I don't think this is the approach if you want people to side against Milei.
His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.
Inflation is still far higher than it was 15 years ago without contractive policies that are destroying the industrial fabric of the country, and the local understanding of economist that actually know a thing or two is that there is inflationary inertia that will not be solved by the current policies.
> the economy is growing
By no means is the economy growing; industrial capacity is down. The nominal price of goods is going up and the cost of living is going up which appears in some metrics as more money moving in the economy, alebeit for drastically lower production as the real price in US dollars has doubled across every product line. The indexes that show progress use outdated purchasing baskets.
> percentage of poor people is down
Poverty went drastically up at the beginning of his mandate and still has not recovered baseline values. Most poverty indicators continue to undercount the impact of the cost of food, medical insurance and services, which hit poor homes disproportionately. This can be observed by the fact that medicine and food consumption are the categories whose consumption has been hit the hardest.
> salaries are up
Registered salaries using indices that have no accomodated for the changes in inflationary inertia are not very useful. [Consumption, however, is the lowest it's been in 20 years with no sign of recovery](https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/01/15/el-consumo-masiv...).
> For nearly 40 years, Argentina’s poverty level had consistently hovered above 25 percent. But since the far-right Milei took office on December 10, 2023, that figure has skyrocketed.
When he started, the poverty index was around 40%, not 25%. Then it peaked to almost 55%, but now they claim it has descended to around 40% again (It's probably down, but I'd wait a few months for confirmation.).
Also, from 2007 to 2015 the numbers were heavily cooked, so take that period with a grain of salt.
And in ~1990 we had an hyperinflation, that may skew the average in weird ways.
> But two months ago, their rent mushroomed from 90,000 Argentinian pesos to 150,000 — a leap from roughly $88 to $148. It was beyond their ability to afford.
We had a heavy rent control, so most apartments were out of the market and it was difficult to find one.
For some time it was ilegal to raise the rent and the inflation was 100% yoy. So a contract for two years used to say something like you have to pay an average of AR$75K, but only AR$50K during the first year and AR$100 during the second year. So no "rise", only a weird paying scheme.
Also, to renew it, you must pay the new market rate, but the inflation was 200% yoy instead of the predicted 100% yoy. So the new prize was AR$150K and AR$300K (with an average of AR$225K).
(IIRC there were some changes to allow increments that follow the inflation index, but only every 6 months. With an inflation rate of 250% yoy, that means that every 6 months your rent double overnight.)
So IMO it's not outdated, but the numbers are cherry picked and are difficult to understand if you never lived with a 200% yearly inflation.
I have no desire if to influence if people side with or against Milei. If you want to follow him, by all means go for it.
I am however, still going to mock obviously bat shit insane ideas, and telepathically speaking with your cloned dogs for policy advice is absolutely bat shit insane
He apparently did clone his dogs but can you point to the source material (in this case Milei) about speaking with them telepathically?
This just sounds super made up.
I've listen to his interview with Lex F. and his WEF speech and he sounded like a principled free market advocate. Not a single thing he said was crazy so I wonder where did you get this factoid.
Milei has certainly been smeared as right-wing so I wouldn't be surprised with other smears as well.
He's said so in speeches I've listened to. He claims his dog Conan (deceased) gives him advice from the Beyond. You can also google the myriad of interviews with him that mention this (and note: not all of them are critical, some found this touch of craziness endearing!).
He also claims his dogs (all clones of his revered Conan) are his "children", because they are the only "people" -- along with his sister -- "who will not betray him". Note that very few people have seen these dogs alive (very few recent photos or videos), and there's concern they may also be providing him comfort from "the Great Beyond". He gets enraged if people question him about this.
The guy is mentally unstable.
> Milei has certainly been smeared as right-wing so I wouldn't be surprised with other smears as well.
Sadly, in this case the truth is stranger than fiction.
> His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.
Do you live in Argentina? Because none of this is actually true.
Look at the other side of the coin, too: his policies are authoritarian, he's dismantling science and industry, he's becoming like a religious leader automatically aligned with the US in whatever random things Trump says (e.g. attempting to leave the WHO just because Trump claimed he would do so).
Lots of poor people begging on the streets for a country where "the percentage of poor people is down". Also, this percentage is compared to the previous administration, which wasn't very good and also went through the COVID pandemic.
He's also been sacking close associates left and right, not exactly a sign of a competent government that inspires confidence.
> salaries are up and so on
This is false, but also, the cost of living is going up. Oh, "inflation" won't show you this, but the actual cost in dollars will.
This make sense, I often use the normal search feature to research a very large ammount of information and it mostly does not work well. If the new search feature increases the number of websites scrapped and the pertinence of the websites, I'm all in.
If French, German and British nations start competing (like in the old days) for AI supremacy, it will unleash a level of creativity that we long forgot we are capable of in Europe.
DeepMind - the company owned by Google, but behind things like AlphaFold is based on London. And one of the fathers of modern AI - leading the resurgence of research into neural nets - Geoffrey Hinton is British-Canadian.
He moved from Britain originally due to the difficulty in getting his research funded.
So the issue isn't one of intellectual capital - and while it's obviously the case that well place monetary capital is an issue - it's not clear to me what the real underlying issue is.
