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Badger of Basra posted:Are the people participating in the protests people who were already middle/upper class before 2002, or does it include the new middle class also? It's not like there's a precise socio-economical analysis of everyone protesting, but yes, there are a lot of upper-middle class people on those marches - people whose families were pretty well-off before PT got into power. The "idealizers" of the whole thing were from Students for Liberty, which is damning by itself. Now, there are many "new middle-class" people that hate the PT government too. It's backlash against corruption - which many people see as PT's fault because it started showing up when they got into power - and Brazil's recent economic situation. It's valid backlash too, but it's also very myopic.
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Mar 16, 2015 01:54
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Sorry for the double post, but someone did analyze the socio-economical composition of Porto Alegre's protesters, at the very least. If you can read Portuguese here's the source: http://zh.clicrbs.com.br/rs/noticia...re-4719348.html 70% had a college degree, 70% had monthly incomes ranging from six and ten+ minimum wages (so, 4.2k to 8k+, which is pretty upper-middle class), 87% were white (although to be fair, Porto Alegre is pretty much that white) and most people were in favor of impeaching Dilma.
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Mar 16, 2015 15:46
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Heh, even the short NPR story on Brazil's protests this morning pointed out how white the crowds were. They interviewed a mom holding a 4 month old who repeatedly declared that the military needed to step in. "So you want the military to take over?" "Well, if that's what it takes to get rid of this president, yes." Don't think most US listeners were expecting that one. They even noted that the protesters were singing songs originally used to protest against military rule  Unfortunately the piece didn't do any analysis at all of the inequality situation. I get that breaking it all down like that would be a tall order for Morning Edition, but that tax burden chart alone would make any American's jaw drop. Even our right wingers who complain that the poor "don't pay taxes" insist at most on a flat tax (which would effectively tax the poor more, and ignores payroll taxes, I realize, but they try to present it as fair).
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Mar 16, 2015 19:10
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tbf being Latin American is a hell of a drug.
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Mar 16, 2015 19:28
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joepinetree posted:
You may not be familiar with North American demographic definitions but by most Goons's standards there are like 4 white people in this photo.
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Mar 16, 2015 20:30
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Jonad posted:You may not be familiar with North American demographic definitions but by most Goons's standards there are like 4 white people in this photo. By most goons's standards everyone in that pic would be Hispanic.
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Mar 16, 2015 20:35
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So tell me about the influence of American Libertarians / Austrian Schoolers on Latin American politics. I know they were big big fans of the military dictatorships and all that. Do they have actual support amongst the upper/middle class like I get the impression they do?
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Mar 16, 2015 21:36
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Jonad posted:You may not be familiar with North American demographic definitions but by most Goons's standards there are like 4 white people in this photo. Don't worry by porteño standards thats just another picture of the black hordes overrunning the continent.
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Mar 16, 2015 21:56
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icantfindaname posted:So tell me about the influence of American Libertarians / Austrian Schoolers on Latin American politics. I know they were big big fans of the military dictatorships and all that. Do they have actual support amongst the upper/middle class like I get the impression they do? The Austrian School is emphatically not the Chicago School. The Chicago School is much, much worse, because they've actually been let near the levers of power in a whole bunch of countries.
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Mar 16, 2015 23:59
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Just read an horrible excerpt from the book "A Narco History", about the Ayotzinapa students. I had seen the images but I had never read a summary of the whole thing. Dear God I understand the anger of those parents and their need to have answers, even though I do feel that if they haven't turned up by now they are dead. http://m.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/the_forty-three_20150313
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Mar 17, 2015 00:08
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icantfindaname posted:So tell me about the influence of American Libertarians / Austrian Schoolers on Latin American politics. I know they were big big fans of the military dictatorships and all that. Do they have actual support amongst the upper/middle class like I get the impression they do? There is a ton of stuff written on this, because academic economics debates have had more of an influence in Latin American economic policy than anywhere else. For a long time, the dominant perspective in Latin America was the structuralist/ISI/dependency view associated with the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL). It included Raul Prebisch (Argentina), Celso Furtado (Brazil), Fernando Fajnzylber (Chile) and others. Starting in the late sixties and early seventies, some organizations most notably the ford foundation, spent a boatload of money to have more American style economics departments created. As a result, departments like Universidad Catolica (Chile), PUC-Rio and Fundacao Getulio Vargas (Brazil) became filled with the so called Chicago boys (at a time where "Chicago school" meant something). Once the dictatorships came, most of the CEPAL folks were removed/exiled and the Chicago boys gained influence. Note that, as mentioned, Chicago school is not Austrian school. Austrian economics had no real presence in Latin America until the aforementioned astroturfing by organizations like students for liberty and the like. But for the most part they are just useful idiots who get a lot of airtime by calling anything to the left of Pinochet communism.
