I can understand the "it's not that bad at all" sentiment from a personal perspective but it doesn't mean that things aren't bad on a rational, comparative basis.
I grew up in Poland, a country at the time under communist regime. It would take a book to describe all the ways the economy and life was fucked up compared to west countries.
It really was a terrible country to live in. But at the same time 40 million people did and on some level our lives weren't all that different from people in richer, cleaner countries where people could buy toilet paper every day. People have amazing ability to adapt to very adverse environments.
From reading the article I get the impression that Argentina is truly, factually fucked up country, compared to other countries, just like Poland was under communism.
While your reassurance that "it's not bad at all" is a testament to adaptive power of humans, unless you challenge the facts described in the article you're not very convincing.
As to your claim challenging the notion that Argentina was a rich nation, well, the rich people you speak of were very successful at rewriting the history. According to Wikipedia:
"Argentina increased in prosperity and prominence between 1880 and 1929 and emerged as one of the ten richest countries in the world, benefiting from an agricultural export-led economy as well as British and French investment. Driven by immigration and decreasing mortality the Argentine population grew fivefold and the economy 15-fold."
"Argentina increased in prosperity and prominence between 1880 and 1929 and emerged as one of the ten richest countries in the world, benefiting from an agricultural export-led economy as well as British and French investment. Driven by immigration and decreasing mortality the Argentine population grew fivefold and the economy 15-fold."
Sure, if you consider the top upper class as the whole country.
The people never saw that kind of wealth and prosperity in those days. Field workers lived in the most absolute poverty while the owners of those fields lived in luxury and traveling abroad for vacations. North of Argentina still remains one of the poorest regions in Latin America, as it was those days. Sure, we were exporting goods everywhere. Not much was being invested on improving the well being of workers everywhere. At least, not until Peron grew to power.
Wealth was more unequally distributed back then in all the rich countries, at least compared to say the 1970s which were the recent equality peak. The US had Getty and Rockerfeller and JP Morgan and also mass poverty, look at the Great Depression. Was Argentina that different back then?
I can understand the "it's not that bad at all" sentiment from a personal perspective but it doesn't mean that things aren't bad on a rational, comparative basis.
I grew up in Poland, a country at the time under communist regime. It would take a book to describe all the ways the economy and life was fucked up compared to west countries.
It really was a terrible country to live in. But at the same time 40 million people did and on some level our lives weren't all that different from people in richer, cleaner countries where people could buy toilet paper every day. People have amazing ability to adapt to very adverse environments.
From reading the article I get the impression that Argentina is truly, factually fucked up country, compared to other countries, just like Poland was under communism.
While your reassurance that "it's not bad at all" is a testament to adaptive power of humans, unless you challenge the facts described in the article you're not very convincing.
As to your claim challenging the notion that Argentina was a rich nation, well, the rich people you speak of were very successful at rewriting the history. According to Wikipedia:
"Argentina increased in prosperity and prominence between 1880 and 1929 and emerged as one of the ten richest countries in the world, benefiting from an agricultural export-led economy as well as British and French investment. Driven by immigration and decreasing mortality the Argentine population grew fivefold and the economy 15-fold."