A few years ago I participated in a talk on the Uruguayan press at the Faculty of Social Sciences, before a small group of veteran sociologists and political scientists. He argued that the Uruguayan press today is superior to that of the 1960s; a little to provoke them, but more because I really think so. One of them made a very interesting balance. The press of the 1960s contained better literary and film criticism —he recalled—; although today’s is certainly superior in political, economic and judicial information.
In the last four decades, since the democratic reopening, economists have vigorously burst into public and private management in Uruguay, and also into the media, as analysts and opinion formers.
A new book by Adolfo Garcé and Javier Rodríguez Weber, “Economists, economy and politics”, by Fin de Siglo publishing house, recalls that process through essays and interviews with leading actors.
Economists (and economics as a social science) began to emerge half a century ago due to the preaching of the monthly magazine “Búsqueda”, and the appointment of Alejandro Végh Villegas as Minister of Economy, a key reformer during the dictatorship.
“Búsqueda” was born in 1972, by the hand of Ramón Díaz, with the aim of spreading liberal ideas. Later, in 1981, when Danilo Arbilla turned it into a general information weekly, many young economists joined in, decisively contributing to a growing professionalization.
Other media were added, such as the newspaper “El Observador Economico” in 1991 or certain radio programs, which included economists as regular reporters and analysts.
So economists were also at the forefront of public affairs, sometimes in the midst of great storms, as in the fight against the deficit and inflation in 1990, or in the debacle of 2002.
Sometimes sick with arrogance, economists had to learn that economics requires knowledge of history and politics, among other skills, and that they have to be a bit skeptical. Economic problems do not usually have purely economic solutions. As someone said a few years ago, economists who only know economics, blinded by mathematics, are the wise idiots of our time.
Economists, when they play gurus, can be embarrassed. You know what time does with the prophets.
Since the 1960s there has also been a notable professionalization of economic studies, which until then were little more than political or voluntarist statements.
In the past, conspiratorial explanations predominated for phenomena that, today we know, are relatively simple; and there was, and still is, a superabundance of demagogic simplifications.
Half a century ago people used to blame inflation on the corner grocer. Today almost everyone knows that the culprits were the rulers who covered the deficits in the State accounts by printing banknotes, from the time of the “revaluations” of gold during the governments of Gabriel Terra (a great devaluation of the peso disguised as a leap forward) , and especially since 1950, during the Presidency of Luis Batlle Berres.
One of the results was that between 1951 and 1998 Uruguay suffered from double- and triple-digit annual inflation.
The irruption of the economists was the Creole version, muffled and late, of a world phenomenon, which began in a certain way —slowly— during the “Great Depression” of the 1930s, when characters like John Maynard Keynes tried to save the system capitalist, which seemed to collapse before the triumphant fascism and communism.
The irruption was a reflection of the “spiritual environment” of an era, says Adolfo Garcé in this book, citing Real de Azúa. The mass emergence of economists also illustrates the transition from mid-20th century Uruguayan statism, a type of economic nationalism widespread in Latin America at the time (and in some Western European states such as the UK and France), to liberal paradigm of the ’90s, after the fall of “real socialism.”
Six or seven decades ago in Uruguay there was a lot of bureaucratic statism, almost unimaginable today. Economic disasters used to be fought with more exchange controls, more bans and prohibitions, with more protectionism of import substituting industries, in the midst of widespread poverty and scarcity. We now view exchange controls or pervasive protectionism as a paradigm of inefficiency and corruption, and look down on Argentina with condescension. So significant have been the political and ideological paths traveled since then.
Garcé and Rodríguez Weber’s book also recalls the difficult link between technicians and politicians. And it contains warnings about the lack of lucidity, many times, of the political class to carry out reforms that are quite obvious.
Almost all economists agree in pointing out the same problems, the same obstacles to development at a good pace: the poor results of the educational system, the lack of greater international insertion, or the inefficiencies of public companies, to give a few examples.
The “welfare state” that Uruguayans yearn for is not financed by the average growth that the economy has shown in recent decades. More is needed.
There is a yellow light on. Uruguay suffered a long socioeconomic decline from the middle of the 20th century without the political system being able to carry out some of the great essential changes. To our shame, those reforms began in a dictatorship —although, fortunately, they deepened later, in a democracy.
Garcé and Rodríguez Weber, both professors at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of the Republic, summarize in their book the central ideological debates of these times; and they describe external conditions, and also flaws and cowardice that are very much our own: our aversion to profound reforms, our conservative tendencies, our attachment to mediocrity, factors that, in the end, contribute to our children emigrating.
That long-standing lag, that economy unable to maintain a good rhythm (the relative decline from the 1890s, and more clearly from 1955), helps to explain our pessimism, our untidy urban landscape, our sad music, our literature. , our soul.
As Rodríguez Weber rightly points out, economic growth is not the same as development. Development is much more than the mere increase in gross product. But growth is a prerequisite for socioeconomic development. Development requires an economy in constant growth, not only because the population is growing, albeit slowly, but because the material demands of our children are much higher than those of our generation, or that of our parents, much more austere.