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Mar 17, 2015 00:26
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rockopete posted:Heh, even the short NPR story on Brazil's protests this morning pointed out how white the crowds were. They interviewed a mom holding a 4 month old who repeatedly declared that the military needed to step in. "So you want the military to take over?" "Well, if that's what it takes to get rid of this president, yes." Don't think most US listeners were expecting that one. They even noted that the protesters were singing songs originally used to protest against military rule Anyone in Latin America who calls for a military takeover should have their genitals connected to a car battery until they understand/remember what the latest coups in the region were like. Or maybe I'm misremembering and the last one in Brazil wasn't so bad? Has there ever been a "righteous coup" in the history of humanity? A coup that deposes a genuinely corrupt leader, without bloody purges or civil wars, and that doesn't overstay its welcome? I'll even be generous and give them a couple of freebie kills on coup day.
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Mar 17, 2015 01:58
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Markovnikov posted:Anyone in Latin America who calls for a military takeover should have their genitals connected to a car battery until they understand/remember what the latest coups in the region were like. Or maybe I'm misremembering and the last one in Brazil wasn't so bad? The military regime in the 70s in Peru was leftist in orientation and tried to do a lot of good stuff, so maybe that one.
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Mar 17, 2015 02:09
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i seem to recall the turks having one, but that probably involved some excessive autocracy during the process of it comedy option: caesar
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Mar 17, 2015 02:15
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Markovnikov posted:Anyone in Latin America who calls for a military takeover should have their genitals connected to a car battery until they understand/remember what the latest coups in the region were like. Or maybe I'm misremembering and the last one in Brazil wasn't so bad? It was as bad as any other coup in Latin America, with plenty of unsavory torture. There's some issues with people's memory of the military dictatorship. First the military were never punished since they hijacked the amnesty law to cover their asses about all the torture and murder they've done. Second, unlike several other places where secret documents were opened and reconciliation was done just after the military left the power, here it was done decades after, the first civilian president took charge in 1985, the National Truth Commission to research what happened during the dictatorship was only instituted in november 2012, 27 years later.
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Mar 17, 2015 02:17
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Markovnikov posted:Anyone in Latin America who calls for a military takeover should have their genitals connected to a car battery until they understand/remember what the latest coups in the region were like. Or maybe I'm misremembering and the last one in Brazil wasn't so bad? The one in Brazil was pretty bad. Not just because of the usual torture and disappearances, but because it was explicitly set up to reward the few. it was the policies of the Brazilian dictatorship that led to Brazil becoming the most unequal country on earth for a few decades. Some people loved it because the dictatorship was great at keeping the poverty and violence hidden away. In 1985 Brazil had an infant mortality rate, for example, that was higher than many SubSaharan nations. It was on par with Kenya or Congo, but worse than Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia... But all of that was happening away from the cameras, the nightly news only brought good news, corruption was never reported, and poor people were kept away from the rich neighborhoods.
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Mar 17, 2015 03:00
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Holy poo poo those slogans calling for military rule scare the poo poo out of me. Hopefully the people in that camp are far from forming a critical mass. In Mexico news, journalist Carmen Aristegui was sacked. This is releveant because she's one of few journalists willing to call out done ludicrous conflicts of interest and corruption scandals the government is involved in. All in all, it feels like we're back in the nineties. PRI strongly in power, shaky economy, crumbling peso, silenced criticism, America as national soccer champion and a Jurassic Park movie about to come out. Freezer fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 04:58
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Freezer posted:Holy poo poo those slogans calling for military rule scare the poo poo out of me. Hopefully the people in that camp are far from forming a critical mass. In fairness, US Men's Soccer has gotten light-years better since the 90's.
