[FRIAM] unrest in SoAm & Global ideological/sociopolitical/economic alignment...

Steve Smith sasmyth at swcp.com
Fri Jan 13 12:32:17 EST 2023 

Gary -

Thanks for the on-the-ground response from the "middle of the world".  I 
realize(d) you (like all of us) live in a bubble and I appreciate your 
acknowledging the two impinging bubbles you recognize yourself to be 
circumscribed by:  1) retired folk who avoid deep political thought; 2) 
locals without the education or experience to see much beyond the local 
community.

In some ways this feels like a template for many of our own bubbles...   
sort of a 1) personal/professional/socioeconomic bubble; 2) geolocal 
bubble .   There are probably more and they may or may not overlap 
significantly.   I use FriAM to try to force some of my own bubbles to 
impinge on one another, or perhaps to explore the interstices between 
the otherwise natural impingements...

I'm not a regular (only dropped in once or twice) vFriam participant, 
and I don't know about Merle, I think she may make a better effort than 
I and could probably be drawn into making an appearance for a topic 
*like* this if you were interested.   I'll ping her offline as well to 
see if she might be interested/available to vFriAM up on this (or some 
vaguely related) topic next week?

- Steve

Regarding "the Golden Age of Latin America", I found this (working) 
paper which moderately reflects what I think of as "the Golden Age".  I 
think they acknowledge (and maybe even explain) what you have 
experienced/observed/believe about "keeping Latin America dirt poor":

On the Latin American Growth Paradox: A Hindsight into the Golden Age
Giorgia Barboni∗and Tania Treibich† November 12, 2010
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/89360/1/64049434X.pdf


    /In 1950, Latin American countries’ capabilities were promising:
    however, some other countries starting at the same level, or even
    below, made a better use of their initial endowments. At the time,
    countries like Argentina and Venezuela had a higher GDP per capita
    than other European countries belonging to the developed world today
    (Italy, Spain...) and many East Asian countries that have managed to
    catch up with the Western World in the last decades (see Figure 1
    below). Indeed, the data on GDP per capita over the last 60 years
    reveals that since 1950, Latin American countries have diverged from
    the Western World. With a GDP growth rate between 4 and 5 percent,
    they have fallen behind Europe which economy has reached a 20,000
    dollars per capita level today. The Latin American countries grew
    slowly until 1980 and, from then, their GDP per capita growth has
    been stationary. The only exception would be Chile which after a
    period of slow growth started an expansion period in 1980s,
    converging to the highest levels. Asian countries in comparison
    followed a convergence path, starting way lower and reaching the
    European levels of GDP per capita after fifty years of catching up.
    Castaldi et al. (2008(16)) point out that this divergence can also
    be measured by the widening productivity gap between Latin America
    and the international frontier in the last decades. Other indicators
    of education and science may also support the hypothesis that back
    then, Latin American countries had a big potential for convergence.
    Argentina, for example, was thought to be so promising that it could
    join the innovators’ club (Castaldi et al., 2008(16)). Then, what
    happened during the Golden Age (1950-1975) that prevented South
    American countries to exploit this potential for growth?/

Which is naturally just one perspective, but provides the basic idea of 
what said "Golden Age" was/is/might-be.


On 1/13/23 9:33 AM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
> Despite living here in the middle of the world, I'm afraid I don't
> give these ideas enogh serious thought these days. I interact mostly
> with people who are retired and avoid deep political thought, and with
> locals who don't have the education or experience to see much beyond
> the local community. I REALLY MUST make myself make it a priority to
> start attending the VFriam meetings on Thursday. It might be valuable.
> I wonder, does Merle ever tune in? She seems the most socially
> concerned (maybe even hopeful?) person on the list.
>
> By the way, I wasn't aware that there ever was a "Golden Age of Latin
> America". Care to elaborate? My view (shaped perhaps too much by
> reading "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" in the early 2000s) is
> that Latin America has always been dirt poor, just like the more
> developed world wants it to be. First under the thumb of the USA and
> USSR/Russia, and now China. No wonder dictators thrive here.
>
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2023 at 1:31 PM Steve Smith<sasmyth at swcp.com>  wrote:
>> GaryS, et al  -
>>
>> I was recently trying to make a little more sense of the larger sociopolitical situation across central/south America and realized that your location in Ecuador might provide some useful parallax.
>>
>> https://www.as-coa.org/articles/2023-elections-latin-america-preview
>>
>> I was (not?) surprised to read that there was a renewed interest in "regional integration".    This article references Lula and Obrador and several other Latin American leaders who might be attempting a broader ideological (and economic) alignment/cooperation across the region.
>>
>> https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/will-lula-achieve-regional-integration-in-latin-america/
>>
>> With the unrest of the summer triggered? by energy/fossil-fuel prices it seems like Ecuador has become (temporarily, modestly) unbalanced which seems like an opportunity for change, whether for better or worse.   I see in the first article (Elections Preview) that Lasso has a very low approval rating and the upcoming (February) elections might include/yield a recall for him?
>>
>
>> I lived on the border of AZ/MX as a teen in the early 70s and the recent memory/residue of the Golden Age of Latin America was still evident.  The Mexican border town (Agua Prieta) still had moderately grand facilities and institutions (e.g.  A huge library with elaborate fountains on the grounds, etc) even though they were not able to support them in that grandeur...   So I think I still have an ideation that Latin America has many of the resources or (hidden) momentum to achieve a resurgence of some sort.
>>
>> These reflections are partly triggered by this interview/article produced by WBUR/Boston and distributed via NPR:
>>
>> https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/01/11/8-billion-earth-population-rise-human
>>
>> Which reminded me that while we *do* have a total-population problem with our 8B and rising numbers (and 90+ % of land animal by mass being human or human domesticates), the *distribution* of people, and more to the point the demographic fecundity/fertility distribution is very uneven and in fact seems to be inversely proportional to various features of human civilization ranging from GDP to education to technological development.    Some (like DJT) turn this into a judgement and a reason for resentment/fear (e.g. S*hole country labels) but others have a more progressive view.   An excerpt from the WBUR interview/article:
>>
>> Jennifer Sciubba: "We're moving toward this aging and shrinking world, and we are worried because we can't sustain that same huge level of economic growth in the past. And we do need to think about what that might look like, so we can look relook at concepts like retirement. We can look at concepts like what is work life. We also, though, have to start thinking about family and marriage. And, you know, we're talking about a paradigmatic shift.
>>
>> "That means we have to look at the world through a completely different lens than we've looked at the world in the past. But all of our theories about the good life, our economic theories, our political theories, those were all developed under conditions of population growth and economic growth, as William said. So it's really hard to get a paradigmatic shift and say, what if we try to look at the world in a different way? Can we look at an aging and shrinking society as a good thing? Can we look at growing older individually as a good thing? We've not been good at that. And so we're kind of taking that negativity and applying it at the societal level."
>>
>> This passage specifically references aging (individual and population) but there are other references to economic/technological disparities.
>>
>> I also defer here to others who have an international POV (e.g. Pieter in South Africa,  Sarbajit in India, Jochen in Germany, and I believe we have someone from Cuba, I think we lost (off the list) Mohammed from Egypt a few years ago, etc.) as well.    We are not a very demographicly representative group here but still offer a somewhat broad samplying by some measures.
>>
>> I realize this is yet another of my rambly maunderings but I'd be curious to hear what others are observing/thinking about these issues in this current time of global flux.
>>
>> - Steve
>>
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