it should be rich.

HBD starts to quickly break down as a predictive theory once someone tries to use it to make predictions that are anything other than the most basic and obvious, such as "all else being equal, a civilization made up of whites will tend to outperform one made up of sub-Saharan Africans".

HBD doesn't explain, for example, why Northern Europeans went from being primitive forest-dwelling villagers to the world's intellectual elite in only 1500 years. There are some hand-waving theories about Christianity reshaping incest rates and so on, but they all have the feel of someone trying to cherry-pick ideas in order to try to make HBD seem more robust than it deserves.

HBD also doesn't explain why Han Chinese still didn't know that the Earth was round more than 1500 years after Europeans figured that out, even though today they have very similar measured IQs to Europeans.

However, with all that said, the reality is that Argentina is much less white than Italy. The average Argentinian has more non-European blood than the average Italian does, and a lot of the average Italian's non-white blood is probably from various MENA groups that, historically, far outstripped native Americans in terms of technological development.

One of the truly interesting things about Argentina is that they actually got many more of the good kind of Italian (northern) than the US did.

They even got a pope out of it! 😀

It shouldn’t just be first-world, it should be rich.

And North Korea should be South Korea.

The difference is that NK has been under one management since (effectively) 1945. The East German effect is well known, even if Korea is the most extreme example.

Argentina has had many governments, many skilled and intelligent senior officials who have genuinely attempted to transition to a prosperous market economy even if stymied by various longstanding political movements and interests. That they’ve all failed to arrest the catastrophe is kind of unique. Everyone knows communism is retarded, the conundrum with Argentina is that even economic mismanagement in the first world (see Greece and Italy pre-Euro) shouldn’t lead to Argentina-esque conditions for 70+ years in a row.

Everyone knows communism is retarded

No, they don't. Lots of people think communism is great. Poor people, in general, think Communism is great. Intellectuals think Communism is great (though many are smart enough nowadays to not call it that). Venezuelans think Communism is great. The big exceptions among the poor are Cubans and many Eastern Europeans, and some right-wing Americans.

Yep. For poor people in societies that have limited social mobility, such as early 20th century Russia, communism actually is kinda great. It's not just a delusion. The reason is that for really poor people, it makes more sense to roll the dice and risk a small chance of getting killed during the revolution and subsequent communist regime, as opposed to just accepting a 99.99% chance that they themselves and their descendants will just continue to indefinitely be really poor.

It's in societies like modern America, where even the poor have it not too bad and social mobility is a bit better than in early 20th century Russia, that one can argue that communism is probably a bad idea even for the poor.

Yep. For poor people in societies that have limited social mobility, such as early 20th century Russia, communism actually is kinda great.

It turns out there are ways nations can get out of poverty that aren't as bad as Communism (lowest bar in the world). That almost every non-Communist country managed. Communism always sucks. That maybe in 75-100 years after Communism is instituted, things are better than they would be in the counterfactual of continuing grinding feudal poverty does not change that.

Yes but when you are a feudal peasant being ground into dirt in feudalism in 1915 and you have an untested idea, I can see why you'd take the leap.

Understandable in 1915, far less so in the 21st century. That doesn't make communism "kinda great", it just makes peasants in 1915 unavoidably ignorant.

Agree, and if you look at the brief 1894-1914 period there was a huge amount of industrialization and economic development, slower than elsewhere but the foundation was being created for a modern financial system capable to funding extensive investment, the middle class was growing and so on.

To your mind, is there no difference between the various flavors of social democracy and communism? Because:

Intellectuals think Communism is great (though many are smart enough nowadays to not call it that).

simply isn't true. Most leftist intellectuals would support various levels of welfare, various levels of socialization of the healthcare system and so on but aren't interested in a centrally-planned economy, one-party rule, state-run media, etc.

To your mind, is there no difference between the various flavors of social democracy and communism?

Would a difference between the two be that social democracy doesn't see capitalism as "the problem", and communism does?

Capitalism as a source of problems, perhaps, rather than an unalloyed good? There's likely a difference between textbook definitions in the communist manifesto or the little red book and the way people use these terms colloquially. If you want the former, I'm not your guy. I read both a decade and a half ago and that was about the extent of my interest. Reading Hayek now, it's interesting to see how much the meaning of the term 'liberal' has shifted in the last 70 years. Gives me a better understanding of the gap between the way my generation uses these words and the way I expect some of the older posters here think.

To turn the question on it's head - if I supported free markets, welfare and socialized medicine, am I a communist? It's advantageous for the right to say so because communism calls to mind Soviet Russia, gulags, starvation, stasi, etc. But I'd argue there's a very material difference between Canada and the USSR, and only the latter would widely be regarded as 'retarded.' I'd agree that many intellectuals on the left fetishize Canada (if Trump wins a second term, this time we're definitely moving meme), but the number who'd want to live in a USSR-style communist hellscape is much lower.

Ok, among widely-reputed non-Marxian economists, Argentina is interesting because even bad economic mismanagement, in a market or quasi-market economy, shouldn’t result in a disaster of Argentina’s scale. No mainstream economist is confused as to why Venezuela’s a shithole. Argentina is genuinely a mystery. None of the usual explanations work, even a series of terrible governments shouldn’t do this much damage.

I was in Buenos Aires recently. I stayed in Puerto Madero, which is a modern neighborhood with fancy hotels, high rise apartments, parks, fancy restaurants, etc. So how do you get a place like that in a third world country? Answer: the government borrows a shitload of money and pays for it that way. I would guess they did a LOT of things that way. And then the bill came due.

