In large parts of the Western world, pessimism is very much in fashion. France’s President Emmanuel Macron fears his country could be sliding towards civil war. Similar thoughts are going through the heads of eminent politicians in the United States, where it is assumed that either the electoral triumph of Donald Trump in November or his defeat by the senile Joe Biden (or whoever is picked to replace him if he stumbles once too often) could set off some extremely violent riots.
Elsewhere, the mood is equally grim; what with Vladimir Putin’s Russia glowering at her European neighbours and Xi Jinping’s China threatening Taiwan, talk about a “third world war” between the democracies led by the United States and a clutch of autocracies is no longer considered outlandish. For now at any rate, in Argentina, where conditions for most people are far worse than they are in the US or Western Europe, the mood is very different. Though President Javier Milei does agree with his foreign counterparts that we are living through what Germany’s hard-pressed Chancellor Olaf Scholz memorably called a “ ,” a turning-point in which the old gives way to the new and almost everything changes, he thinks this is something to celebrate.
The reason is simple. While for North Americans, Europeans and East Asians such as the Japanese and South Koreans, the years that have gone by since the end of World War II have seen economies get far more productive and living standards rise to levels .