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Mar 17, 2015 06:08
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Markovnikov posted:Anyone in Latin America who calls for a military takeover should have their genitals connected to a car battery until they understand/remember what the latest coups in the region were like. Or maybe I'm misremembering and the last one in Brazil wasn't so bad? Comedy answer Nº2: Sulla. 
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Mar 17, 2015 06:46
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to my knowledge, economic discourse in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile are all prone toward a continental ideological framework that is pretty alien to most of the Anglosphere it is hard to understand the propensity of Argentinean intellectuals to pin the Paraguayan War on Britain a full century after the war otherwise to invoke the Chicago school is, I think, potentially misleading. There was no neoliberal ideological revolution in Latin America - notice that rhetorically promising the radical transformation of economic relationships is still a winning strategy. There was a shift toward neoliberal policies by functionaries and bureaucrats, a tendency for center-left parties to emulate Rogernomic/Blairite/Rubinite perspectives in practice, but popular economic thinking is an unrecognizable mix of wild conspiracism and continental econ, both on the Latin American right and left. You get more assertions about power, institutions, foreign relations, class identity, etc and less claims to superior theoretical or analytical models of the world. fast forward a few struggling center-left or centrist governments and I think you get modern Turkey, not Britain - that is, perennial accusations/invocations of a nebulous deep state that seems to continually foil left-wing plans or promise safety to the right-wing (where in practice 'it' doesn't remain a coherent entity capable of delivering either), rather than disenchantment with economic agitation and a shift to cultural identity politics.
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Mar 17, 2015 10:34
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ronya posted:fast forward a few struggling center-left or centrist governments and I think you get modern Turkey, not Britain - that is, perennial accusations/invocations of a nebulous deep state that seems to continually foil left-wing plans or promise safety to the right-wing (where in practice 'it' doesn't remain a coherent entity capable of delivering either) Chile.txt
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Mar 17, 2015 13:03
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ronya posted:to my knowledge, economic discourse in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile are all prone toward a continental ideological framework that is pretty alien to most of the Anglosphere The influence of the Chicago school is pretty well documented in Latin America (see Dezalay and Garth's The internationalization of palace wars, or Marion Fourcade's Economists and Societies, or Jeffrey Chwieroth's articles, or, for a more Chicago friendly version, "Good Economics comes to Latin America, 1955 to 1995," by Arnold Harberger). We are not talking about just any bureucrats. There is a remarkable shift where in the 1950s and 60s most high level cabinet positions related to economic policy are staffed by lawyers and CEPAL trained economists, and by the late 70s early 80s those positions are dominated mostly by US trained economists. And that had a huge impact on policy (see, once again, Chwieroth's work, or Bruce Kogut's). As for public discourse, it depends on what you mean by it. If you mean whether Joe Schmo in the street is discussing rational expectations and knightian uncertainty, and the epistemology of economic science, no poo poo they aren't. But a lot of the themes are very prevalent (bloated state, privatization, economic efficiency), to the point where central bank independence was one of the key debate points in last year's elections in Brazil. And even if the themes themselves aren't always that pervasive, the prestige associated with being a US trained technocrat is certainly played up . Most importantly, the debate is still a huge part of economics training in Latin America. I don't think you can have graduated in economics in the last 40 years and not be aware of the orthodox vs heterodox economics debate. In Brazil, in particular, that distinctions is incredibly sharp. UFMG, Unicamp and UFRJ economics departments on the heterodox side, PUC Rio, FGJ- Rio and Insper on the orthodox side, and USP, UNB and so on in the middle. Hell, Maria da Conceicao Tavares got elected to congress in Rio based on nothing but her reputation as a heterodox economist.