This is just believers in government policy believing there should be a floor in government's ability to mismanage, rather than accepting that technocrats can easily make things worse for short-term political advantages. This is dispiriting to visions of top-down technocratic control, but is completely in keeping with far more banal expectations that politicians who run the economy for political benefit will not actually prioritize economic health.

That Argentina has some relatively unique political interest entrenchments in the way- such as regional ability to incur debt not found in most centralized economic systems- simply provides more obvious purchases for the later view. That Peronism was adopted functionally entrenched for so long is another.

As I’ve said here before (I think last year when we had the last big Argentina discussion) I completely agree with you that some unique quirks like the ability for state governments to effectively print money are substantially responsible for Argentina’s condition.

But I think that again you discount the weirdness of Argentina. The stagnation is unusual for a population of that quality and historic development even with severe economic mismanagement. Look at the regular catastrophic economic decisions taken by successive postwar Italian governments, for example, the endless (stupid, to appease unions and voters in the short-term) devaluation of the Lira. And yet Italy saw a huge amount of growth and was (the worst parts of the south excepted) broadly a prosperous modern country well before full Euro integration. Franco’s abortive attempt at autarky was quickly fixed. Ireland saw a huge economic boom after liberalization. Yes, these examples all have confounding factors. Yes, you can’t ignore proximity, EU economic integration even pre-Euro and so on. But the sheer mismatch between human capital and population prosperity in Argentina versus country of origin (ie Spain/Italy) is unmatched in any settler population, anywhere in the world.

Even bad politicians, provided they don’t literally abolish even the last vestiges of a market economy, which even Peron didn’t, don’t typically result in growth charts as bad as Argentina’s.

And yet you already identified a significant number of very relevant political, economic, diplomatic and other factors that Argentina lacked but their countries of origins had. Those are literally explanatory factors: post-war saw a huge amount of growth because the pre-war entrenched system had just been leveled and so there was only one direction to go, that rebuilding in that context after entrenched political interests had been bloodily wiped away changed the foundational dynamics from the first half of the century, that cultivation of prosperity was considered a strategic interest of the United States who gave the Europeans preferential market access that Latin Americans didn't, that European economic integration overturned local political-economic interests in key factors that enabled economic growth, even as it was shackled to one of the richest economic zones on the planet.

By contrast, post-WW2 Argentina was not subject to major economic reconstruction, its prosperity was not prioritized at a policy level of the United States, it was not part of a premium economic block, and it did not submit to external rulings to overrule domestic political-economic fusion.

The questions is comparison is thus reversed: the question is not why Argentina would fail despite it's failings, the questions should be why Argentina should be expected to succeed despite lacking major- even decisive- factors of success that could overcome failings.

I disagree. The question is why Argentina performs so far below comparable European (diaspora) nations. This isn’t explained by being in a slightly unfavorable postwar position, higher performance tribes have done well in highly remote corners of the world, the inverse has likewise been true. New Zealand did OK, Israel did OK, Argentina could have done OK. There were still large export markets; the broader Latin American economy grew substantially; the full weight of European integration restricting global imports only began to bite from the very late 1970s, well after Argentina’s decline had begun.

This is by far the poorest West-of-Hajnal majority nation on Earth. It is a curiosity, it is unique. I don’t think the mystery can be explained away the way you suggest.

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Argentina does have some incredibly bad policies, though, e.g. about 1/6 of government tax revenues come from taxing exports. It's as if they looked at export-led industrialisation success stories and said "How can we stop that happening here?"

If Milei ends up building a durable political coalition my guess is the country becomes very talked about in right-wing circles. It’s big weakness is geopolitically its very isolated.

I have been thinking about how would this country develop in the global economy of the 21st century as it is a country that HBD models would predict to be rich but is not. It does fit the communists exception to the model in a lighter firm of Peronism/Kirchnerism.

For what I know about trade economics though it’s not in a good place. They speak the wrong language for entry into the elites of the global market - English. Geographically isolated so it is difficult for them to plug into a larger industrial clusters (Poland entering the German industrial machine). Commodities only get you some wealth and they aren’t as well positioned as Australia to be a Chinese mine. Time zone does seem to be an advantage. Probably not enough true Brahmin types to compete in big tech or chip making which are industries where geographical location matters less (not bulky). Northern Italy does plug into the larger German industrial base and has a lot of machine tooling industry.

The country still feels like it should be carving out niches in the global economy and perhaps this will happen if the politics are truly changing. One or two Skype level tech firms would make a lot of sense. Something like a high-end state consumer good company too. A firm comparable to Sub-Zero.

The isolation is an excuse, come on. Singapore is rich despite being surrounded by much poorer countries, a rich and competent Argentina would have replaced/supplanted Miami as the center of Latin American finance, all global corporations in the region would have their Spanish-world HQs there etc. Uruguay is in a tough spot because it’s small. Argentina is large enough to do well.

Isn't the point that Singapore is the opposite of isolated? It's in one of the most strategic locations on the planet and is a massive shipping hub on the way to very wealthy places. Argentina is on the way to where? Miami is the Latin American finance hub because it's on the way to... in the Estados Unidos.

Miami is the hub because it’s the only Latin American city that’s a nice place to live. It’s actually not geographically more efficient that deals between, say, a Colombian and a Peruvian investment fund needs to be conducted via Miami than that they should be conducted via Buenos Aires. The problem with LatAm is instability and a lack of places the global PMC want to live, which is why Miami is the capital of Latin America. It’s not that it’s in the US except in that the US is safe and stable; if it was about the US market or access to Wall Street they’d be based in NYC, but they’re not. They wanted a Hispanic city that was nice (and Spain was too far).

Argentina has so mismanaged its economy for structural reasons that it cancels the whole thing out, though.

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