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Argentina fact of the day
The country was not quite as rich in the early days as it is sometimes made out to be:
Argentina’s performance on this measure is frequently exaggerated. In 1929, for example, Argentina’s per capita income was less than half of the average of other temperate agrarian societies (such as Canada and Australia) and of European industrialized countries (such as Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, and Sweden). In 1969 and in 1929, it was 38 percent of the U.S. figure…
That is from the very good 1996 Larry Sawers book The Other Argentina: The Interior and National Development. It is related to my earlier post on Salta.
The author also has an excellent explanation of how import substitution strategies run out of steam, even if they produce more growth in a shorter run. The import substitutes usually require subsidies to get started, which puts a squeeze on the government budget, and in fact you can think of import substitution as a kind of deficit spending/borrowing against the future. The import substitution also puts a squeeze on the agricultural sector, which for many countries, Argentina included, had been generating net foreign exchange. The balance of payments then worsens, which also becomes a longer run problem. Over time, in addition, obtaining the needed foreign inputs for the import-substituting sectors becomes yet another problem. In time, tariffs are needed for the nascent domestic sector, and that protectionism lowers living standards and also leads to higher corruption.
As the author notes:
In the early postwar years, ISI [import substitution] was highly recommended by almost every development economist in the world and pursued by virtually every Third World country.
At first it worked, but over time it fared far less well. This is one of the very best and also unheralded books about Argentina, as there are interesting points on almost every page. One point the author makes, for instance, is that the Argentina economy never had great facility in making high fixed investments, even before Peron and various later depredations. Most of all, this is a book that actually tries to answer your questions.
Friday assorted links
1. Those new service sector jobs, former chess player edition.
2. John O. McGinnis reviews GOAT.
3. Huge ancient city found in the Amazon.
4. Michael Magoon on progress-related Substacks.
5. Elaine Schwartz has been blogging every day for ten years at Econlife.
6. Things you learn dating Cate Hall. And Cate’s essay on how to be more agentic.
My “writing every day” awards
Since I recommend the practice of writing every day, or virtually every day (every day is better!), I thought I should give awards for 2023.
Clear winner in my view in Noah Smith, who just keeps on writing and being productive and improving. Here is Noah’s Substack.
Runner-up awards go to the blog Economists Writing Every Day (duh).
Cass Sunstein remains extraordinarily prolific, and Rainer Zitelmann keeps on writing books, he has a new one Unbreakable Spirit: Rising Above All Odds.
I wonder if the exact same people will win next year? If you don’t see these awards given again, that means the answer has been “yes.”
*You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism*
That is the new book by my colleague Bryan Caplan, collected largely from his previous blog writings. Bryan emails to me:
I just released a new book of essays on Amazon, entitled *You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism*. Emerson and Thoreau were right: Excessive conformity is a major impediment to living a full life in the modern world, and you really can improve a lot with modest effort.For details, see my recent Substack.…Like my other books of essays, You Will Not Stampede Me is divided into four parts.
- The first, echoing Milgram, is “Disobedience to Authority.” These pieces dissect the psychology and economics of being normal.
- The next section, “The World Is Wrong,” explores big, specific issues where the popular opinion sucks. Covid, of course, but also bioethics, trolling, the right of revenge, and more.
- I follow with “The Weird Is Right,” most notably with the essay, “A Non-Conformist’s Guide to Success in a Conformist World.” Yes, the world does punish non-conformists, but so sporadically and thoughtlessly than the crafty can usually defy the world with impunity.
- I close the book with “Non-Conformist Candor,” where I call a litany of hand-picked controversies just like I see them.
As usual with my books of essays, you can read them all for free in the Bet On It Archives. What you get for your $12 is curation, convenience, and coolness.
As you might expect, I like to troll Bryan by telling him he is a deeply conformist suburban Dad, in the good sense of course. Read this book and find out if I am right or not.
What should I ask Jonathan Haidt?
Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with him. Here is my previous Conversation with him, almost eight years ago. As many of you will know, Jonathan has a new book coming out, namely
The Everything Token
If you want to understand NFTs and where they are going, The Everything Token by web entrepreneur Steve Kaczynski and Harvard Business school professor Scott Duke Kominers is by far the best guide. 
Kaczynski and Kominers emphasize that NFTs are more than deeds to digital art they are an ideal way to create communities.
Community formation around shared interests has been happening forever, of course. But NFTs turn it up to eleven because of what we call their embedded network superpower:…becoming the owner of an NFT is to some degree an act of affiliation with the brand. Yet NFT ownership doesn’t just connect you with the brand itself, but also with the entire network of individuals who are similarly affiliated….The holders of a given NFT comprise a network of brand enthusiasts just waiting to be activated.
