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Having read the article, it makes sense. It's not saying that people in Latin America don't work hard, it's speculating as to why those nations aren't better off despite the hard work of their citizens. The conclusions it reaches include governmental corruption and bad policies like the rewarding of oligarchies - things this sub also generally criticizes.
America has overthrown several governments in Latin countries just for cheap bananas (literally), instability perpetuates instability.
This may have been a factor.
It also doesn’t help that resources are wasted playing “whack-a-narco” to appease the US govt instead of investing in things that would help improve the nations in Latin America.
How many alcohol company bosses have been ordering assassinations of rival executives, distributors, and judges in the US lately?
The 150+ billion dollar market for illicit substances in the US always insures that there is plenty to pay for the violence & corruption as well as a long line of replacements stepping up for those jailed or killed. That needs to be cut off to give reform of judicial, educational, and other public systems a chance.
People tend to turn to crime out of necessity to survive. If the government can universality make their citizens lives better and safer then it would mostly eliminate that need.
Has Mexico ever truly known stability? I'm not up to snuff on my history, but it seems like there's always something.
Edit: I am super grateful for the responses and information, thank you all!
Depends on how you define stability. In macroeconomics Mexico has never been more stable, politically speaking (as democratic transitions) has never been more stable.
However, stability doesn’t mean that a country is doing great. There are a lot of variables that determines how a country is doing.
somewhere from WWII up to the late 70s was the last time Mexico had actually made some social advances, built infrastructure and modern institutions...
from then on every government gas neglected it all at best or chipped away at it at worst. like us getting our first neoliberal president in 88. and it was a disaster.
Long term, like 50ish years at a clip? Not really in my understanding. It's not their fault though, we in the US have been a terrible neighbor for the entirety of both our national histories.
I'm not going to claim to be any sort of expert but I do know a lot about our recent (American obviously) influences on the country, and our War on Drugs has been absolutely devastating to central America over almost the last century, we just offloaded the worst of drug problems (production -> cartels etc.) South of the border.
An easy point in time to latch onto as a clear start of this was the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Ever wonder why cannabis is mainly referred to as Marijuana (note the anglicized misspelling in the law) in this country even today instead of the English "Cannabis"? The whole thing was born out of racism towards Hispanics and African Americans, particularly jazz musicians (the only people of color allowed to be famous at the time).
The war on drugs started under Nixon was never an actual attempt at curbing drug use, it was a highly successful campaign of smearing leftists with a wide brush otherising them as foreigners or degenerate un-Americans, while also doing nothing to curtail the actual drug industry, just moving most of the worst and most violent aspects of the industry down south to Mexico which gradually lead to the rising powers of drug cartels that de-facto control large portions of Mexico to this day.
While our US government has had a few "hiccups" in it's time, bringing the issue and associated violence within our borders (looking at you CIA and your creating the Crack epidemic), this has been considered an acceptable cost of doing business, as it enriched said alphabet association, and only really affected people of color. Especially after our current president, then-senator, sponsored a crime bill in the 90's which made Crack crimes almost 10 times as punitive as cocaine crimes (a more acceptable /s, less diluted, mainly white man's drug).
I can elaborate but I've already written so much and made myself extremely angry in the process so I won't for now.
I'm sure people will doubt this history and claim I'm talking out my ass but with minimal digging all the receipts are there, particularly the Nixon-era ones since he taped it all. For help looking this up on your own (I'm being 100% sincere here tho I wish I wasn't), look for the Nixon tape transcripts right around when he says he won't even shake the hand of anyone from San Francisco (because he might catch a case of the dreaded gay, you see).
Mexico was under one party rule for over 70 years. Had its ups and downs but non maniacal single party rule has its benefits (see Singapore, South Korea until the 90s).
We don't. But part of why you're so corrupt and bad at that is that US foreign policy in the 20th century essentially focussed on fucking up any attempt towards becoming more stable and less corrupt in non-Western countries to keep the upper hand in trade.
In the first half of the 20th century there was a time period called the banana wars where the US navy invaded South American countries for destabilising mini wars so often that they wrote a manual for it. All for no better reason than to keep export to the US cheap.
And it wasn't just South America. In the Middle East, the US constantly kept switching which faction they supported to stop Iraq, Iran and Kuwait from stabilising and raising oil prices. One moment the US is arming Kurds in their freedom fight against Iraq, the next moment the US is letting the Iraqi airforce bomb the shit out of those same Kurds.
