The headline says "pillaging," which is a kind of stealing by force. But actually (as the less editorialized HN headline says) what the US companies are doing is hiring Latin America's tech talent, paying a fair price instead of the shitty prices Latin American companies are used to paying. Unsurprisingly these companies think of Latin American developers as their property, so they see it as "pillaging". Because I'm a liberal I don't see it that way.
Governments often also see this as "pillaging", since they're answerable to powerful company founders who lose out, not the everyday people who benefit. In a lot of cases they put major roadblocks in the way of people who export technical services in this way.
For example, here in Argentina, you are required to convert your earnings immediately into pesos at the official rate, which is half the real rate. That's pillaging. In effect this is a 50% export tariff, used not to provide government services but to subsidize importation and travel abroad for rich Argentines, making most exportation wildly unprofitable; programming services have low enough costs that they can still remain afloat, at least until the programmers move abroad, but any export business with a substantial cost of sales is unviable. Bitcoin is a common way for such developers to get paid here in Argentina. I don't know about other countries.
Argentina has a strong crab-bucket or zero-sum mentality, justified by the belief that anyone who is rich got that way by screwing over other people, so as long as the government can direct attention to the exporters instead of the importers, there's strong public support for confiscatory policies like the fake exchange rate --- even when they harm the poor instead of helping them.
It's probably true that people like López Conde can get away with paying their employees 20% of the market rate as long as those employees don't speak English --- but probably not for very long. Spanish is the most-spoken second language in every state in the US, and in New Mexico where I grew up half the population speaks it.
That's part and parcel of deep, amalgamated, problems our countries suffer from. I receive in crypto, live in south america and still sleep worry-free. I just do a good job and happen to heap benefits from all this shit we're immersed in (ridiculous low prices for everything) and from working for a rich country. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, no matter how deep I look. I don't even worry about how my countrymen see this, I simply don't have a reason to tell them. Creating reliable and safe systems is the one talent I have, I might as well concentrate on that and leave political issues to those capable of grasping them.
> The headline says "pillaging," which is a kind of stealing by force. But actually (as the less editorialized HN headline says) what the US companies are doing is hiring Latin America's tech talent, paying a fair price instead of the shitty prices Latin American companies are used to paying. Unsurprisingly these companies think of Latin American developers as their property, so they see it as "pillaging". Because I'm a liberal I don't see it that way.
> Governments often also see this as "pillaging", since they're answerable to powerful company founders who lose out, not the everyday people who benefit. In a lot of cases they put major roadblocks in the way of people who export technical services in this way.
There are salary differences w.r.t. Europe and the US as well but no one uses such language.
The salary differences are smaller, in large part because the governments have taken very different policies over the last century. Latin American governments are, by and large, continuing with the policies that have been producing economic disasters throughout that century, though Argentina is among the worse cases.
Also, though, the US does have a history of actually pillaging Latin American countries. Like, with soldiers. By contrast, the last time the US invaded Europe there was a surprising lack of pillaging.
They're not much smaller when one factors in the extreme taxes we have to pay in Europe. 49% of a salary for a senior SRE position vaporizes in taxes before it reaches me. That's a salary that would be decent but not great for the same title in the US subject to US taxes. And my union told me they've never seen such a high salary with that title before when I sought their counsel during negotiations.
It's hard to tell, but I think there may be a big difference between "51% of a salary that would be decent but not great" and "literally paying people five times less than a decent salary", which is what the article described. Like, maybe a factor of two. And in Europe you get something extra for those taxes, while generally in South America public services and infrastructure are worse than in the US, not better.
It’s interrelated. It’s part resentment, part mediocrity, part laziness.
If the only way the rich got rich is by screwing over people, then I’m justified in not working hard, not being ingenuous, not being diligent because what good does it make anyway.
And if people get rich with just a bit of hard work, that's a convenient kudgel to beat poor people over the head with. Clearly, they were too lazy or stupid to get rich.
It kind of all falls apart when even the relatively wealthy (like me) recognize there isn't much reason for them to be so much more successful than the people they grew up with.
