BadEmpanada Lies About Argentina Being Kept Non-Industrialized

 Confirming the 2017 interpretations of economists Edward Glaeser, Rafael Di Tella, and Lucas LLac, none of whom are radical free market ideologues, and the latter two of whom are Argentines themselves, in their paper, Introduction to Argentine exceptionalism, there is a sort of historical revisionism among some students of Argentinian economic history regarding how prosperous the country really was and seemingly how much potential it really had. The go-to theory for subscribers of this approach is the idea that, despite being in the top 10 countries in the world as concerned GDP per capita rankings by 1913, Argentina was never actually that rich and it was because of the legacy of Spanish colonial land policy that this was still the case and the growth that did occur was because of an export boom. This is more or less the theory posited by left-wing YouTuber BadEmpanada in his 2021 YouTube video “Argentina Was Never ‘Rich’: The Myth of Economic Decline”. The basic premise of this video is that because the Spanish had dished out land to their cronies during their three centuries of rule over Argentina, the country was never able to escape the grasp of a few oligarchic landowners and subsequently never industrialized before Juan Peron came to power. These landowners enjoyed export earnings that the rest of the population did not and were able to live in opulence, while the rest of the country was comparatively destitute. Plus, consulting with criteria on what is generally measured to see if a developing country is rich or not, such as life expectancy and the numbers of years of schooling the average person had, Argentina was behind countries like the United States, France, or Australia. Even worse, apparently, was the country’s supposed lack of industrialization. The oligarchic landowners are said to have actively kept the country from industrializing in order to keep it poor for their own benefit, as it is declared impossible for a country to grow rich exporting primary agricultural products. A country ostensibly needs to industrialize for that to happen. Immigrants are briefly mentioned as having been attracted by land offerings, but are otherwise totally ignored in the video, despite their gigantic impact on 1880-1914 Argentina. The wealth of Buenos Aires may appear to have been real in early 20th century films of the city, but this ignores the squalor everyday people lived in. (Why contrasts in living conditions among different income levels made Argentina not truly wealthy, but the United States or United Kingdom, with cities full of comparable contrasts, were still wealthy, is not fully explained.) All in all, the video presents a decent basic overview of Argentine economic history from the late 19th to early 20th century, but fails to appreciate the numerous nuances of the country’s economy and ways that it was indeed growing steadily. Nothing better demonstrates this then the industrialization that did indeed occur prior to import substitution becoming official policy during the Great Depression after the 1930 military coup, the major immigration destination that Argentina proved itself to be compared to alternative countries in the Western Hemisphere, and most importantly, the reality that land concentration, while bad, was not a death knell dooming the country to stagnation without some kind of Peron figure coming to rectify the situation it is presented as.                                                                      

Since this seems to be the most important reason for why Argentina was supposedly never rich to BadEmpanada, it is worth first touching upon the subject of industrialization in the country during the 1880 to 1930 period and showing that it was not quite as absent as his video makes it sound. Seemingly influenced by the Ha-Joon Chang-type, developmentalist school of economics, BadEmpanada expresses the opinion that it is impossible for a country that mainly exports primary agricultural products to become rich. How largely agricultural New Zealand, Canada, and Australia got to their First World status is never explained in this hypothesis, aside from a mention of less land concentration. All the same, the narrative in the video is that landowning oligarchs ran the show. They were not interested in industrializing, so it did not happen. Never addressed is that the view that Argentina’s enormous increase in agricultural productivity, massive expansion of railroads to facilitate exports from this productivity, or that the meatpacking industry that came with this could be all considered as forms of industrialization. What seems to be industrialization in this framework is only an economy of manufacturers and an internal market being created and protected by high tariff walls. While it is true that Argentina's comparative advantage was definitely in agriculture, this ignores the fact that Buenos Aires, as well as Corboda and Santa Fe to an extent, did have domestic manufacturers. They were largely small workshops employing around a dozen or fewer people, but they certainly existed. Another left-wing narrative on Argentina's economic history that BE does not bring up, but that is very popular, is the idea that even if the British never managed to conquer the country as a colony, as they tried to do twice in 1806 and 1807, they did manage to do this through direct foreign investment into the country. Indeed, possibly because it would contradict the narrative, the most famous Argentine historical event concerning British investment and President Hipolito Yriogyen's moderation in labor relations, La Semana Tragic (The Tragic Week), is noticeably absent in this video. The reason? It involved a strike among the workers of the Argentine Iron & Steel Manufactures, a company that employed 2,500 people. That might make the narrative that the country was all enthralled to landowning petty tyrants looks a bit awkward. The British-owned railways are mentioned later on, but that is the most we get of the gigantic presence of British foreign-investment in the country. Finally, of note with regards to industrialization, it should be said that the landowning oligarchs actually did support import-substitution by the time the Great Depression started. When the rest of the world was throwing up trade barriers, it was hard not to.