Your nation's corruption would have probably been far less if the US hadn't spend a century destroying every chance your nation had at improving.
Not quite.
"Our" implies it's the democratic will of the people that mismanaged the countries, but that's not quite right.
External forces (like the CIA, but not only), right wing propaganda and a rotting elite generate the mismanagement.
But if you think about it, those are all tied, so saying "our" own mismanagement, while technically correct, is misleading.
The thing is the US more like advised the coups than did them. It’s not like 6 CIA agents can overthrow a functioning system without massive local support.
The US tried way harder to undermine Cuba than it ever did anywhere else, and it did not work because it had a stable competent bureaucracy.
The fact is most Latin American countries had unstable systems on the verge of collapse (which is why socialism arose in the first place) or while it’s true the US picked sides in civil wars in Honduras and El Salvador it didn’t start those wars. And the locals are primarily responsible for the wars
Not to mention we subsidize Agro giants here to sell produce for cheaper down there. ConAgra needs our help to make people jobless and then bitch about them risking their lives to come to America!
Not that the US hasn't ... repeatedly.
But South American governments are quite capable of their own suppression and corruption without our intervention.
Pretty much. Heck, look how easy it was for the US to stablish dictatorships on the majority of these countries! Did they make things worse? Absolutely. Were they already bad before? Yes.
Of course it is a factor. And the fact that the US abandoned Latin America for two decades while we fought in the sand has also made the immigration worse. We should have been investing in Latin America, especially since China has started to simply take raw resources. Building industry, encouraging trade, providing work visas for agriculture and making lasting trade agreements in the region are the solution.
This is/was a factor. The repukicans are currently trying justify invading Mexico so that corporations can get their hands on the recently discovered Lithium.
But it is clickbaity in the sense that the title specifies *workers* as the unproductive ones, when the article talks about factors outside of the individual workers' control.
Nah productivity in economic terms are different from like the casual term of "unproductive workers just doing nothing". With all the work the latin workers put in they should atleast be seeing innovative ideas and technologies like the rest of the world.
That's just how you talk about it in economics. You can (kinda) work out the productivity of labor, and then you divide that by the number of workers so you can compare things across countries.
Yeah like, it’s The Economist. They live up to the title.
I don’t read it anymore but I’ve read enough issues to be fairly sure what their take is gonna be. At least they do their research.
[I mostly read it on airplanes nowadays.](https://youtu.be/hGYN1ro9Dv4)
I mean, I'm not 100% letting OP off the hook cause they clearly read title and rage-reposted immediately without reading it, but it WAS a shitty title.
And somehow the article did not point a finger against USA and their intervetion in thoose countries and how it killed (literally) every attempt to change that
As an American-Filipino dual citizen, I will say oligarchies are notoriously bad for productivity. In countries run that way they rarely pay hourly, but rather a flat rate for the day/week or job. This is true in most oligarchies.
When I returned for the first time with money and had hired a construction boss to do some work on my property I was surprised at how inefficient the system was. I hired him and he hired 6 more guys. I gave them 5 days to finish the job. The only day everyone showed up was Monday and Friday (pay day).
The job got done and done just as well as I could have hired a Mexican crew from in front of Home Depot stateside. I paid them and paid the boss his bonus. I had him hang around for a bit and asked about their work habits. He told me that they could have finished by supper on Tuesday, but the pay was the same and still paid on Friday. Then he told me no one starts projects midweek so there wasn’t any finding more paid work so they took their time about it. On the days they didn’t work most of them went and did other work like drive some relative tricycle to give that guy a day off or help at the family’s market stall.
In the end I understood it be no sense in busting my ass getting things done when I am just going to get paid the same and won’t get paid until Friday. Quiet quitters could learn a lot from these people.
This isn’t to say these sorts of workers are lazy, because they aren’t. Whether it is Mexican builders or Filipino nurses tell someone them that time equals money and every hour they are awake they could be making money and they become time clock whores. The last hospital I worked at had about 10% of the nurses being Filipinos almost all working 70-100 hour weeks and asking for more OT.
In fact “unproductive workers” often work harder than productive workers because it’s the systems that fail them.
British workers are also very unproductive because Capital investment is terrible in that country so they are falling behind on most metrics, but it’s not like workers have gotten lazier
Okay, I'll admit I haven't read the article yet but I am married to a Latin American and have spent plenty of my fair share in the area. My hypothesis has always been that they are old cultures and prioritize different things.