I don't know to what extent you can disentangle cause and effect in human psychology. Certainly if you believe rich people are evil, you will feel justified in tearing them down, so you will tend to tear them down more, in which case it's a cause of the crab-bucket mentality. But you might also just feel a lot of envy for rich people and consequently engage in motivated reasoning that leads you to believe that they are evil, in which case it's an effect.
(Negative feedback systems in general do this weird interchange of cause and effect. An op-amp's inputs are kept at the same voltage because they're its inputs. It's a real mindfuck, in a good way.)
More generally, throughout history, most people who got rich did get that way by screwing over other people; I mean that's literally how warfare works, by harming the opposing forces enough to get them to submit, and in feudal systems (and quasi-feudal systems like the Argentine system) that's how you gain power and wealth. Feudal nobles and partisan politicians are whoever was historically best at harming the opposing forces. Most of human history isn't that, of course, because everyday life always works by cooperation and goodwill, but most of the parts of history that got written down were people competing to hurt each other.
The crab-bucket mentality is very helpful to politicians because it prevents upstart businesses (and regions, and cities) from creating alternative centers of power that could compete with the established order.
Capitalism was the decisive break with that tradition, in which people compete by doing the most good for their customers instead of harm to whoever their enemies are at the moment; but nothing in capitalism prevents powerful and rich people from hurting whoever they see as their opposition, except that it's unprofitable to spend too much on hurting them, and if you choose poorly they may be able to hurt you back, which is even more unprofitable. And whoever is powerful can use that power for harm, too, and being human, they usually do. Still, by changing the criterion for wealth from doing harm to doing good, capitalism changed the incentives enormously.
Capitalism really gave the wealthy a reason to not hurt the up and coming, by requiring the newcomers to pay tribute to the old rich.
It's not doing good per se(since capitalism doesn't care if you're doing good or bad, just profitably), just that you can't benefit without also benefiting some already wealthy folks. Thus, the wealthy folks are incentivized to allow the new rich to propser
In a competitive market, if your customers don't think your products do them good, they won't pay for them, so you won't be profitable. If they don't think they do them much good, they won't pay much for them, so you'll be less profitable.
Of course this isn't perfect --- they might be wrong about whether you're doing them good, like Lucky Strikes, and you might have stolen your products or dumped toxic waste or something. And there are lots of principal-agent problems, where the person making the buying decision has no incentive to care whether it turns out to be a good one. And the wealthy get a disproportionate vote. But it's probably a better criterion for whether you're doing good than anything else we can evaluate in real time in practice.
Although getting bank loans is pretty important, and getting wealthy angel investors is essential for some businesses, you can totally get rich by bootstrapping and selling to poor people. No already wealthy folks need be involved --- except where those wealthy folks are politically powerful, but that's a question external to capitalism.
Procter & Gamble sold soap and candles. Walmart sells to almost nobody but poor people. ExxonMobil started out, roughly speaking, as Standard Oil, whose main product was originally kerosene used for lighting and heating people's homes, and now is gasoline, used by everyday people to drive their cars around. (Rockefeller was no exemplar of capitalism, of course; he spent most of his life trying to destroy it because it wasn't profitable enough.) Berkshire Hathaway is generally considered to be the paragon of modern capitalism; it started out as a cotton textiles company, and nowadays its businesses are mostly things like GEICO (car insurance), Dairy Queen (fast food), Fruit of the Loom (cheap underwear), Acme Building Brands (bricks), Shaw Industries (cheap carpet), and Flying J (truck stops). If all wealthy people stopped buying from all of these businesses at once, they'd hardly notice.
It's certainly true, though, that the possibility of buying shares in new businesses reduces the opposition to upstarts. But public ownership is by no means fundamental to capitalism!
The crab-bucket mentality you talk about, at least in what the belief of business being bad respects, comes from the cultural influence of Catholicism, and it’s pervasive in all LA. I’d dare to say it can be found in Spain/Portugal as well.
I think it comes from the cultural influence of Spain, not Catholicism. I don't see it in Ireland or Switzerland, and not much in France, though they all have large Catholic populations. More generally, I think it comes from the cultural influence of feudalism. Catholicism teaches that wrath, covetousness, and envy are mortal sins, and strongly endorses property rights. Rallying people to confiscate their neighbor's property in order to improve their own situation involves all three of those mortal sins. (To be fair, running a successful business involves a certain amount of covetousness, too.)
