Argentina is an economy weakened by Peronism, an ideology that constantly interferes with the free markets, with excessive regulations that incentivize rent-seeking and unproductive businesses.
It'll be much richer if it was designed to "benefit the capital," but it's far from it.
Past events aren't a definite excuse for today's situations. Yeah, the U.S. interfered in many countries, including some that are super successful today, e.g., Taiwan and South Korea.
But many Latin Americans never stop blaming U.S. interventions for everything. Of course, blame a boogeyman instead of wreckless internal economic policies.
Yes, that's exactly why Russia was meddling and Bashar al-Assad was torturing/raping/murdering: to keep that pesky Western influence away.
The noble citizens of Syria obviously accept these human rights violations as a much better option than... allowing decadent Western concepts like "liberal democracy" or "pluralism" into their country.
That's why they're sitting peacefully and not putting their lives on the line for the prospect of a risky future that only seems better compared to a present full of horror, right?
Unfortunately, like in Asia or Europe, the US never stopped interfering in the democratic process of South America. Still today, many of those countries are defacto western colonies and lack any independence. And the few who dare proclaiming themselves as Republics tend to end up on western blacklists.
Still today, many of those countries are defacto western colonies and lack any independence.
Can you name even one?
The only one to which the phrase "lacks any independence" could meaningfully apply is Puerto Rico. But even that's not really true, as it continually holds status referenda in favor of actually joining the US over independence. Most recently by a margin of 50-30 - and just a few weeks ago, in fact.
Argentine here — the US helped the military coup that overthrew democracy in Argentina and waged a "Dirty War" that saw people drugged and thrown out of helicopters. People born in the 70s grew up while that was happening. It's still living memory.
The US (and other western countries) dictate the price of raw material exports, and drain countries like Argentina of the best talent. They dictate freight rates. To the extent western capital is willing to invest in the country, it is to build roads/rails that take raw materials from the countryside to the ports in Buenos Aires so that a small class of bourgeois vendidos can sell out the nation's national wealth like a fire sale.
Macri is beloved by western media because he's willing to let the IMF and Federal Reserve dictate social policy in Argentina. Slash pensions, crush labor power, etc. My family voted for him and now my grandma needs us to send more dollars over so she can afford to live. Lot of parallels IMO to people on public assistance voting for Trump in the US. There were other solutions possible besides austerity.
> There were other solutions possible besides austerity.
What solutions? How does one fix a hyperinflated country without painful reforms?
Millei made it clear that pre-election that his tenure was going to bring painful reforms. He was realistic, unlike the incumbent Peronists who had no plan.
It’s been 50 years almost since the dictatorship, it’s time to get over it, most people alive today didn’t live through it.
The us doesn’t drain Argentina of their best talent, Argentina kicks them out with their shitty economy and policies, I know that’s why I left.
Yes, western capital is super evil for investing in infrastructure to move resources. It’s better for the country resources to be laying within the ground making no one money.
There was no other way out since the K printed all the money to finance their madness.
Keep resisting with aguante though, that will work out.
Argentina spends too much money; that is the core problem. Their debt/gdp ratio is extremely high. There is literally no other solution than austerity. Austerity is the entire point
> Macri is beloved by western media because he's willing to let the IMF and Federal Reserve dictate social policy in Argentina
If you think western news outlets have any affinity for austerity or the IMF, then you're watching fox news or something because most American news media is inclined to support a left wing strong man
Of course, the company of concern is Eskom, the underperforming state electricity monopoly whose incompetence has dragged the South African economy down.
She likely doesn’t have Paul’s passion for computers…not her fault.
Paul Allen could have set up an endowment if he wanted the collection to last. But he didn’t for some reason, despite having founded other formally endowed organizations like the Allen Institute.
> If their duty is to deliver education, why are they sitting on a $20B hoard?
Rich alumni, patents, etc. Also, it is a warchest for innovation and expansion. Same thing as other businesses, you have a surplus of cash for reinvestment.
Endowments are not just slush funds that can be used at leadership’s discretion; they are often from donated monies with specific stipulations set by donors on how, where, and what those funds can and cannot be spent on.
Interestingly, according to the report in your link, UPenn pays over 3 billion dollars in salaries, but it has around 1,400 faculty for ~10,000 students. This means that either the instructors are fabulously well paid, or that the vast majority of money is going somewhere else. And indeed according to [0] just 4.64% of salaries are paid to instructional staff, with 23.9% or 2078 of paid employees being management staff. So if I am reading this correctly, they have far more administrators than actual academics, which is rather incredible. Incidentally, according to the same link the median percentage of salaries paid to instructional staff is 30% for similar doctoral universities.
Thanks. Had not actually looked at the numbers of Philly that in depth. Unfortunately, has personally started to be such cynicism it's often expected there's usually a massively lopsided overhead of administrators with moderately paid academics and money that appears to vanish.
Harvard really did a number on my belief in American academia, and then finding out that students in Columbia were complaining they had to read made me not want to look at those types of statistics very often.
Anyways, appreciate the work of actually delving into the payscales, teacher / administrator ratios, and allocation of funding. Also, the https://datausa.io/ site's another interesting one to add to the list of public available dataset visualization, plotting, and summarization websites.
there are many, many people who are paid a lot of money to pretend to believe that the universities should actually be spending less and keeping more for their endowments because that strategy would enable the biggest impact at some indeterminate point in the future
We could try explaining this to someone in a poor country scraping by on $50 monthly. Hint: They'll laugh at us in the face.
There's a reason people take huge risks to flee to the West, including traveling on unsafe boats, crisscrossing areas controlled by bandits, or crossing the environmentally harsh Darien Gap.