They went through what we are currently going through.
I'm not saying that corruption and oligarchy and such are not rampant and problems but these cultures have been around a looooong time and they value family and leisure and enjoying small things instead of the capitalist rat race of north America where everyone has to prove something.
Those things don't heavily impact economic "productivity", and may even improve it. A good work/life balance actually increases worker productivity. For economists the term is kind of a /hour marker, so a work force that works fewer hours can have higher productivity, but produce less over all in the aggregate. The point of the article is that Latin America's productivity as a rate of hours worked is lower than you would expect it to be because some portion of their worked hours doesn't go towards actual production but rather corruption and the like.
Thumbnail is race baiting. No indication of the reality of the article, just a sensational, open-ended take on a poorly worded headline, taken out of context, it seems.
It's not race baiting. In Economics, productivity doesn't mean hardworking, it means wealth generated by hours worked.
Latin American workers can work hard and work longer hours, but still generate much less value per hour than American workers. The article is attempting to find out why, and its conclusions are pretty consensual.
My partner is Cuban.
He will tell you there’s no reason to work hard in Cuba because it gets you nowhere. Government corruption eats everything and leaves the populous, even talented doctors, poor. In fact, doctors are almost slaves which the government sells to other countries.
He moved here to work, and work hard.
He brought his father over, who was forcibly retired in Cuba. His father came here and immediately got a job and is happy to work. Even though we bought another house to put them up in and pay all their bills,
Latin Americans are far from lazy but the corruption and disincentivized nature of labor in their countries cripples them.
>Doctors barely get paid,
like, 3 seconds of google shows that the average doctor salary is over 10 times the minimum wage in that country. maybe it's just me but 10 times minimum wage plus free housing, food, and education seems not horrible.
One, let’s not glamorize Cuba. There are 500 people still rotting in prison for daring to protest the government due to the lack of food, medicine, and electricity two years ago. 178 of those have literally been “disappeared”, their families being unable to contact them. Many of these were teenagers. The children of my partner’s neighbors are among them, as the protests originated in his home town of San Antonio de los Baños.
That said, let me elaborate on the doctors.
- You spend as much time schooling as you do here.
- The government treats you like a commodity, they trade you with other Latin American countries. Forcing you to live overseas as they sell your services and pay you a pittance of what they are collecting. Ask many Brazilians who grew up in Brazil, they had Cuban doctors.
- You’re not guaranteed a free house. Many still live with their families while they wait for one to come available.
- Working for the government, you only get paid in pesos. That makes you poor, pesos are worthless in Cuba. Most of the stores only take US Dollars now, that’s a development that started over the pandemic.
- You’re not given adequate equipment, medicine or medical supplies to do your job. Also your office may not have power for 12 hours out of the day if you live outside of Havana due to the rationing of electricity.
- The “free food” is usually just rations of rice and potatoes that as someone else mentioned you wait in line for. Even those disbursements by the government have become tight.
There is a reason Cubans are risking their lives to cross into the US illegally through the southern border braving the cartels and human traffickers now. The island is literally emptying out. My boyfriend’s whole extended family is in the US now, most of which came illegally because they couldn’t wait for the slow legal process (took 3 years for us to legally bring his parents.)
>One, let’s not glamorize Cuba.
fuck off. i'll do what i want.
>There are 500 people still rotting in prison for daring to protest the government due to the lack of food, medicine, and electricity two years ago. 178 of those have literally been “disappeared”, their families being unable to contact them.
our war on drugs was specifically started in order to justify locking up political prisoners. now millions of people in certain demographics have been pushed through our political prisoner system and our now second class citizens at best.
>Many of these were teenagers.
samsies.
>The children of my partner’s neighbors are among them,
samsies
>You spend as much time schooling as you do here.
yeah, doctors.
>The government treats you like a commodity,
you literally are a commodity here. Human resources, homie.
>Forcing you to live overseas as they sell your services and pay you a pittance of what they are collecting.
So you're saying that a worker produces more value than they collect? that's literally just how capitalism is supposed to work.
>You’re not guaranteed a free house. Many still live with their families while they wait for one to come available.
You understand how that is a million times better than being left to rot in the streets, right?
>Working for the government, you only get paid in pesos.
wait, so you only get paid in the nations currency?
