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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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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.

Well, obviously you don't, but we also obviously disagree on the relative merit of various factors, with you discounting the core point of governance and politics I placing a high priority on it.

Even your choice of the 1970s is both odd and seems to lack an obvious political/policy dynamic that others had opportunity to partake in, but Argentina did not. Europe's ability to afford imports after WW2 was immediate crushed because, well, WW2 happened in Europe and the colonial empires were subsequently shattered, but European reconstruction entailed integration not only into the American market (which Argentina lacked equivalent access to), but the South Korean and Japanese markets (due to the special US trilateral economic deals where the US offered its Asian and European allies market access to the US in exchange for them granting access to eachother). As such, the Korean Miracle and the Japanese golden decades- and their stratospheric, extremely efficient, industrial output growth- were well underway into the 70s, undercutting the industrial-sectors of the Peronist system, even as the trifling things like the coup of Peron and the Dirty War undermined the agricultural sectors by running a terror campaign.

To cut to a core disagreement: I contest that Argentina is, and ever has been since WW2, a higher-performance tribe.

Peron was not an high-performance economic manager as much as someone who had the fortune of seeing the rest of the world blow itself up but not good enough to long-term capitalize, Peronism was not a high-performance ideology, it was not a political choice or economic model taken equivalently amongst the Latin American region, and the cross left/right dynamics of Peronism that let it outlast the coup meant that it's malefects continued to entrench well beyond where other countries purged their ideological opponents' systems.

If I wanted to create an enjoyable and pleasant European ethnostate Argentina would be it. Enough bad things to be the smelly kid and keep people away. But enough good things to be safe etc.

The problem with smelly kid theory is there still seems to be enough absolute poverty. And University of Buenos Aires had free tuition to attract foreignors.

Had drinks with an American educated Argentinian tonight who I have some school ties with and he actually said they don’t have enough cops. As an American and he agreed I am like isn’t this safer than American cities and you have all these other issues?

It’s a weird country. I think it might be better if it stays outside the US zone of influence. In a zombie collapse it feels like a prime spot for an eventual restart.

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?"

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