Spain spent 300 years living off the plunder from Latin America and its other overseas territories, which of course perpetuated the power of plunderers, not creators or merchants. Even today in Argentina it's considered far nobler to be an escribano or a lawyer than a physicist, a programmer, or a businessman --- but the real national heroes are football players! Pure zero-sum players.
Physicians are at least somewhat honored, but Favaloro still committed suicide because of the lack of support for his work, and Diego Maradona is far more honored for cheating at football and raping teenagers (and, to be fair, playing football too) than Esteban Maradona is for his lifetime spent on eradicating Chagas disease and studies in anthropology and biology.
Catholicism endorses a peculiar idea of social justice founded on commutative justice, viz. paying the pre-determined "just" or "fair" price as opposed to whatever most efficient price might be set by the market - far more strongly than it might endorse property rights. Property rights are really only acknowledged to the extent that they might tend to preserve a rigid, authoritarian social order.
There is, by and large, no appreciation in Latin America for the actual long-term benefits of property rights, such as, for instance, letting average people obtain formal title over the land that they might currently be holding/homesteading informally in a kind of adverse possession. Of course the lack of this acknowlegdement leads to all sorts of power imbalances, and predictable tensions as some try to push back without addressing the actual underlying issues.
> Catholicism endorses a peculiar idea of social justice founded on commutative justice, viz. paying the pre-determined "just" or "fair" price as opposed to whatever most efficient price might be set by the market - far more strongly than it might endorse property rights. Property rights are really only acknowledged to the extent that they might tend to preserve a rigid, authoritarian social order.
As a Catholic, this is news to me. Is this some peculiarity of Latin American Catholics? I'm not seeing anything supporting this view in what appears to be the relevant portion of the Catechism[1]. Sure, it says that wages should support human dignity, but that’s hardly price-fixing.
201. Justice is a value that accompanies the exercise of the corresponding cardinal moral virtue[441]. According to its most classic formulation, it “consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbour”[442]. From a subjective point of view, justice is translated into behaviour that is based on the will to recognize the other as a person, while, from an objective point of view, it constitutes the decisive criteria of morality in the intersubjective and social sphere[443].
The Church's social Magisterium constantly calls for the most classical forms of justice to be respected: commutative, distributive and legal justice[444]. Ever greater importance has been given to social justice[445], which represents a real development in general justice, the justice that regulates social relationships according to the criterion of observance of the law. Social justice, a requirement related to the social question which today is worldwide in scope, concerns the social, political and economic aspects and, above all, the structural dimension of problems and their respective solutions[446].
202. Justice is particularly important in the present-day context, where the individual value of the person, his dignity and his rights — despite proclaimed intentions — are seriously threatened by the widespread tendency to make exclusive use of criteria of utility and ownership. Justice too, on the basis of these criteria, is considered in a reductionist manner, whereas it acquires a fuller and more authentic meaning in Christian anthropology. Justice, in fact, is not merely a simple human convention, because what is “just” is not first determined by the law but by the profound identity of the human being[447].
203. The full truth about man makes it possible to move beyond a contractualistic vision of justice, which is a reductionist vision, and to open up also for justice the new horizon of solidarity and love. “By itself, justice is not enough. Indeed, it can even betray itself, unless it is open to that deeper power which is love”[448]. In fact, the Church's social doctrine places alongside the value of justice that of solidarity, in that it is the privileged way of peace. If peace is the fruit of justice, “today one could say, with the same exactness and the same power of biblical inspiration (cf. Is 32:17; Jas 3:18): Opus solidaritatis pax, peace as the fruit of solidarity”[449]. The goal of peace, in fact, “will certainly be achieved through the putting into effect of social and international justice, but also through the practice of the virtues which favour togetherness, and which teach us to live in unity, so as to build in unity, by giving and receiving, a new society and a better world”[450].
It's true that commutative justice is important to the Catholic conception of social justice, but I don't think the rest of your paragraph is generally true of Catholics.