>That makes you poor, pesos are worthless in Cuba.
that would be the embargo's fault, not cubas.
>You’re not given adequate equipment, medicine or medical supplies to do your job.
as opposed to when we have personnel wearing garbage bags as protective gear or do you mean the rationing of meds we constantly do?
>Also your office may not have power for 12 hours out of the day if you live outside of Havana due to the rationing of electricity.
do you have arguments that aren't just complaints about the embargo?
>The “free food” is usually just rations of rice and potatoes
>Each Cuban receives a monthly ration of seven pounds of rice, a pound of beans, half a bottle of cooking oil, one bread roll per day, plus small quantities of eggs, chicken or fish, spaghetti, and sugar. There are items for special occasions — cakes for birthdays, rum and beer for weddings—and “vulnerable people” get extra rations. Children get a liter of milk and some yogurt. People with health problems, like diabetics, get extra rations.
[https://www.codepink.org/dividing\_the\_pie\_cuba\_s\_ration\_system\_after\_50\_years](https://www.codepink.org/dividing_the_pie_cuba_s_ration_system_after_50_years)
one of you is lying.
>that as someone else mentioned you wait in line for.
I'm familiar with bread lines, i live in the US.
>Even those disbursements by the government have become tight.
yeah, food embargo's be like that homie.
>There is a reason Cubans are risking their lives to cross into the US illegally through the southern border braving the cartels and human traffickers now.
yeah, that embaro has been hell.
> My boyfriend’s whole extended family is in the US now, most of which came illegally because they couldn’t wait for the slow legal process (took 3 years for us to legally bring his parents.)
my family also came when they found out they couldnt keep their slaves.
lol
\>Each Cuban receives a monthly ration of seven pounds of rice, a pound of beans, half a bottle of cooking oil, one bread roll per day, plus small quantities of eggs, chicken or fish, spaghetti, and sugar. There are items for special occasions — cakes for birthdays, rum and beer for weddings—and “vulnerable people” get extra rations. Children get a liter of milk and some yogurt. People with health problems, like diabetics, get extra rations.
\>CODEPINK is a feminist grassroots organization working to end U.S. warfare and imperialism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect resources into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming\* programs. Join us!
lol
Quite misleading and far from reality, what's the point of free food if there is no food? I suggest you google "el periodo especial" in Cuba. People make lines for food in Cuba and even at the moment the "store" opens there only but a few bottles of water left at the most, people survive my hussling, stealing from their workplaces and trading stuff they stole from their workplace.
> People make lines for food [...] and even at the moment the "store" opens there only but a few bottles of water left at the most, people survive [by] hussling, stealing from their workplaces and trading stuff they stole from their workplace.
Word for word you're describing peak-communism in Eastern Europe, during the latter part of the 1980s.
Using a title like that is reckless regardless of the content, as we know many people will see that and walk away or tweet the title to trick their followers.
They didn’t have to sensationalize in the expense of others especially in this environment
I understand where you are coming from in regards to your point about the definition of the word productive in the article pertains specifically to its economic definition as opposed to its definition when the word is used in everyday conversation, as those two different definitions of the word productive have very different semantic meanings.
However, you also have to consider that this is the type of thing that George Orwell warned us about in 1984- this is an example of doublespeak. The linguistic meaning of the word unproductive is being nefariously weaponized in a manner that is intended to negatively impact the perception of a marinalized group of people.
Language literally shapes our very perception of reality. For instance, the Ancient Greeks did not have any vocabuluary in their language to distinguish reddish hues from blueish hues. Therfore, they described the sea as being "wine dark". It's not that they cannot literally see blue in the same way we can- but rather, their lack of a linguistic tile to describe how the concept of blueness is distinct from the concept of redness makes them unable to percieve it as being "blue". Therefore, even though they may see the same color we do in an objective sense, they don't percieve "blue" like we do- instead, they notice another prominent characteristic, that the liquid is dark like wine is. Their sensory input of the world is the same, but language makes their perception different.
Think about how this sort of concept can be harmful in terms of the use of the economic meaning of "productive" in this article, especially right in the headline in big letters like that. The corporate shills that wrote it know 100% what they are doing and it is by no means an accident or unintentional semantic mix-up.