The Everything Token is all about advising brands on what NFTs are, how to understand and navigate the design space and how to active brand enthusiasm. Now you may find ‘activating brand enthusiasm’ pedestrian, perhaps even a little dystopian but Kaczynski and Kominers are correct that this is where the NFT market is going.
When the internet first exploded into public consciousness there was a lot of talk about declaring independence and creating a civilization of the Mind. If you bought into that (I did not, despite lauding the goals) then maybe you think that the internet as we know it today, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and all the rest are a big disappointment. I don’t. I love the new world, even if it isn’t the libertarian paradise that some once promised.
In the same way, NFTs won’t lead to a revolution of the creator class but they are poised to be increasingly adopted by corporations. Corporate adoption will ‘domesticate’ the underlying cryptographic technology. That is, as corporations infuse NFTs into mainstream business models, NFTs will become more user-friendly and accessible and much like the seamless integration into our daily lives of technologies such as Google Maps and digital payments, they will become a ubiquitous part of the digital economy. As NFTs become embedded in various sectors ranging from finance to entertainment, they will reshape how we perceive and interact with digital assets offering innovative and versatile applications that extend well beyond their current scope. It will be fun but don’t expect to liberate the means of production.
*Molly*
That is the new book by Blake Butler, a memoir. It is no spoiler to tell you that his wife Molly takes her own life at a young age. I don’t know of any better argument for social conservatism than this book. And perhaps suicide should be regarded as a sin, not something to get sentimental about on Twitter. There is so much depravity in this book, at so many different levels. There is the decline of a whole civilization in this book. Here is a good New Yorker review by Alexandra Schwarz.
What I’ve been reading
1. Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create. Could the be the best book on NFTs? I think we should be genuinely uncertain as to whether NFTs have a future. In the meantime, I consider NFTs a good Rorschach test for whether an individual’s mind is capable of moving out of “the dismissive mode.” Do you pass or fail this test? The “snide, sniping” mode is so hard for many commentators to resist…
2. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans. Excellent text and also color plates, including paintings and sketches of her, a very good introduction to her work. Here is a good bit: “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture. Yet she seems actively to have resisted the lure of the world of images, preferring to live and write, as Bell liked to think she did spontaneously, out of her own mind.” A wonderful chronicle of a very particular time, artistic and otherwise.
3. Peter Cowie, God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman. The author knew Bergman, and early on, so this is a useful biography in several regards, most of all for some background information and TV and theatre projects that never came to fruition. But it is not useful for converting the unconverted, nor does it have much more interpretative meat for the in-the-know obsessives.
4. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis. One of my favorite books on the British Enlightenment. For instance, the author captures the tenor of 18th century British debates about liberty very well. Very good chapters on Hume, Shelburne, and Macaulay. Whatmore somehow writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you! If you read a lot of history books, you will know that is oddly rare. Recommended, for all those who care.
5. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. So far I’ve read only 22 pp. of this one, and it clocks in at 900 pp. plus. It is obviously excellent and I wanted to tell you about it right away. I expect it to make the top few picks of the best non-fiction of 2024. The author’s main theme is that Byzantium built a “New Roman Empire,” and he details how that happened. The writing is also clear and transparent, for a time period that is not always easy to understand.
William Magnuson, For Profit: A History of Corporations is not a book for me, but it is a good and sane introduction for those seeking that.
My classical music listening for the year 2023
2023 has been one of my very best years for classic music listening. I’ve discovered an unusually high number of excellent recordings, and made a lot of progress in understanding many composers better. Most of all, that would be Bach, Scriabin, Byrd, Handel, Robert Ashley, and Caroline Shaw, but by no means exhausting the list. For whatever reasons, I’ve just had an immense amount of emotional energy to put into these discoveries.
I thought I would write up a list of my favorite new recordings, but there are too many of them. Here are just a few:
Handel, The Eight Great Suites and Overtures, Francesco Corti. My whole life I’ve preferred these for piano, say by Richter. Corti is converting me to the harpsichord versions.
Frank Peter Zimmermann, Bach, sonatas and partitas for solo violin, volumes one and two. These are some of my favorite works to buy multiple versions of. I started off preferring the Milstein recordings, which still are wonderful. Last year went through a Biondi phase, now am enamored of these. I never tire of these pieces.
Monteverdi, Vespro Della Beata Vergine, conducted by Raphaël Pichon, covered here by the NYT. Monteverdi’s greatest work, and this recording has been receiving special praise from many quarters.
Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, the complete score (for the first time recorded), John Wilson and Sinfonia of London.
Here is the Alex Ross New Yorker classical music recording list: “I can’t remember a year of so many pleasure-inducing, addiction-triggering albums.”
You also might consult these 2023 recommendations from Gramophone, the ones I have heard are excellent, the others are high expected value.
It is a marvel that such a revenue-poor, streaming-intensive musical world is generating so many new and amazing recordings for virtually all kinds of classical music. This is not what I was expecting five to ten years ago.
Another marvel is how many world-beating recordings are coming from young performers who do not have mega-strong preestablished reputations. A lot of them I have never heard of before.
Most of all, I am pleased to see that beauty is proving so robust.
Merry Christmas everybody!
*The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters*
By Benjamin Moser, I loved this book. It is one of my favorite books of art criticism ever, written from the perspective of a fan I might add. It talks you through the pictures and the lives of the 17th century Dutch artists and tries to tie it all together. It doesn’t spend too much time on the super-famous works or the anecdotes you might already know.
If you want to get down to brass tacks, after Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Fabritius — the top Dutch masters — I like Pieter Saenredam and Paulus Potter and Rachel Ruysch, who had ten children. I admire Hals, but don’t go to any great lengths to go see it. Judith Leyster remains modestly underrated. If you read this book, you’ll come away with your own opinions, or revise the ones you already have. The color plates are well presented.
Moser is highly rated but still underrated, and his Lispector and Sontag biographies are excellent as well.
*Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative*
That is the new memoir from Glenn C. Loury, and I cracked it open right away, here is one excerpt:
But now Harvard is looking to retool its ailing Afro-American Studies department, and Tom [Schelling] serves on the committee whose job it is to recruit new faculty worthy of the institution. The chair of that committee is the distinguished black historian Nathan Huggins, who has recently taken the helm in Afro Studies at Harvard. Apparently my Econometrica paper on intergenerational transfers had gotten their attention, and my writing on the dynamics of racial income differences has piqued their interest. I’m just six years past my PhD and they’re offering a joint appointment as full professor of economics and of Afro-American Studies. The appointment would make me the first black tenured professor in the history of Harvard’s economics department. I like the sound of that. In the past, the timing hadn’t quite felt right for Harvard. But now it does feel right, and I have the sense that if I say no a third time, they won’t be calling again.
You can pre-order the book here, it is self-recommending of course. And here is my earlier Conversation with Glenn Loury.
The new *Pedro Páramo* translation
By Juan Rulfo, first published in 1955. The previous English-language translation was abysmal, so this is perhaps the least read piece of truly great world literature? In the English-speaking world at least. It took me a long time and a lot of effort to read this short novel in Spanish. The vocabulary is not difficult, it is simply difficult in any language to know exactly what is going on. What exactly are the borders between the living and the dead, for instance? Which character is doing what? What is Rulfo telling us about Dante? As first-tier literature should, it strains our capabilities to the utmost. A knowledge of rural Mexico helps, for sure.
García Márquez compared the work to that of Sophocles in import. Carlos Fuentes called it “the essential Mexican novel.” For me it is in the top 25 novels of all time. Susan Sontag thought it was one of the essential works of 20th century literature.
The new Douglas J. Weatherford translation is probably as good as it is going to get. The work is intrinsically difficult to translate, so try the Spanish if you can, or read the two jointly together, switching back and forth. And as they like to say in Haiti, “if you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.”
Recommended, essential, and kudos to Weatherford for making this available. I’ve addended it to my favorite fiction of 2023 list.
*The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights*
That is the new book by David Beito, and the subtitle is The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance. Here is the closing passage:
If Roosevelt’s civil-liberties reputation meant anything to mainstream Americans at the end of the 1950s, it was not for witch hunts against gays in the navy, mass surveillance of private telegrams, crackdowns on free speech, inquisitorial investigations, sedition prosecutions, or the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Far more central in the memories of most was his authorship of the four freedoms and the Fair Employment Practices Committee and the appointment of Black and Douglas to the Supreme Court. But that was not the whole truth, or even the beginning of the whole truth.
There you go. I don’t think these facts are much contested, though the accompanying mood affiliation hasn’t changed very much.
Salta (and Jujuy) notes
The food is excellent. Don’t worry about choosing the right restaurant, just try to eat the simple things. Corn products. Beans. Baked goods such as empanadas. Don’t waste your time on the steak. The food stalls in the Mercado Municipal are a good place to start, and many items there cost fifty cents to a dollar. The “sopa de mani” (peanut soup) is especially good, and almost identical to what you find in Bolivia.
