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I have the image of a severely malfunctioning engine, a group of people gathered around trying to fix it. Someone finally gets tired of the whole thing and begi

I have the image of a severely malfunctioning engine, a group of people gathered around trying to fix it. Someone finally gets tired of the whole thing and begins beating at it with a hammer. The other guys shrug. Maybe that'll work.

zeroCalories 3y ago
The analogy is exactly the opposite. Argentina has been getting beat by idiotic populist policy forever. Milei is taking a hands-off approach, which will let the economic fiction disappear. Yes, that will send many people into poverty, but the reality is that Argentina is a poor country and cannot provide high standards if living for everyone.
- leidenfrost 3y ago
  1) Many times qe had "liberal" governments trying to fix it: Alfonsin, De La Rua, Macri. Even the de facto dictatorship tried to open up the economy. All of them failed. 2) Argentina is not poor. It's a rich country and their agriculture industry is one of the best in the world. However, it's an industry with very little trickle down dynamics, compared to other fields like electronics or the service industry. You don't need that many educated people to export crude oil and unprocessed goods to the world. A "pure" agricultural Argentina would be very financially stable, at the cost of having horribly high levels of inequality, with a (from my POV) inhuman quality of life for the average person. And no country in the world would favor that.
  - zeroCalories 3y ago
    1) And they continually get undermined by populists, just as is happening here. 2) Argentina has the GDP of a third world country. It is poor. You don't need natural resources to be a wealthy country, you need efficient industry. You will never get that as long as Argentina continues its populist policies. I'm not even against government spending, but the spending needs to be done tactically, like east Asian countries, not for "muh workers".
- leidenfrost 3y ago
  > Yes, that will send many people into poverty, but the reality is that Argentina is a poor country and cannot provide high standards if living for everyone. The point of any talk about economics is to create prosperous nations and long lasting well being for the people. Not to make a number look good on paper. If you think that most people should live terrible lives just to have low rates of inflation, you just failed economics.
  - zeroCalories 3y ago
    You will never get a prosperous nation for everyone if you have a wasteful crab bucket economy. Yes, some people will need to be cut off. Hopefully they will find a more productive way to live, or die.
aerhardt 3y ago
Milei has a singular focus on curbing hyperinflation, an objective no other politician in recent Argentine history has shown any interest in, and he's using a multi-pronged approach to do so. Some of his policies have been fairly sophisticated, like removing the insanely complex network of quasi-monetary instruments that gave the government multiple ways to print money (ex: LELIQS - my head still hurts trying to understand that tire fire system), others are by-the-book inflation-curbing methods, but all in all more sophisticated than just hitting things with a hammer. Probably curbing inflation won't be enough, and maybe he will fail in doing so, but I think it's wrong to suggest his government is merely trying to brute-force the solution.
- sandspar 3y ago
  Thanks for informing me. His public persona is "hammer guy" but perhaps that's more for the cameras.

zeroCalories 3y ago

The analogy is exactly the opposite. Argentina has been getting beat by idiotic populist policy forever. Milei is taking a hands-off approach, which will let the economic fiction disappear. Yes, that will send many people into poverty, but the reality is that Argentina is a poor country and cannot provide high standards if living for everyone.

leidenfrost 3y ago
1) Many times qe had "liberal" governments trying to fix it: Alfonsin, De La Rua, Macri. Even the de facto dictatorship tried to open up the economy. All of them failed. 2) Argentina is not poor. It's a rich country and their agriculture industry is one of the best in the world. However, it's an industry with very little trickle down dynamics, compared to other fields like electronics or the service industry. You don't need that many educated people to export crude oil and unprocessed goods to the world. A "pure" agricultural Argentina would be very financially stable, at the cost of having horribly high levels of inequality, with a (from my POV) inhuman quality of life for the average person. And no country in the world would favor that.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  1) And they continually get undermined by populists, just as is happening here. 2) Argentina has the GDP of a third world country. It is poor. You don't need natural resources to be a wealthy country, you need efficient industry. You will never get that as long as Argentina continues its populist policies. I'm not even against government spending, but the spending needs to be done tactically, like east Asian countries, not for "muh workers".
leidenfrost 3y ago
> Yes, that will send many people into poverty, but the reality is that Argentina is a poor country and cannot provide high standards if living for everyone. The point of any talk about economics is to create prosperous nations and long lasting well being for the people. Not to make a number look good on paper. If you think that most people should live terrible lives just to have low rates of inflation, you just failed economics.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  You will never get a prosperous nation for everyone if you have a wasteful crab bucket economy. Yes, some people will need to be cut off. Hopefully they will find a more productive way to live, or die.

aerhardt 3y ago

Milei has a singular focus on curbing hyperinflation, an objective no other politician in recent Argentine history has shown any interest in, and he's using a multi-pronged approach to do so. Some of his policies have been fairly sophisticated, like removing the insanely complex network of quasi-monetary instruments that gave the government multiple ways to print money (ex: LELIQS - my head still hurts trying to understand that tire fire system), others are by-the-book inflation-curbing methods, but all in all more sophisticated than just hitting things with a hammer. Probably curbing inflation won't be enough, and maybe he will fail in doing so, but I think it's wrong to suggest his government is merely trying to brute-force the solution.

sandspar 3y ago
Thanks for informing me. His public persona is "hammer guy" but perhaps that's more for the cameras.