"Is Argentina the most developed country in Latin America?" today's El Clarín Buenos Aires daily asks
A recent report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) seems to think Argentina is Latin America's "most developed" country. Buenos Aires's biggest daily, El Clarín, is skeptical:
¿Es la Argentina el país más desarrollado de América latina?
I share the daily's skepticism after having lived there for five weeks this summer. While Argentina might be the "most developed country" in Latin America on the UNDP list, this doesn't seem to trickle down to the country's daily realities, at least amongst its poor, working, and middle classes. As the paper cogently - and with more than a bit of irony - points out: "[w]ith an annual revenue of $2000 per person per year, informing us from Washington that each Argentinean carries with them a value of $130,000 [for the national economy] is not very convincing. To arrive at this exaggerated conclusion, in a country with 40% of its population living under the poverty line, the World Bank uses indicators that don't just account for the actual situation but rather the 'potential' situation, as well.... In conclusion, international reports like these ones that claim that Argentina is the richest country on the continent are more worthy for what they don't show than for the reality they claim to measure."
This brings to mind an apt observation by the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse from his 1964 book One Dimensional Man:
Kudos on the editors of El Clarín - part of Argentina's biggest media conglomerate, I might add - for calling this NGO's spade a spade.
¿Es la Argentina el país más desarrollado de América latina?
I share the daily's skepticism after having lived there for five weeks this summer. While Argentina might be the "most developed country" in Latin America on the UNDP list, this doesn't seem to trickle down to the country's daily realities, at least amongst its poor, working, and middle classes. As the paper cogently - and with more than a bit of irony - points out: "[w]ith an annual revenue of $2000 per person per year, informing us from Washington that each Argentinean carries with them a value of $130,000 [for the national economy] is not very convincing. To arrive at this exaggerated conclusion, in a country with 40% of its population living under the poverty line, the World Bank uses indicators that don't just account for the actual situation but rather the 'potential' situation, as well.... In conclusion, international reports like these ones that claim that Argentina is the richest country on the continent are more worthy for what they don't show than for the reality they claim to measure."
This brings to mind an apt observation by the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse from his 1964 book One Dimensional Man:
"As a habit of thought outside the scientific and technical language, such reasoning shapes the expression of a specific social and political behaviourism. In this behavioural universe, words and concepts tend to coincide, or rather the concept tends to be absorbed by the word.... The word becomes cliché.... The communication precludes genuine development of meaning...[where]...the functionalization of language has a political connotation.... At the nodal points of the universe of public discourse, self-validating, analytical propositions appear which function like magic-ritual formulas.... The result is the familiar Orwellian language ('peace is war' and 'war is peace,' etc.)" (Marcuse, 1964, pp. 87-88).
Kudos on the editors of El Clarín - part of Argentina's biggest media conglomerate, I might add - for calling this NGO's spade a spade.
posted by Marcelo Vieta at
12:26 AM
