Argentina is a very special case. The country has been repeatedly racked by debt defaults and economic crises and its voters have been susceptible over the years to leftwing populism, in the form of the powerful Peronist movement, and now Milei’s rightwing version.
Milei is a textbook populist: charismatic, iconoclastic, promising muscular policies to wrest back control of the economy from the establishment on behalf of the people.
Hayek is populism now.
But this is The Guardian of course:
In truth, the evidence suggests neither left nor right populists tend to fare well when faced with real-world challenges (though of course each charismatic individual claims to offer something unique).
A recent paper in the American Economic Review analysed the performance of 51 populist presidents and prime ministers, from 1900 to 2020. It found that on average, after 15 years, gross domestic product per head tends to be 10% lower in countries run by populist leaders than in similar economies with more mainstream regimes.
That’s not actually the fun part of the paper. Rather, the left populists fuck up more and faster than right populists. Funny of The G not to note that, eh?
So it could be that “right wing” populist policies actually grew economies by 10/% but leftists decreased theirs by twice that amount over the same period.
Also the degree of control over a national economy (or the entire nation) surely varies wildly from one prime minister to another?
In other words what the G is regurgitating is a meaningless and misleading study based on subjective data.
SOP.
Good to see Milei get over the line in mid-term elections yesterday. There must be a massive difference in attitudes between residents of BA and everywhere else. Well done the non-BA voting districts.
Look at the electoral map of London and how red it is. That’s people working in parliament, whitehall, quangos, the state-funded arts, the BBC, the state-funded charities, all sorts of suppliers to those organisations like wanky architects who are mostly selling to the state.
They’re all voting for bigger government that feeds through to them, they want to protect their phony job.
And I’m guessing BA is the same. The people doing useful things like making very good malbec are out in the Mendoza region, much like the useful people in the UK are out in Wiltshire and Northamptonshire.
Missed that. Good news. Unless you’re a public sector parasite.
It’s interesting the last person I asked was from Aires & was university educated. Middle class family, both parents working in the public sector. Enthusiastically pro Milei.
Looks like you’re right, and my contra capital assessment was a bit out: the Grok say about Libertad:
“Buenos Aires Province 41.5% Narrow win over Peronist coalition (40.8%); a major turnaround from a 14-point loss in September provincial elections.”
“CABA (City of Buenos Aires) 50.3% Dominant win over Peronist coalition (30.6%); led by candidate Patricia Bullrich.”
It is, almoat by definition, impossible to provide an objective definition of “populist”. Any statistic analysis of “populism” is therefore BS
Use the Texas sharpshooter method: identify 51 economically under-performing governments, then label them populist.
Populism in a democracy is a terrible thing. The wrong Party might get the most votes! The only was to protect democracy is to do what the Labour Party is doing and cancel elections. That way the vital ingredient of democracy is preserved
I’m sure the paper cited is bollocks anyway.
There’s a lot of anti-Milei stuff in the British media recently. There was something in the Times and the Speccie must run one a week. I wonder if it’s part of the War Against Nigel (even though Reform has different economic policies); all rightish populists must be dissed….
To get a populist party elected you probably already have the economic problems will cause an economy to underperform. Or the electorate would be content with the same old, same old. So you have to expect the economy to underperform after the popularists are elected. It’s why they were elected. So now you’d have to track how new policies affect performance & over what timescales. What would be interesting is what the growth slope is approaching that 15 year point, not over the whole period. It may take a lengthy period for new policies to bite. Especially if there’s resistance from those favoured the status quo or opposite popularist policies.
Incidentally, I actually know more than a few Argentinians. And I have been asking opinions about Milei. What’s surprised me is how favourable they are. Since, simply because of the people I’m asking, I’m selecting from Argentina’s economically disadvantaged. It’s somewhat different from Brasil, where amongst the same sort of people there was initially a lot of enthusiasm for Lula but it quickly declined.
The other thing is that what Milei has done so far can have short term recessionary effects. You start dropping all the tariffs, and ending all the Peronist Departments of Money Burning, you can create a bit of short-term economic pain and anxiety that can take time to adjust.
Like you’re going to get a lot of unemployment when you fire parasites. That may hit spending in other places. GDP might fall because government burning money on State Wank gets counted as GDP. Senoritas start buying cheap clothing from Shein because the tariffs fell could mean GDP falls, even though they’re getting richer.
It’s necessary pain and readjustment will happen though. Give it a couple of years, if it’s all going great, The Guardian will find another reason why he’s the bad guy.
One way to improve GDP per head is to reduce the population – a well known tendency of Leftist governments
“Argentina is a very special case”
For fuxache!
We were taught in primary school that it is very, very, very bad to overuse “very”.