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Mar 17, 2015 14:20
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Yes, exactly: Latin America remains more focused over where one obtained their training than the ideological framework being expounded. That's exactly what I meant by "you get more assertions about power, institutions, foreign relations, class identity, etc and less claims to superior theoretical or analytical models of the world". Neoliberal economists disagree about magnitudes within what is, essentially, the same ideological model. They get a bit hyperbolic in rhetoric but in the end Larry Summers chairs the NEC and Christina Romer the CEA. In Latin America there's no agreement over ideological precepts at all so you get an apparently genuine belief that the opposite side are puppets of the imperialists/capitalists/both or plotting kleptocratic populism. It's always hidden loyalties and class identity. Policy itself is nonetheless dramatically neoliberalized; I am more inclined to blame exchange-crisis-imposed external constraints rather than palace power struggles, myself, but that's not really central. The impact of interest is that policy has quietly drifted away from the shape of debate. This is why you have a bizarre debate over abstruse central bank degrees of official autonomy as a kind of a proxy war over whether the (already de facto autonomous) central bank failed to meet its mandate and who, if not, is to blame for excessive inflation. It's the mirror image of frothier Republicans trying to audit the Fed as a substitute for cultural anxieties. In all cases, neoliberal fetters generally impose binding constraints whilst the politicians bicker about irrelevancies, but in Latin America the politicians claim the mantle of higher truths on economic ideology and people are actually interested in abstract policy levers as tools of class war that may be used for or against them, just as they were prior to the neoliberal revolution in the West. But they still can't escape those constraints, so the alleged levers either don't actually exist any more (e.g., for grand import substitution projects that CEPAL revivalists keep salivating about) or exact such crippling penalties for their use that they're not touched.
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Mar 17, 2015 17:27
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ronya posted:Yes, exactly: Latin America remains more focused over where one obtained their training than the ideological framework being expounded. That's exactly what I meant by "you get more assertions about power, institutions, foreign relations, class identity, etc and less claims to superior theoretical or analytical models of the world". Of course ideological framework matters. You either are setting up a strawman (it is obvious and noncontroversial that the regular person on the street doesn't have a strong opinion on Friedman's paper on the predictive power of neoclassical economics) or you are reducing all political debate to the usual mudslinging you find online. There is a long and continuous debate between orthodox and heterodox economists that is not at all reducible to beliefs about hidden loyalties or class identity. Now, of course class and economic position play a role in choosing a side.
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Mar 17, 2015 18:58
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Having worked in brazilian financial newspapers and magazines, I can second joepinetree's point. Whenever we had to get a quote from an economist on a subject, we could choose between neoclassics and neoclassics. The editors and higher-ups didn't even pretend. Some really wore the shirt of free-market-will-redeem-us culture, while others just knew that it was what played well with the owners/backers and went along without incident. Never thought I'd be saying this, but I'll feel relieved when I return to the stability and fair play of Argentina's status quo this sunday.
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Mar 17, 2015 21:11
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ronya posted:fast forward a few struggling center-left or centrist governments and I think you get modern Turkey, not Britain - that is, perennial accusations/invocations of a nebulous deep state that seems to continually foil left-wing plans or promise safety to the right-wing (where in practice 'it' doesn't remain a coherent entity capable of delivering either), rather than disenchantment with economic agitation and a shift to cultural identity politics. It isn't really nebulous though? It's basically the opaque and oligarchic as gently caress Judiciary establishment, which works by a weird mix of appointment and state bureaucracy with little to no oversight in theory, in reality varies by state from "literal oligarch mafia" in political fiefdoms such as Maranhão, where the Sarney family has a familial hegemony on politics, to "state nobility" in Rio de Janeiro, all due to it's astounding degree of continuity and institutional inertia through brazilian history and it's close association with the upper military establishment. From what i know Turkey's situation is similar, but I'm not informed enough to be sure. Anyway, they are entrenched, turn a blind eye to most corruption at high levels and act as political justice when convenient. It's a mostly unaccountable and very hard to change part of the brazilian state and political system. bagual fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 21:38
