False Economy - Alan Beattie [16]
Meanwhile, Japan, the first of a stream of East Asian countries to industrialize, was starting to show what was possible with growth led by exports. Simon Kuznets, one of the first academics to study the economics of poor countries as a subject in itself, used to say there were four kinds of countries: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina.
Rather than face the reality of its own problems, the elastic Argentine sense of victimhood stretched to include successful economies on its own side of the Atlantic, such as the United States, as well as those across the ocean. Argentine politics became dominated by an unpleasant and destructive discourse, mixing self-pity and arrogance in equal parts. Each of Argentina's frequent failures had a prefabricated excuse; each of its occasional successes represented the indefatigable spirit of the Argentine nation overcoming adversity.
This attitude endures. One of the more bizarre evenings this author ever spent was at a dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, gathered to discuss the economic crisis following Argentina's debt default of 2001. Of the several dozen or so attendees at the dinner there appeared to be only a handful of non-Argentines—among them me, another journalist, and a New York bond lawyer—who regarded Argentina's fate as primarily of its own making rather than the effects of a malign and capricious world.
It has been said that part of the problem of solipsistic nations that persistently make wrong choices—India, before its recent economic revolution, chief among them—is that they compare themselves only with themselves. Argentina was even worse. It compared itself with its deluded vision of itself, and found the contrast too painful to bear. There is a traditional reciprocal dislike between Argentina and its neighbor, Brazil; the standard Brazilian joke is that the best deal in the world is to buy an Argentine for what he is worth and sell him for what he thinks he is worth.
Argentina's obsession with itself was shared by few. The U.S. attitude was one of neglect and condescension. Once it had satisfied itself that Argentina was unlikely to ally itself with the Soviet Union, the United States turned its attention to preventing other Latin American states from going that way—generally with success, though at considerable cost to its reputation as an incubator of liberal democracy.
Just as with the First World War, the United States emerged from the second with both moral and financial credit from Europe. For thirty years after the Second World War, the United States anchored one corner of the global monetary system, the dollar being the hard currency on which the Bretton Woods arrangements rested. The U.S. economy, safely on the right course, was raised by the tide of trade, technology, and growth that lifted all the Western European boats together. Some referred to the three decades after 1945 as the Second Golden Age. The world economy was less integrated than during the first one, but the benefits of growth were more widely and sustainably spread.
Meanwhile, Argentina was pursuing industrialization within one country. Massive tariff walls were erected around its newly favored industries. Tariffs averaged 84 percent in the early 1960s, at a time when barriers between the advanced countries in Europe, and between Europe and Australia, and the United States and Canada, were being sharply reduced toward single digits. As well as taxing imports, it also taxed exports: Argentine goods were for Argentines. Having been one of the most open economies in the world in the late nineteenth century, Argentina saw its exports shrink in value to just 2 percent of its national income. In the United States, by