Lithium is not the only cause of aquifer depletion in Chile, avocado farms have also been responsible for depleting the wells of residents [1].
These outcomes, as the article alludes to, are due to the privatization of resource rights, which is a consequence of Pinochet government going all in on the policies Milton Friedman promoted [2].
Citizens of Chile are more victims of neoliberalism than they are of any particular industry.
From wikipedia: « In 2010, Chile was the first nation in South America to win membership in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, an organization restricted to the world's richest countries »
Chile has a GDP per capita not all that different from peer South American countries of Argentina and Uruguay [0]. It is a stretch to characterize “winning” membership to the OECD as some sort of objective, non ideological measure of economic progress.
GDP per capita is a very narrow indicator that does not come close to telling enough about the economic condition of a country.
Argentina seems to be going bankrupt and drown in enormous inflation every couple of years. That isn't the case with Chile. Based on this factor alone, Chile and Argentina aren't peers.
I won't propose any exact criteria, given that this is HN and I am in no mood for nitpicking games, which usually follow after a demand for something exact.
However, if I were considering investment from my own pocket, political and economic stability would play a much higher role for my decision making than GDP per capita. And Argentina would therefore be a big no-no, while Chile might make the cut.
> I won't propose any exact criteria, given that this is HN and I am in no mood for nitpicking games, which usually follow after a demand for something exact.
I understand that, you were the one who dismissed GDP per capita as an objective measurement of economic development.
The point I was making that the OECD exists to espouse a particular model of global economic organization and development, which is politically informed.
As to your question about investment, what might be beneficial to me as an investor isn’t necessarily the same as what is beneficial to a citizen of a particular country.
Economic situation of a country is a fairly complex picture that cannot be measured by a single scalar value. GDP per capita is not useless, but just one value among many. Same as you wouldn't try to measure an individual's overall health by their BMI alone. It tells you something, especially on the extreme ends of the distribution, but in the middle, not that much.
Yeah, OECD is very political. No disagreement about that.
But I would say that the correlation of "being attractive for FDI" and "having good standards of living among the general population" is rather high and given that FDI tends to predate said growth of standards of living, there actually may be causality.
Excluding resource-rich countries that grew fat on something that comes out of the earth, pretty much every country whose standards of living soared since, say, 1950, attracted a lot of FDI beforehand.
After all, the same things that attract investors (stability, low crime, high educational attainment, reliable electricity supply, rule of law) tend to be good for the citizens as well.
Some countries are known for falsifying statistics -- Argentina and China, for example. Chile is not. That means that if the official GDP/capita of Chile and Argentina are about the same, the real ones must be very different.
(And they aren't the same. Chile's is a lot higher at the moment.)
> In the U.S., Pinochet is often a talking point in economics debates. He was a brutal dictator, who killed thousands and who tortured, imprisoned, and/or exiled tens of thousands more. It’s very understandable that Chileans would want to expunge any portion of his legacy. But in the U.S., it’s his economic policy that continues to be debated decades later. Some libertarians believe that despite the brutality of his regime, he implemented economic policies that were wildly successful in raising Chilean living standards.
I would say the USA (where I grew up and still live, which doesn't make me a expert, mind- these are mostly just feelings) is also a victim of neoliberalism[0], and that people who revere President Reagan (USA) and Prime Minister Thatcher (UK) are generally selfish and inconsiderate of (what I see as) the importance of other life on earth whether or not we can directly benefit from it.
> What we are now doing to the world... is new in the experience of the Earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways. The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world's climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all.
> The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out. Those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not.
Environmental destruction doesn’t have a single exclusive cause.
There is the horseshoe theory that says that either extremes have more in common with each other then they have with the center [1].
If I we’re to connect neoliberalism with Soviet communism, I’d say that both ideologies are examples of high modernism, which is the idea that leaders can optimize on a metric and ignore all other factors that contribute to their countries success. This never has positive outcomes for the people living in those countries.
These outcomes, as the article alludes to, are due to the privatization of resource rights, which is a consequence of Pinochet government going all in on the policies Milton Friedman promoted [2].
Citizens of Chile are more victims of neoliberalism than they are of any particular industry.
[1] https://www.lifegate.com/avocado-chile-water
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_Chile