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http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/03/leading-mexico-journalist-carmen-aristegui-sacked-mvs-broadcaster-150316062758717.html Someone brought it up before, but seriously this is a big deal. Aristegui is one of the few journalists that actually calls out government corruption and is also one of the few that people still trust. With Mexicoleaks and the house of the First Lady that is worth millions this has become one hot mess. Others like Lorenzo Meyer and Denisse Dresser have also quit. Mexican twitter is exploding and I've even seen a few "Je suis Carmen" or similar thrown around" Freezer posted:All in all, it feels like we're back in the nineties. PRI strongly in power, shaky economy, crumbling peso, silenced criticism, America as national soccer champion and a Jurassic Park movie about to come out. I know  . I live in Tijuana and things over here have gone pretty bad (the dollar is almost grazing $15 pesos jesus christ). The raise in taxes from last year has killed a lot of local business (and it seems that California is taking advantage of it), everything is so goddamn expensive. It feels pretty hopeless, you know? Like, no matter what people do, it won't get better.What's worst is that at this rate, my state may vote PRI again. Why, Baja California, Why  Siselmo fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 21:49
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Sephyr posted:Having worked in brazilian financial newspapers and magazines, I can second joepinetree's point. Whenever we had to get a quote from an economist on a subject, we could choose between neoclassics and neoclassics. The editors and higher-ups didn't even pretend. Some really wore the shirt of free-market-will-redeem-us culture, while others just knew that it was what played well with the owners/backers and went along without incident. Was there ever a direct pushback if you or someone else tacked an issue from a non-neoclassical perspective, or used language implying a framework other than the neoclassical one?
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Mar 18, 2015 00:07
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Siselmo posted:http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/03/leading-mexico-journalist-carmen-aristegui-sacked-mvs-broadcaster-150316062758717.html How have you (and Mexicans in general, if you think you can speak for them) perceived EPN's attempt to focus on the economy and pretend the security situation is doing fine? It looks ridiculous to me, but I also know some Mexican exchange students who are very quick to point out that not everywhere in Mexico is plagued by drug violence and who get offended by thinks like Pope Francis' "Mexicanization" comment.
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Mar 18, 2015 00:16
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Customs on strike again. Woo.
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Mar 18, 2015 02:33
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Badger of Basra posted:How have you (and Mexicans in general, if you think you can speak for them) perceived EPN's attempt to focus on the economy and pretend the security situation is doing fine? It looks ridiculous to me, but I also know some Mexican exchange students who are very quick to point out that not everywhere in Mexico is plagued by drug violence and who get offended by thinks like Pope Francis' "Mexicanization" comment. I really, really can't speak for anybody else. Mexico is pretty big and a lot changes between states and even between years within the same state. Tijuana is certainly not the same thing in 2015 compared to 2008 (maaan, that year sucked). The reality I see in the north (heck, just in the border zone, even) is not the same compared to my extended family in Jalisco and Colima. About the Pope's comment, I don't know? I know the church here was not happy, but from the people I know/comments on news sites, responses ranged from "Meh", to "well yeah he is kinda right", to "our state sucks but the way he phrased it was bad" and "gently caress you, the church is bad too so shut up". Most were in the "Meh" area. The thing about the drug cartels is kinda complicated. It really varies from time and state. In my experience, I'm in this middle area of thinking the cartels are out doing bad things, but at the same time, the everyday life goes on, you know? I go out with friends to a street full of cheap bars and stay 'till 2 a.m. and I'm fine as long as I pay a bit of attention. Not too scared, but not too safe.Tijuana is a city with a bad rap since forever, and in many ways that reputation is totally justified. In 2008, violence was pretty bad because two cartels were fighting for the place. Now one of them is the dominant one, so violence went down a bit. And I gotta say, it does sting a bit when gringos say that Mexico is failed state full of violence, even more considering American drug demand. Kinda hypocritical? Especially when they couple it with some extra racism. And in some ways they are not wrong (specially these days), but it feels like they are overgeneralizing, like they don't fully understand. Like, I can still go out and live a kinda normal life. I don't know, I'm really bad at explaining this. Then again, I remember a few years ago, when I was talking with my uncle in