Perhaps Europe needs a tech/industrial revolution again - where the power shifts from the old guard to the new. Perhaps too many people in charge in Europe are from a certain class that studied history at university.
Sure the ideas go away away back - but most people had given up on neural nets after the initial excitement, and sure others were also working on it - however the difference for me is he used it to solve real world interesting problems - and by showing what was possible - that ignited the resurgence.
Now you could argue that the people in the 60's and 70's didn't have the compute available to make non-toy networks, and it was only applying the same techniques on bigger datasets with more compute that was the real difference.
Sure - but that happens all the time in science - every innovation is building on the shoulders of others and the assignment of the Nobel prize is as a result often rather arbitrary.
Also don't underestimate the value of reducing to practice - the difference between coming up with an idea and actually making it work in practice.
I wouldn't discount the issue of intellectual capital. There are just a handful of universities in the UK that produce world class level work in CS. While there are dozens of such universities in the US. Numbers like that make a big difference.
And if I remember correctly, PhDs in the UK are kind of weird compared to the US. Your thesis has to be research that you haven't published yet.
The most common degree for UK politicians is PPE - politics, philosophy and economics.
I'm not sure the problem is an understanding of economics, it's an understanding of how the real world works, and how to make it better - they are often too easily swayed by big lobby groups with vested interests.
We both know that's not gonna happen. Europe is way too entrenched in its ways by this point. The good ol' glory days that brought in Airbus and Concorde are gone and not transferrable to the modern, dynamic and very internationally competitive SW world, nor are its leaders strong and motivated enough to enact policy changes that favor disruption of the old money guard at the expense of the status quo. Case in point we have no SW giants, no Airbus equivalent of the SW world. All Europe's giants are decades to centuries old. 20 years ago EU's GDP was on par with the US's, now we're only half the US's GDP. We're cooked.
Plus, we first have to prioritize solving more urgent and important topics like affordable housing (WHEN?!), the collapsing pension and welfare systems which is a ticking timebomb, cheap energy, collapsing demographic (see affordable housing), illegal immigration, Putin's war next door, the rise of the right wing (see illegal immigration) before jumping into another pissing contest with the US and China on something that's not gonna help fix the pressing issues we have right fucking now. I don't see how we can recover from this downward spiral when I look at the inactions of our politicians who are just kicking the can down the road and blaming the EU and other countries of the union for their own systemic failures.
Winning the AI race might sound cool but it might also be similar to winning the race to the moon: a cool flex but not super useful to the general population if they can't afford a place to live or getting healthcare in a timely manner. Until ChatGPT can wipe your retired old ass in a care home I doubt many people will see AI investments as being a top priority.
You just wrote my thoughts in polite manner. I am adding up, that German universities have no capability to do applied research. All the time everything “applied” was not worthy for them. “Applied” was the level of Hochschule (higher school) type institutions. Even being good these institutions didn’t had good reputation. So the best and brightest went to universities far away from practical research applications. The system isn’t built for great AI race. Add poor salaries and yearly contracts for research positions and all the smart pupils are gone. Gone to work for Google or Facebook or even Huawei!
Imho death spiral could be turned by providing enough affordable housing. That would be really long term goal, but the democracies do not have long term goals - the time after election ist time before election.
It's not like the US doesn't have a problem with affordable housing, so I don't see how this plays any role in the divide.
Germany has plenty of applied research organizations, from universities (e.g. RWTH) to things like Fraunhofer. The funding schemes behind these organizations are horrible and I would argue that in many ways, they are machines to burn up potential. Even with all this, Germany has been doing okay on the publicly funded AI research front, but that is irrelevant. The US isn't leading because of publicly funded AI effort, but because of privately funded AI effort.
The problem with “build more affordable housing” in countries that are desperately importing the entire world in an attempt to keep welfare programs afloat is that the amount of housing required to be built EVERY YEAR is staggering.
When a new citizen is born, there’s 18+ years for the required housing supply for that person to be created. When a new citizen is imported, they need housing TODAY. It’s just not a sustainable model on a continuous basis, but no one wants to hear that.
Food isn't an apreciating asset who's value grows when you hoard it and is also easily transportable between free markets. I can't import cheaper land from abroad. I'm limited by what's around me. That scarcity gives it value. You can keep growing virtually infinite food in the same land. You can't do that with housing.
Government can't solve affordable housing. It is the problem causing unaffordable housing.
Housing affordability is 100% because we let people tell their neighbors they cannot build as much housing as they want to, where they need to build it more slowly. There's no middle ground, there are no acceptable structures of land use law if you want affordability. If you get to tell your neighbor how much housing they can produce, bureaucracy will form around that and it will drive up the price of housing.
>Government can't solve affordable housing. It is the problem causing unaffordable housing.
They CAN solve housing because, like you said, they're the ones causing it. They just don't want to because the housing bubble is making a lot of people rich.
I think if you drill down you'll find there's no "they" who can. The majority of voters are homeowners who benefit from restricting housing supply. Any state actor who loosens land use regulation enough that it actually lowers housing prices would likely be voted out.
The changes you see - like allowing ADUs - are inherently very limited impact so that they look good to those advocating for more housing without actually lowering prices.
What about SAP? What innovations does SAP make? Nvidia alone is worth 10 SAPS and US has about 20 Nvidias. It's not even a competition. It's like Usain Bolt vs Grandma.
His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.