You're probably right that it doesn't come from Catholicism, but it still can be based on it. I.e. be explained by it, used as a motivation for the said behaviour. Religions are quite malleable, Christianity (in general) is no different. Full of contradictions that open the possibilities of quite different interpretations by emphasizing one or the other of the contradicting pieces of informations.
So while what you say sounds right, at the same time Jesus talked a lot about social justice and how one should help the poor and also, famously how the rich man has less of a chance to get to the kingdom of god than a camel to go through the eye of a needle. (Which, AFAIK, he said to a rich men when he was reluctant to give away his wealth to the poor in a bet to live a life that leads him to the heaven.)
Oh, agreed! And you can't read the story of the dude kicking the moneychangers out of the temple without feeling that he wasn't super enthusiastic about commerce.
Those countries you mentioned aren’t as archetypically Catholic as Spain. Also, remember that the version of Catholicism that made its way to LA through colonialism was, in essence, medieval. While in Europe new ideas entered and became established in the Christian religion, we were stuck with the medieval version of Catholicism for several centuries. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that new ideas started entering the collective consciousness.
In my comment, I said, "Spain spent 300 years living off the plunder from Latin America and its other overseas territories, which of course perpetuated the power of plunderers." This was the beginning of my second paragraph's topic sentence. You responded, "This seems to ignore the history of bad people stealing land to make themselves rich, and the continuing wealth from that theft." Perhaps you intended to post your comment in response to a different comment? Or possibly you don't know what "plunder" means?
In any case, I think "the experiences of people that the Europeans screwed over to become wealthy" tautologically resulted from "European influences", which suggests that your comment contains a self-contradiction in its first line, wherever you intended to post it.
Argentina used to be a first-world developed country in the late 19th and early 20th century. The self-defeating crab bucket mentality only took root there as a result of left-wing populist politics.
Well, not really. The end of the cow-product-based Argentine Golden Age didn't come from US feedlots; those were still decades in the future. It came from the Smoot-Hawley act and its beggar-thy-neighbor brethren worldwide: our economy, which had grown fat from its abundant and fine exports, suddenly found the gates closed to those exports and the drawbridges drawn up, almost everywhere in the world, precipitating the fall of democracy and the Década Infame. Within three years exports had fallen by almost two thirds, an economic disaster in an export-driven economy.
Argentina had left-wing politics in the 19 teens, well before it got really rich.
Perón... is hard to pin down. Gabriel Garcia Márquez has quite correctly pointed out that peronism spans the spectrum from far-left to far-right. People tend to project on Perón what they wish to see. Fortunately Perón is far in the past now.
The opinion you are quoting is just the typical "not real socialism" stuff from people who don't want to admit that their ideology destroys everything it touches. They are doing it right now with Venezuela. 15 years ago they called Venezuela the future of left wing activism in South America, today they claim it was really right wing all along.
Perón was close personal friends with Mussolini and Hitler, modeling his policies explicitly and in some detail on Mussolini's, and when he had to flee Argentina, he went to Franco's Spain. Mussolini and Hitler rose to power largely on their opposition to socialism, though they did of course attempt to co-opt its more popular policies (and in the case of Hitler even its name), and Franco's opponents in the Spanish Civil War were anarchists who were very explicitly extreme left wing. When Perón returned to Argentina, there were left-wing and right-wing factions of the Peronist Party, who immediately started killing each other --- like, literally at the airport when his plane came in. (This is not a literary invention by Garcia Márquez; it actually happened historically.) Perón sided with the right-wing factions.
Perón is hard to pin down: he adopted the most popular socialist policies with even greater enthusiasm than Hitler did. It's true that he welcomed fleeing Nazis, but he also welcomed fleeing Jews. The clearest aspect of his political alignment is that he was authoritarian and anti-elitist. But I think it's a clear mistake to identify him as a "left-wing populist".
As for the 19 teens, that's when Argentina was at its richest.
>Perón was close personal friends with Mussolini and Hitler
So was FDR. In fact, FDR openly modeled his economic reforms on fascist Italy also. Today he is still held up as one of the most famous left-wing American politicans. Absolutely no one claims he was right wing.