Colima over the phone, he and my twenty-something cousin talked about how she and other teenagers started to drink and mingle with friends at their own homes because they were terrified of going to bars at night (drug violence related). Though the situation over there seems better these days. In terms of economics EPN is bad. Like, trainwreck bad. There's a lot of attempts at privatization (and most seem against that). With the peso devaluation and extra taxes on everything, people's finances got hit really big. Gasoline has been going up, up, up for years. One particular case in my area was the "homologación del iva" (I think IVA is basically the VAT in other places?). Before that, the whole country had an IVA of 16%, except for border zones, where it is of 11% (in my state, to compete with California). A law was passed in order to make it a flat 16% even in the border zones. Except they didn't take into account that: -Cost of living here is higher (+$2000 a month for renting) -Public transport is more expensive (my mind was BLOWN when I went to Mexico City and paid $3 pesos for the metro. Public transport here goes $10 on buses, $10-$20 on fixed-route taxis and more on free-route taxis. I wonder how chilangos fared when the metro was raised to $5. It must have been pretty bad.). -Businesses here compete with California, where a lot of stuff is plain cheaper (like new clothes, electronics, a few groceries and house goods). -The minimum wage was not adjusted for that. Prices of everything (even stuff supposedly not affected by it) went up. It was a shock in January of last year to go to the groceries and see everything a couple pesos higher (more than the inflation from other years). Imagine how that affects the average maquiladora worker with a weekly wage of $1000 - $1200 when you also add up other costs like kids, water and electricity (which also became more expensive, of course). What most people have done is spending more of their money in California, which has caused the death of many small businesses and low sales on the bigger ones (along with layoffs). So that's what I know and what I live. Again, it really isn't representative of the whole country. Siselmo fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 05:35
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drat, man. It's strange to hear that prices are so terrible in Mexico because here in the States all that we hear is how cheap everything is and how businesses are thriving in Mexico because you beat the dogshit out of us on labor costs. It sucks to hear that it's just workers being exploited and paid below-living wages. Are the tax hikes and inflation the result of the crash in oil? Or are there other economic issues?
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Mar 18, 2015 06:04
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Zeroisanumber posted:drat, man. It's strange to hear that prices are so terrible in Mexico because here in the States all that we hear is how cheap everything is and how businesses are thriving in Mexico because you beat the dogshit out of us on labor costs. It sucks to hear that it's just workers being exploited and paid below-living wages. As far as I know it is just plain bad económic policy. México also just went from a progressive tax rate to a flat one, it was sold as simplifying the fiscal system but that is bullshit. The crash in oil prices is aggravating what is already a bad situation on its own.
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Mar 18, 2015 06:31
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Zeroisanumber posted:drat, man. It's strange to hear that prices are so terrible in Mexico because here in the States all that we hear is how cheap everything is and how businesses are thriving in Mexico because you beat the dogshit out of us on labor costs. It sucks to hear that it's just workers being exploited and paid below-living wages. Usually, the more south you go the cheaper it gets. The rent I mentioned would give you a nice place in a not upper-class but otherwise pretty decent neighborhood in Colima or Villa de Álvarez. And some stuff is cheaper in Mexico. It depends on what. Fruits, veggies and most edible stuff I find them much cheaper over here and of better quality. Also, if you buy a lot of stuff second hand, then you can spend less than in Cali. Electronics and clothes of decent brand are no contest cheaper in Cali, though (I never buy new games here, just trade. And as plus-sized woman, the US has much more variety of plus size clothes of decent brands). As papasyhotcakes said, in terms of gas prices, the oil crash made things worse, but the hikes in prices have been around waaaay before that. On tax hikes, I don't know why they happened. AFAIK, they said it was to be more equal with the rest of the country. A lot of people here thought it was just another way for the government to milk more money. A few who are more conspiracy minded say it was planned between the US and Mexico in order to help the american economy near the border. Also, keep in mind that in my area, the minimum wages are around 70 to 120 pesos a day. How the gently caress is someone expected to live with that I have no loving idea. Heck, once I get my degree in two and a half years, if I get a job with a weekly wage of ~$1500 I wouldn't complain. OH YEAH! Almost forgot about the dollar! Before the 2008 crisis, the exchange rate was ~10.50 to 11 pesos for a dollar. During the crisis, it spiked a lot, reaching $15 at its worst (in exchange houses, it was around $14.70). Then, it sorta stabilized between $12.20 and $13.50. Now it has reached $15 again on banks and in exchange houses it's almost reaching it (today it was ~$14.70). For us at the border, not only is everything here getting more expensive, but also our money is worth less and less dollars, so even California is getting more expensive (and let's not forget the people that pay rent for their homes/businesses in dollars! because that totally is a thing). Siselmo fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 07:10
