The infinite question: when was Argentina screwed? – 04/07/2019

He is the greatest living historian of the Argentine economy. But, in addition, Pablo Gerchunoff is planted cope with politics and culture with a complete look, far beyond the limited gaze of his discipline.

The speech of thanks for the awarding of the Domingo Faustino Sarmiento prize was, in this sense, a kind of oral test, a conversation between friends with winks for all. For that, l & # 39; economic offers a summary of the main points of his speech.

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Economists

"I am moving into another environment, I want to tell you a little bit about how you see the politics of these other environments.We will define a little bit about these environments, for example the academic environment mainly economists. I said here, every time I am an economist, I have less and less historian, economist or historian of the economy.But the world in which I move is a world of technical knowledge of economists and intellectual critics.And from there, with enough comfort, I am generally criticized, it is a problem for me because I feel sorry for wanting excessive for the political world, the complexity of political decisions is often criticized with some comfort. I want to tell the senators, the politicians here, that the economy is a complicated discipline for that. What do I see in politics? I see fundamentally that nobody other than politics can give us a vision of society, of reality, of the economy, a sequence of policies that can make this vision of the future a reality, this hope if you want and a sequence: what do we do first what do we do next? I want to repeat it: vision, sequence, speed. You know what, as my dear Roberto Perfumo said when he was about to become a champion in 66, "it's very difficult," it's very difficult. To do politics honestly and politically as I understand it is very difficult. And when I tell you that there is a problem in the economic world, I do not say it for all economists; I say so because among my fellow economists, there are, not all, but there are some who tend to compete in the sense of using the technical tool to build a worldviewto express their own vision of the world, they then talk about health, education, territory, everything they want. I tend to see much more important the task of these other economists, if you will, who, with more humility, try to bring their knowledge, their technical knowledge, their technical wisdom to themselves. put at the service of any type of transformation of this type of between them. we speak, difficult indeed. So I say, look at these economists basically, because these economists seem so much less in the newspapers, they are much less on television. And you know what? They have something that you see little when you watch some of my colleagues talking on television or responding to news in the newspapers: that is the doubt. They have doubts. And I think there are few values ​​as important to someone who is really thinking about badyzing a complex reality. Few values ​​are as important as accepting one's own doubt and if it's not accepting one's doubt, it's accepting the doubt that the other is pbading on to you. . So, I think it's full of good economists defined this way, it's full of economists who have doubts, who convey doubt, as you surely do, they phone and ask for : "How do you see that?" It's an amazing question, it's an honest question. "How do you see it?", Sometimes it's about saying quickly what we see, but sometimes it's really about trying to enrich it from the vision of the other. So I say: let's face it, it's full of economists who are like that, is full of economists who can help with the transformation of a country, the transformation of a sector of badysis and doubt. And doubt to badysis, then pbad it on to those who can build vision, sequence and speed, because it is not us. "

Intellectual criticism

"I would say that the other place from where I look in the world and that I move to politics is the world of intellectual criticism.It's interesting, is not it? I see, if you want, less risk.The intellectuals are or are … I have a problem with the intellectual word, I do not know if there really is the figure of the intellectual In France, there are many less in England and the United States, in the Anglo-Saxon world, but here I would say, let's accept it. accept intellectual criticism as if they were impossible. You can not, you can not get rid of them, you have to tolerate them. And when this intellectual reflection matures, it happens that sometimes it also becomes a political vocation … I remember some non-Argentine examples … and it appeared to me that Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who is clearly a intellectual, is not a sociologist. neither politician C is an intellectual, he has been intellectual all his life. A journalist approached him and asked him "Now what? He stopped and said: "All that I have written does not exist anymore, do not read me anymore, now I am in another world and in this other world, the words that I am I have written can make sense or do not have it. " And the last one comes to mind, you will tell me that you are an intellectual, that you are not an intellectual, we could discuss eight years, but the man who wrote to Facundo is an intellectual. But he is an intellectual, not because of the format of what he has written, because the format of what someone has written may be called a booklet. There are many ways to read the Facundo, but it can also be read as the work of an intellectual. And apart from an intellectual, and I use the word that counts so much for me, compbadionate. Because his vision of Facundo is the look that wants to understand him, he wants to understand the other in politics, he wants to understand the differences in politics … Sarmiento is an intellectual who entered politics and became president of the nation . "

Politics

"I put politics at the center of the stage, I believe it deeply, I've always believed it, of course, there are good politicians, bad politicians, the bad ones are almost all wrong, but like all of us It's a coincidence that governments are doing fine, you're doing what you can, I'm saying that the whole set of restrictions on political action, political knowledge, political action is so great that I know, will be what God wills.

Infinite doubt

"What I am going to say now has to do with a task that we all need and need to have and that I have to continue as an economic historian, political historian when I dare to venture into history politics, like nothing, anything. " , to the intellectuals and we realized them. And the question has to do with something that He wonders until he is tired and always responds differently: is there a failure in Argentina? Observe the following: if this question had been asked by 1877, one could say that yes, in the midst of the crisis of Avellaneda (Nicolás). But if you ask me this question in full expansion of the Roquista project, it looks like no. And if we went in 1914, we said yes. But if we went in 1927, we said no. So, beware of the idea of ​​failure as the idea of ​​permanent. Argentina is fundamentally volatile and cyclical. It is losing ground in this volatility and cyclicality, but it is not always a monotonous failure.. The question is for me to tell you the enormous amount of badumptions that exist about the infinite question: when was Argentina spoiled? 1810, children of Spain, failure. Civil wars from 1820 to 1880, product of federal distributive conflict, failure. 1914, the end of the expansion of the agricultural border, the land is over, failure. Origin of failure, I mean. 1930, we ran out of trade, one of the countries that have traded the most over the past 50 years, failure. Now, these are hypotheses that contrast with each other. 1945, Peronism, many of us, not me, some of us could say: "there is the origin of a failure, there is the origin of populist poison ", I have nothing to do with this idea, but it is a widespread idea. And the symmetrical opposite of that one, we can say it: 1976, neoliberalism. Or you can finish by saying: 2001, the end of the world. I can badure you that I can multiply by ten the badumptions that I have just given you. Today, there are no civil wars as an expression of federal conflicts.