Again, this is just more of the same. Before WWII, "National Socialism" was the future of the world and supported by leftists everywhere. The Nazis worked closely with both the Soviets and the Chinese. For the first 2 years of WWII, the Soviets and the Nazis were on the same side taking on the whole of Europe together. After the war it "wasn't real socialism."
>. When Perón returned to Argentina, there were left-wing and right-wing factions of the Peronist Party
Killing each other is what left wingers are famous for. In Soviet Russia the Trotskyites accused the Stalinists of being right wing and they both spent a lot of effort trying to kill each other. This doesn't mean that Stalin was actually right wing, it just means that this is how the left talks - all hyperbole, no reality.
It's true that FDR was left-wing, that he expressed admiration for Mussolini, that Stalin persecuted Trotsky and his followers, and that for 22 months the USSR and Germany were invading other countries instead of fighting each other.
The rest of your comment is Holocaust-denialist-level pseudohistory, as is obvious to anyone who reads literally anything from the time period or anything about it by real researchers or talks to anyone who lived through it.
Kind of, though nothing like our golden age of the 01920s. But we didn't have high levels of literacy or lots of expert machinists; we were still living off our ag exports and creating unprecedented levels of economic inequality. And then Perón redirected us towards North-Korea-style autarky and cult of personality, purged the universities of ideological dissent, and valorized ignorance: Haga patria, mate a un estudiante, and alpargatas sí, libros no. Economic development became impossible. The post-Perón dictatorships were just as anti-intellectual.
No, Argentina was never either a first-world country or a developed country. What we were is rich, because a small population had conquered a large territory that yielded limitless amounts of beef, and with the advent of refrigerated shipping, that meant amounts of wealth limited only by how many cowboys and meatpackers you could hire. The self-defeating crab bucket mentality was already well in place during the Argentine civil wars, and the distance from the rhetoric of Juan Manuel de Rosas to that of Perón was really just as small as Perón claimed.
Also I really think it's a stretch to call Perón left-wing. Are you talking about the Montoneros?
That's literally dehumanizing. You're reducing human beings to game animals, and you're analogizing giving them a lot of money to shooting them dead and butchering them. From whose perspective is that a sensible analogy? Only someone who thinks the employees are, or should be, their chattels.
Yes, there are a lot of people who disagree with me about that metaphor because they do think of employees as livestock. I wasn't saying it's an uncommon opinion. I was saying it's a deplorable one.
I do think people should pay their taxes in order to fund the next generation of universal prenatal medical care, education, etc., but having them work for local companies for 20% of the market rate means they only have 20% as much income to tax, so we can only fund 20% as much education and medical care. You might think this would be compensated by vastly increased profits for the companies, but it isn't, because the low wages mean it's profitable to set people to work on low-value projects.
So, no, I don't think people "owe" working locally. If they owe anything in exchange for free education, it's realizing their full human potential and being generous with their time and money.
Now, go donate to Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, so the next generation can have free education not only in Argentina but everywhere in the world that it's legal.
Governments often also see this as "pillaging", since they're answerable to powerful company founders who lose out, not the everyday people who benefit. In a lot of cases they put major roadblocks in the way of people who export technical services in this way.
For example, here in Argentina, you are required to convert your earnings immediately into pesos at the official rate, which is half the real rate. That's pillaging. In effect this is a 50% export tariff, used not to provide government services but to subsidize importation and travel abroad for rich Argentines, making most exportation wildly unprofitable; programming services have low enough costs that they can still remain afloat, at least until the programmers move abroad, but any export business with a substantial cost of sales is unviable. Bitcoin is a common way for such developers to get paid here in Argentina. I don't know about other countries.
Argentina has a strong crab-bucket or zero-sum mentality, justified by the belief that anyone who is rich got that way by screwing over other people, so as long as the government can direct attention to the exporters instead of the importers, there's strong public support for confiscatory policies like the fake exchange rate --- even when they harm the poor instead of helping them.
It's probably true that people like López Conde can get away with paying their employees 20% of the market rate as long as those employees don't speak English --- but probably not for very long. Spanish is the most-spoken second language in every state in the US, and in New Mexico where I grew up half the population speaks it.