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joepinetree posted:Of course ideological framework matters. You either are setting up a strawman (it is obvious and noncontroversial that the regular person on the street doesn't have a strong opinion on Friedman's paper on the predictive power of neoclassical economics) or you are reducing all political debate to the usual mudslinging you find online. There is a long and continuous debate between orthodox and heterodox economists that is not at all reducible to beliefs about hidden loyalties or class identity. Now, of course class and economic position play a role in choosing a side. Hmm. I see I was unclear, sorry. Another try: - there is such a debate. In the Anglosphere it's largely limited to the pages of niche publications and sometimes the JEP. In Latin America, unusually, it's actually something that is visible to the public eye and maintained in the popular zeitgeist. That is really remarkable! - despite this unusual feature, the ensuing battles over economic ideology have remarkably little impact on policy formation in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, etc. This is very much not the mid 20th century - leaky exchange controls are hardly in the same ballpark as license rajs or across-the-board price controls or state-managed nationalization. This applies in both political directions - left-wing programmes despised by the Latin American right, like conditional means-tested cash transfers tied to recipient adherence to antipoverty programmes, are moves out of a neoliberal third-way textbook. And yet the Latin American right will pretend that it is Stalinism and the Latin American left will pretend that it is the very incarnation of socialism on earth. Rhetorically it seems as if the Cold War is still raging, when in practice foreign observers readily recognize it as center-left in a way that would be unremarkable elsewhere. - as you point out, laymen everywhere are laymen; they don't have deep awareness of philosophical disputes. This doesn't stop them from having strong opinions on the appropriate conclusions or affiliations to adopt, though! To pick a non-controversial example, people can identify as Calvinist or Anglican without having particular opinion or even interest in the Vestiarian Crisis. Again, the interesting point is that politically-relevant identities do line up on a nominally orthodox-heterodox economics axis in Latin America. - if you are familiar with how the monetarist-Keynesian debates of the 70s and 80s shook out in the West, you may be aware that the Keynesians largely went extinct in both government and the academy and the neoliberal left emerged from left-wing monetarists across the 1980s and 1990s (this emergence paralleling the monetarists emerging from right-wing cost-push Keynesians in the 1970s). The flavour of the orthodox-heterodox debate in Latin America, at least to me as a foreign observer, feels highly reminiscent of those old debates prior to the new consensus: a narrow debate over abstract technicalities in the academy mirrored by a viciously hostile battle in the wider society aligning along class and party lines. bagual posted:It isn't really nebulous though? It's basically the opaque and oligarchic as gently caress Judiciary establishment, which works by a weird mix of appointment and state bureaucracy with little to no oversight in theory, in reality varies by state from "literal oligarch mafia" in political fiefdoms such as Maranhão, where the Sarney family has a familial hegemony on politics, to "state nobility" in Rio de Janeiro, all due to it's astounding degree of continuity and institutional inertia through brazilian history and it's close association with the upper military establishment. From what i know Turkey's situation is similar, but I'm not informed enough to be sure. Anyway, they are entrenched, turn a blind eye to most corruption at high levels and act as political justice when convenient. It's a mostly unaccountable and very hard to change part of the brazilian state and political system. Yes, that's what "nebulous" means: opaque, de facto structure hard to characterize, hard to trace the boundaries or shape of. "Nebulous" doesn't mean "non-existent". There's a lot of dynastic privilege extraction without explicit mechanisms of inherited title. Nonetheless it's not a command hierarchy. You can't hope to arrest its leaders, if only you could identify them, in order to arrogate its apparent powers onto a revolutionary legislature. ronya fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 07:18
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ronya posted:
This is not true at all. I will once again point to a large and established literature on the topic (Kogut and MacPherson's articles on economists, Fourcade and Babb's "The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries," Jeffrey Chwieroth''s articles, Dezalay and Garth's book). If you'd rather have examples, it wasn't an accident that the US created the Chile Project to influence Chilean economists starting in the 1950s, it was not a coincidence that Chilean economic policy under Pinochet started to change drastically after 1975 (and not 1973) when Sergio de Castro became minister and General Leigh (much more Keynesian) started to lose support, it is not a coincidence that Chile was far more aggressive in its pursuit of neoclassical inspired policies than other countries (see the privatization of their social security program), despite the fact that the Chilean dictatorship was politically and ideologically allied with the Brazilian, Argentinean, etc. ones. joepinetree fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 08:48
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joepinetree posted:This is not true at all. I will once again point to a large and established literature on the topic (Kogut and MacPherson's articles on economists, Fourcade and Babb's "The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries," Jeffrey Chwieroth''s articles, Dezalay and Garth's book). If you'd rather have examples, it wasn't an accident that the US created the Chile Project to influence Chilean economists starting in the 1950s, it was not a coincidence that Chilean economic policy under Pinochet started to change drastically after 1975 (and not 1973) when Sergio de Castro became minister and General Leigh (much more Keynesian) started to lose support, it is not a coincidence that Chile was far more aggressive in its pursuit of neoclassical inspired policies than other countries (see the privatization of their social security program), despite the fact that the Chilean dictatorship was politically and ideologically allied with the Brazilian, Argentinean, etc. ones. errr. I'm not denying that policy ideology has changed. All your remarks here are true, but I see you're still not getting what I'm saying - I'm saying that it's changed in a way that is essentially unrelated to the direction which the surrounding political debate has taken. Policy has moved in the same center-left neoliberal/third-way direction that it has in the rest of the Western world, especially from the 1990s onward. However, the battling camps in Latin America don't seem to include any center-left neoliberals. The left maintains a rhetorical adherence to assorted heterodoxies. The right regards the distributive programs as illegitimate patronage rather than legitimate neoliberal ways to achieve social goals. Hence: the debate has had, and continues to have, remarkably little impact on actually-existing policy formation. So you have means-tested cash transfer schemes, elaborate public-private partnerships structured along contractual rather than managerial lines, etc., and both left and right pretend that it isn't textbook third-way neoliberalism.
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Mar 18, 2015 14:21
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papasyhotcakes posted:As far as I know it is just plain bad económic policy. México also just went from a progressive tax rate to a flat one, it was sold as simplifying the fiscal system but that is bullshit. The crash in oil prices is aggravating what is already a bad situation on its own. Wait, what? Mexico just went to a flat income tax? I'm googling but can't tell if this is just businesses or personal as well.
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Mar 18, 2015 15:53
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Sick_Boy posted:Was there ever a direct pushback if you or someone else tacked an issue from a non-neoclassical perspective, or used language implying a framework other than the neoclassical one? Nope. True to brazilian form, the best way to deny conflict is to behave as if it's never existed. You send in an article citing three sources, and the one edited out is the one spousing unorthodox/annoying viewpoints. Is asked, you'd be told it was done to make the piece fit a certain space, because that guy "already gets too much of a soapbox" (my personal favorite excuse, because of how selective a peeve it was), or because the piece was too quote-heavy and one needed to go. Over time, you just stop trying. It's literally adding fruitless legwork/typing to your daily workload. The newspaper I worked for was big on hospitng events and symposiums, and then they'd sometimes invite some opposing viewpoints. Dalmo Dallari, a moderately progressive old intellectual, was a fixture in those, to bring in some credibility to the whole thing. He often gave nice speeches/lectures, but when it was time to write about the event, his participation was usually condensed to "Dalmo Dallari was also there" or something laughably generic and neutral like "Dallari reminded the audience of the importance of economic growth".
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Mar 18, 2015 17:16
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For some reason this soft approach makes my blood boil even more that direct pushback. "Pretend there's not an argument" is both insidious and bloody insulting. And I'm loving Uruguayan, the masters of low-key pressure like a humming somewhere inside your head, so that's saying something.
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Mar 18, 2015 17:48
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