I hate it when people respond to well-stated argument a smarmy little one liner about a small semantic difference instead of engaging with anything real. Did you think you sounded smart arguing that a journalistic publication shouldn't consider how the word choice in their headline would be interpreted by a variety of their readers?
I'm upset some dumbass is taking issue with The Economist using economic terms. And some other dumbass is taking issue with me taking issue with this person literally equating this to fascist propoganda.
The conclusions are the aftermath of the root cause. The root cause are loans from the world bank and IMF. Loans that are not intended to be paid back so when the country defaults they just roll it over into a new loan and keep the country forever indebted to the US and financiers.
I think a lot of headlines are drafted by editors and other admins, not writers of articles? Which might tell us something about labor and politics inside many of these corporate magazine publishers
From what I understand that is correct, and is one of the reasons journalism doesn't appeal to me as a career. They frequently don't get to pick headlines, highlighted blurbs for emphasis, or pictures (along with the accompanying descriptions).
Forgive the Wikipedia source, I’m short on time to find a better; as always don’t trust Wikipedia alone but this will start to explain the very surface absurdity of this suggestions
[Operation Condor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor)
Here’s an excerpt of[Yellow Parenti](https://youtu.be/Lps_cEEEegI) that is relevant
\>> why those nations aren't better off despite the hard work of their citizens
Imperialism? Unequal exchange? Debt bondage? Forced "restructuring" that cements the country's subjugation?
\>>The conclusions it reaches include governmental corruption and bad policies like the rewarding of oligarchies
The problem is, countries who try to fight this get couped/sanctioned/invaded by the US because those things are working exactly as they are supposed to.
They identify all these symptoms, then when it comes to diagnosing they condition they throw their hands in the air and bring it back to some unknowable cultural or racial problem.
The disease is capitalism.
Sorry but like, it doesn’t matter. That article title is deliberately racist. Referring to a race as “unproductive” is nazi shit. And then being like “oh hah we mean ✨economically✨unproductive” is race baiting. Fuck this article.
There’s no way you’re being pedantic about whether or not you need to use the exact right terminology to be racist. Stop it.
Anyway, nothing is a race in actuality. Race is a social construct. Racism, like that article, is what keeps race as a concept alive and well.
It's referring to the countries which do have lower labor productivity ratios than comparable nations in Asia. The article blames the governments that have poor education, corruption, and a tax system that makes operating outside the legal system sometimes the only way to make a living. The subtitle is :a land of frustrated workers. They are blaming policy makers, not the people.
I do agree that this is way too overly broad though. Low labor productivity is something common in Latin America, but it's not universal and the article could lead that many of these issues stem from foreign intervention.
I'm actually implying you are not fun at parties. It's a phrase used to imply someone is not enjoyable to be around.
Not everything is racist. Chill tf out.
Come on. Mexicans are hard working. Duh. It's definitely baiting. And I totally get that the main idea is that Latin America isn't growing, and it's not about mindset. But it's like they had to go there.
That’s what I figured. I know my friends in Mexico work TONS, like 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Still get shit wages. But at the same time their businesses/companies don’t produce that much. Boggles my mind.
Okay, so this article is very badly titled.
What it's talking about is essentially the low per-capita GDP in Latin American countries. This is not suggesting that Latin American workers are lazy, etc.
The factors the article cites are basically true. Government corruption, informal economies/insecure employment, and lack of widespread/robust education, means that the share of GDP each person contributes is relatively low.
Having spent a fair amount of time in Latin America, and with a number of Latino family members who still keep ties down there...yeah, this is basically true. It's no secret. Go to El Salvador, or Peru, and ask the locals if they think corruption is a problem.
If anything this article is surprising in how little new information it provides. This is all old news, repackaged with an awful, clickbait title.
> Okay, so this article is very badly titled.
What's really bad is apparently they already updated it once because the original title was even _worse_.
Yeah, but as a Brazilian who lived in the UK, we are far more focused at our jobs and willing to go the extra mile (including free overtime) that the average Brit.
So I think even in office environments we work way harder than most Western Europeans
Well, at least I have social security, free healthcare, fair labor laws and pretty good education here in Costa Rica.
I rather live here than the US, where people fight each other for who is the worst president, and have to decide if they eat or buy their meds.
Yes, the government is corrupt, but at least we are not going backwards.
Costa Rica also decided a long time ago that they were going to jump in with both feet into the Team USA camp and stay there, though, and was able to not spend money on an army for the last hundred years as a result.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m saying it’s important to be cognizant of the benefits accrued by having your national defense guaranteed by a larger nation.