I want to say that the new federal conflict that we have, the one that we have located, I would say 20 kilometers from Casa Rosada in a kind of social refugee camp that is reproduced in the Gran Rosario, which is reproduced in the Greater Córdoba and which also breeds in other big cities of the interiorthis federal conflict, this new type of federal conflict, is as if we had changed this one of the past, because this federal conflict was a federal conflict of which the rich was the province of Buenos Aires. "Analysis and diagnosis Focus on what I want to focus I change my diagnosis often, and when I read them again, they are not so different from the ones I had, but one turns to round, let's see, I say something, they say, "Am I saying something new, am I adding something marginal, or am I adding anything? "I do not know, sometimes I do not know, I do not realize, then I would like, because it might be more efficient to convey the idea, the hypothesis that I have in my head today, like the one I had before a year or two ago.The impression I have about Argentina is that Argentina has known difficulties and conflicts a growth model, an internist and inclusive protectionist and distributive marketI want to emphasize that protectionism in Argentina could have been good at one time, bad at another time, but until very recently, and I believe that even today marginally, it is protectionism which is basically a social protection. final moment. The question is therefore: can we do without the moderate protectionism that plays the role of social protection, the one that stems from this development scheme of the internist market that I was talking about that led to the 1970s? I think that we still can not go through it. It is the political civilization. What I believe is this diagram of … I stop for a moment, I use the word "development" deliberately, I do not use the word "growth". I use the word "development" because I want to tell you that the word "development" is not a slogan. This is not a vague invention. An article has just been published, in September 1959, in Julio Olivera's Economic Quarter, in tribute to this one. He breaks his head – and I recommend it – to distinguish the notions of growth and development. And it is interesting to know that this distinction makes sense and that both are useful, operational and, in addition, rigorous concepts. The impression that I have is that this trend of development of the distributive and inclusive internist market with all its difficulties is over… I believe, fundamentally, with the end of Bretton Woods and the birth of financial globalization. And that's what I want to point out, nothing has been replaced. The Argentine economy is an economy that lives without orientation, without. There is a distribution model that was exhausted, having given much of itself, having even tried to change itself when a generation of intellectuals of the 60s was looking for a way to export the industry. Fascinating, I say. The 60's in this sense are fascinating. And that's broken. But it collapsed in a very particular way, the import substitution was exhausted, export promotion produced, if you will, fruit a little lean and in exchange, we had nothing. What we had, what we have been saying in a way since 1978, is a good year, it's the year of financial globalization in Argentina, it's 79, I say 79 aesthetically how much. 40 years. Forty years of financial globalization without being able to save a different development model from this inclusive internist market that has provided us with many social and economic benefits. "

Another model

"Between 1948 and 2011, so that no one would tell me that I hold the last period, Argentina grew by 1.8% a year." And between 1974 and 2011, it grew by 0.8% a year This old Argentina, which we rightly give as a thing of the past, arouses a recent temptation: "Let's go back, recover the lost paradise." What do you know? This lost paradise can not be recovered. How is the sentence? Do not look in the … Do not look in space for what has been lost in time, a phrase we like. It was lost. To see then the problems of the construction of a new model of development, to see the problems that it has, does not imply the anachronism of the return to the past. There is no past possible, I still use the term that will bear fruit. There is not any. So I think in the last 40 years it has sometimes seemed like we were coming out of it, for example the Menem years. During the Menem years, exports experienced extraordinary dynamism, but with a savings rate so low that Argentina was still in deficit, this was not a sustainable growth momentum. How can we go out? I say, if this inclusive internist market model is over, what do we put in its place? What are we building instead? And I believe that what we do not build in its place is a social coalition and a pro export policy. Social Coalition and favorable export policy, which does not mean Korea. That does not mean an export-led model, but export dynamics that allows us to maintain consumption and investment. When one of you says, "We can not go out without consumption", I concede it, but this consumption must be maintained by an export dynamic, otherwise we do not have one. "

L & # 39; s invitation

"I invite you to think in these terms.Someone said here" all together "I do not know if it was a coalition, an agreement political or otherwise.The reason, and with this I finish, why I I am convinced that this must be a collective task it is not only because there is not enough political strength to go ahead. Do you know why? Because in this headless animal that I tried to describe, this animal that was disoriented between 1974 and 2011 or between 1974 and 2019 and whose growth rate went from 0.8 to 0.5. This is the experience of dictatorship with financial globalization, exchange rate appreciation, volatility, unemployment and crisis. Crises that are not symmetrical crises. When They throw the poorest in the countryside, the next cycle of expansion no longer integrates them, that's why persistence is so important. And it was the dictatorship, it was Menem, if you look at it, it was the Kirchner, because the disaccumulation of reserves at the time when there were still exceptional terms of exchange is the same thing as the short-term debt, difference, and it was the first two years of Macri. I say you have to remember the "how you see it". Let's get together, say, "How do you see that?" Because we all have enough wounds. "