![]() ![]() In infrastructure or human capital to match the top-to-bottom developments in other western cities. Others concentrated their efforts on turning select areas of Buenos Aires, at least superficially, into a copy of London and Paris, but they were unwilling to fund (via taxation or philanthropy) investments The far lower levels of education in rural Argentina.Īs the next figure shows, no variable from 1900 better explains success in 2000 than investment in education.ĭon’t forget the entrenchment of an extremely self-interested oligarchy of beef barons and shipping families that stifled political and social development in early 20th century Argentina. By contrast, more than a fifth of Buenos Aires’s population was illiterate until 1900, reflecting Migrants who came to the city had been well educated in the common schools that dotted America’s farmland. ![]() ![]() Throughout the 19th century, Chicago was almost completely literate, because the rural The greater levels of technological innovation in Chicago probably reflected the higher levels of education in the United States. Buenos Aires’s entrepreneurs, such as the industrious Torcuato DiTella, often succeeded by importing American technologies, as DiTella did with gas pumps and refrigerators. Chicago was a seedbed of technological innovations, including the skyscraper, the zipper and Capital per worker was more than twice higher in the Windy City. Clothing was also Buenos Aires’s largest industry.īut there were also major dissimilarities between the two places.Ĭhicago was substantially wealthier, even a century ago. Ships, greatly increased its ability to ship beef. Buenos Aires grew as a center for transporting agricultural products east. Like Chicago, the city was surrounded by a vast, fertile hinterland. The story of Buenos Aires is broadly similar. Clothing employed even more Chicagoans, who were making garments for thousands of rural customers, supplied by Marshall Field, Montgomery Ward and Of refrigerated rail cars that shipped slaughtered beef back east. Chicago’s most famous 19th century industry was its stockyards, which thrived because The waterways and enabled the rich farmland of Iowa to ships its corn, in porcine form, to eastern markets via Chicago. Cities like Chicago grew as the nodes of that network.Ĭhicago’s fortune was made by two canals, the Erie Canal and the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which turned Chicago into the linchpin on a great watery arc that runs from New York to New Orleans. Network of canals and rails makes America’s rich farmland accessible. The enormous costs of shipping by land caused America’s population to perch on the Eastern Seaboard, dependent on an Atlantic lifeline. In 1816, it cost as much to move goods 32 miles over landĪs to ship across the Atlantic. Chicago grew great in the 19th century as a conduit for the agricultural wealth of the American hinterland. In many ways, the two cities are strikingly similar. In a recent paper, Felipe Campante and I have taken an urban perspective on Argentine exceptionalism and compared ![]() Was different from other wealthy countries, like the United States. To understand Argentina’s political problems during the 20th century, we must look back to the Belle Epoque, and try to understand why, despite its wealth, Argentina Those bad policies weren’t just bad luck. Decades of political instability have made property rights insecure and investmentĪrgentina was cursed with bad policies that bear much of the blame for the country’s problems, but why was Argentina’s public sector so problematic? Has historically had trouble weathering severe shocks. Neither strategy has been particularly good for growth. Peronism was not only protectionist, but it also favored large state enterprises and significant regulation of the economy. After World War II, formerly poor countries including Japan, Korea and Italy followed an export-led model to wealth.Ī combination of external shocks (two world wars and the Great Depression) and protectionism caused Argentina to turn inward. In its pre-World War I heyday, Argentina thrived as a trading giant shipping beef and grain abroad. ![]()
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