The overall vibe in Salta reminds me of both northern Mexico and the older parts of the American Southwest. And the adjacent parts of Bolivia. It is hot, the cities are surrounded by beautiful scenery, and it still all feels rather wild. Salta is also much safer than Buenos Aires, and you don’t see many beggars here. In B.A. they are now asking for food rather than money.
There’s not much to do in Salta, as the central sights in town are the two mummified remains of young Incan girls in the archaeological museum. They are memorable, as it feels like they are staring right back at you.
Spending time here will cure you of utopianism, and also of pessimism. Whatever issues you might think are really important, most people here really don’t care about them or even know about them.
American brands at the retail level are not to be seen. Nor will you run across Chinese or Indian merchants. Perhaps a Syrian or Lebanese is to be found, but not in any great numbers.
Tyrone is accompanying me, and I asked him what he thinks. As you might expect, he had only stupid rudeness in response. Tyrone said that northern Argentina is the true essence of the Argentinean nation, and that everyone interested in Argentina should visit here. In fact, having visited North Macedonia, he wishes to rename the country South Bolivia — were they not once part of the same Viceroyalty? Is it not enough to share the same soup? Do they not have broadly the same accent, devoid of all that B.A. slurring? Was not the country born here in the north? That is where the decisive battle for national independence was fought and won. Do we not all agree with theories of deep roots? It is not just who moves to your nation, but it is about how and where your nation was founded. And for Argentina that is in the north, and with violence and corruption and economic decline. Tyrone even wishes to hand over the rest of Patagonia to the Chileans, so that Argentina may better recognize its true self.
In the twisted view of Tyrone, the creation of the modernist city of Brasilia was a big success. The real failure, hermetically hidden by some charming Parisian and Barcelona-style architecture, was the attempted modernist outpost of Buenos Aires, an immature and underdeveloped excrudescence from the real nation of chocro, horse saddles and the quebrada. It tricked a few Johnny-come-lately migrants during the early 20th century, and neglected to tell them they still would be ruled by the ideas and the norms of the north.
Imagine thinking that you could govern a nation with high modernism and Freudian psychoanalysis — what folly! And now, Tyrone tells us, we have the Milei revolution, attempting to replace one Viennese modernism — that of Freud — with the Viennese modernist revolution of Mises. Good luck with that one, Tyrone says. What kind of fool would think that the future of South America would be determined by a war across different Viennese modernisms? Those mummified corpses still will rule the day, whether or not the feds balance the budget in the short term. Desiccated ever-young girls are in perpetual deficit, no matter how the daily fiscal accounts may read.
I had to stop Tyrone right then and there, as he was explaining why the current hyperinflation probably was a good thing, as the only path to true dollarization and at least one symbolic unification with North America. Tyrone was shouting that such symbolic unification nonetheless was impossible, and thus the corpses had brought in Milei to restore fiscal sanity and prevent dollarization and thus protect the true Incan and Andean nation.
Such thoughts are not allowed on Marginal Revolution, and so I am now trying to persuade Tyrone to visit Iguassu, in the hope that I can induce him to take a quick swim in those falls…
I hope the rest of you will visit northern Argentina nonetheless, and put all that nonsense aside. The empanadas await you.
What I’ve been reading
Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Yes, that is the Rob Henderson of Twitter and Substack. He was raised by foster parents and joined the Air Force at the age of seventeen. He ended up with a Ph.D. from Cambridge. This is his story, it covers class in America, and it is a paean to family stability.
There Were Giants in the Land: Episodes in the Life of W. Cleon Skousen. Compiled and edited by Jo Ann and Mark Skousen. If you are interested in LDS, one approach is to read The Book of Mormon. Another option is to read a book like this one. It is also, coming from a very different direction, a paean to family stability.
Thomas Bell, Kathmandu. There should be more books about individual cities, and this is one of them, one of the best in fact. Excerpt: “At its most local levels, of the neighbourhood, or the individual house, Kathmandu is ordered by religious concepts, either around holy stones, or divinely sanctioned carpentry and bricklaying techniques. The same is true of the city as a whole.” And how do they still have so many Maoists?
Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala & English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas, edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, and Shash Trevett. A truly excellent collection, worthy of making the best non-fiction of 2023 list. Or does this count as fiction? It’s mostly about things that happened.
Eric H. Cline, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations. A good sequel to the very good 1177 B.C.
Allison Pugh, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World accurately diagnosing networking as a skill that will rise significantly in value in a tech-laden world.
Dorian Bandy, Mozart The Performer: Variations on the Showman’s Art shows how Mozart, first and foremost, was a showman and that background shaped his subsequent output and career.