Argentina didn't really go down hill.

Constant GDP per capita is up ~50% from 1960: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDARG

The GDP of the rest of the world went up a lot more than that [1] - and Argentina never did anything besides have decent weather and a roughly constant amount of fertile land.

It's kind of like a Dutch Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=eMGt

People didn't really need smartphones, laptops and even personal cars in 1960s in Argentine. I believe they generated that GDP while being mostly rural, where it translates to a lot of amenities.

Now they would usually be cramped in a city where the effective cost of living is much greater (leading to villas), whereas their GDP and thus income didn't grow much.

70-80%+ of the population was already living in urban areas in the 60s though.

Perhaps we've spotted a case for sloggy Argentinean growth, since the country doesn't strike me as being an industrial giant or a R&D hub - what would they all do living in urban areas?

?? Urban areas are just the default for the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Argentina is surprisingly comprehensive. The sidebar has agriculture at 7% of the economy. The place is not without industry, it's just making and selling things at ""wrong"" prices because of the currency issue, which in turn comes from the balance of payments issue. There's clearly substantial local commerce, just not quite enough export.

What % of exports, though, and what % of exports to the countries outside of the region (i.e. the globally competitive industries)?

Even by world standards, 70-80% of urbanization in the 60s and 92% now is quite a lot. Especially a lot for a country which mostly exports agricultural produce. Without checking, I would expect it to be 50% in the 60s and 70-80% today.

A huge portion of the population in the cities doesn't do anything, quite literally living on the government budget.

Hence why the poverty rate near instantly skyrocketed after the huge cuts to government spending recently.

2 small pieces of anecdotes

1) I used to work in a very large IT group in Latin America, and I worked with some EngManagers who hired and managed some folks in Argentina. One interesting dynamic was due to the inflation, we used to give to folks 'monthly' salary increases to offset. Since the company captured the inflation also in the prices, for a long time offer that offset with a small plus was a very huge retention factor for us;

2) After 2015/6, our IT director started to give 1 Bitcoin or USD 500 equivalent in Bitcoin for our argentine colleagues as part of their monthly salary, and eventually those guys ended up holding or selling it with more than 10x over it.

Inflation is a symptom, not the cause.

Not sure how Argentinians are supposed to do better using cryptocurrencies.

There is no federal agency or corporation that can inflate Bitcoin like Argentina's central bank has been doing. This is the major cause of inflation.

Currency was inflated to avoid defaulting on payments on debt.

So again, this is really a symptom of a deeper problem.

Regardless, you can't print more Bitcoin.

With regards to out of control spending, I think Milei is trying to get that under control. No idea if it'll work though.

People are usually being hurt harder by deflation than by inflation though, and it's demonstrably the best way to get overthrown (which usually doesn't happen with inflation) by a lunatic dictator. (Weimar Republic gets a bad rap for its hyperinflation period, but it survived it, and in the end that's Brüning's *deflation* in 1930-32 that caused the eventual demise of the republic and the birth of the 3rd Reich).

The kind of intermediate-level inflation (not tour typical inflation, but also not hyperinflation) that exists in Argentina (or Turkey for that matter) is typically caused by governments addressing underlying problems by driving inflation up (it's not an unintended consequence of poor monetary policy, they aren't oblivious). Sure it's not nice, but the problem is: how do you solve the underlying problem anyway. If you just say “I'm gonna play the "strong money" card no matter what” you're not solving the problem, you're tying your own hands and now you have two problems.

Be careful what you wish for.

Agreed that deflation is scary and things can spiral out of control.

Just hyperinflating forever though seems to just be making the pop of the bubble that much worse.

You can however still default on debt in Bitcoin. I wonder how that's supposed to work.

Well, at least you can save and not be in the need to spend your money soon, as it then devalues quickly, which helps to stop inflation :D

They could just search € or USD, which they do :D But the government used to have a cap of 200$ per person and month to exchange (not sure if that still happens now with Milei)

The inflation is still a symptom of the balance of payments problem. What cryptocurrency lets you do is evade the capital controls and get closer to dollar-referenced currency.

On the whole income be significantly lower because the state couldn't afford to pay them as much (or at all) anymore.

I've never seen issues with obtaining any required quantity of physical US dollars cash, and that includes 2022 Russia.

Been there in 2014 with a group of friends. We ran out of cash. I took the ferry to Uruguay with 4 credit cards and for a day each 2 hours draw the max sum the ATM let me. Returned with 4k dollars in my pockets. Not before I bought something to smoke and smoked a big doobie on the beach in the sunset. God, I miss this muchileros life.

The Crystal language was written by gauchos!

So was Godot, the open source gaming engine.