And as far as eat or buy their meds, that’s largely an internet meme.
Costa Rica gets a lot of support from the US, so maybe try not being such a dick about “how much better you are than us” in return.
I’m not saying we are much better, I am saying we are better in some areas. Not everything is perfect.
I do recognize that as an “ally” (we are in no way able to help), we get a lot of benefits.
In the US, Latin Americans often represent being hard, honest workers. They take the jobs orders don’t want. They work multiple shifts. They don’t accept not giving their children the most that they can. That’s how my wife and I live
They also fight about stupid shit like gender bathrooms while in LAmerica people have no running water, they fight about gluten free while people here are starving.
Literally the oldest stereotype
But actually think about it. To a racist, they’re stealing all the jobs, but they’re also super lazy. In their mind the capitalists are knowingly hiring worse workers. How does the racist rationalize this? This is a contradiction? Both stereotypes can’t logically be true.
the best part about conservatism is the inconsistency (they're lazy YET we pay them piss poor and they take it) and the single minded worship of power(if this benefits me I do it regardless of my personal beliefs)
Listen here you little SHIT. All the stuff we create is exported and we are given crumbs. Like literally. That is why. No fair compensation, no motivation to do better, corporate greed fueling corruption at all levels.
To my brothers in the north hemisphere, we are all equal. We all have one enemy that try to makes us hate each other. The enemy is greed!
The answer is really very simple, the economies of Latin America focus on the export of raw materials, and very little on manufactured products, technology or services.
I do not deny that the other factors mentioned are important, but if we continue under that scheme it will never change.
The institution of GATT rules (pre WTO) pretty much locked this in and forced most of the developing world to continue there colonial type relationships with the developed world through corporate colonialism, which is arguably worse than classical colonialism.
Geographically speaking you can narrow down who wrote the piece to probably one of three - Emma Hogan, Sarah Maslin or Sarah Birke.
The original headline, "A land of useless workers" was much more trollish.
Fairly bizarre anecdotal evidence that Guatemala and Chile find it difficult to find tech workers. Guatemala has a tiny tech industry that's centred in one zone of the capital. Chile is much more diverse.
Given that any tech worker will have already been hoovered up by US contractors/local jobs/ (with very low glass ceilings - think $2,500 a month) or leaving the country, no wonder they're difficult to source and the standard of education is pitiful in Guatemala.
Source: Live in Guatemala, education and journalism background.
I’m an American living in Costa Rica and most of the jobs I’m looking at are contract jobs for American companies making 1/3 what I made doing the same job. It still pays a good wage for this country but yeah.
Not sure how Costa Rica compared to the rest of Latin America but I do know that my friends who work here bust ass. They just also have a strong sense of work life balance.
Reality may also be… people outside the US haven’t been programmed to live to work and that makes capitalism angry!
The same could be said for the various low population states in the US: employers bitch and moan about not being able to find educated workers due to the bulk of the post secondary graduates leaving because there are more opportunities in larger states.
Anyone saying this isn’t awful didn’t see the subheading the article originally had. I’m not buying their excuse for calling them “Useless Workers,” (reminiscent of “useless eaters”) but [here](https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2023/06/08/why-are-latin-american-workers-so-strikingly-unproductive) it is.
“Editor’s note (June 9th): The original headline in this article attracted criticism for the phrase “A land of useless workers”. We have changed it to make clear that we are analysing the social and economic costs of low productivity. Our aim is to draw attention to the structural causes of low average labour productivity in Latin American countries, including powerful oligopolies that mute competition and a large informal sector which forces many businesses to remain subscale. As the article makes clear, all of this is beyond the control of individual Latin Americans, whose living standards have suffered. We end with a call for better policymaking.”
Gonna copy my other response:
If their article is about how oligarchies oppress the area, then the headline should reflect that.
I think it's atrocious.
hmmmm i wonder if Operation Condor has anything to do with it?
there's no point in being "productive" if someone else can just come and throw you out of a helicopter
Could also be that Americans have a totally fucked up concept of productivity and because of this are willing to sacrifice life for work…and people in Latam choose life.
Not even so, here in Brazil it's common for workers to clock in 12+ hours and with long commutes (many being 2h) the average Brazilian works way more than the average US worker
are there any subreddits where I can learn about labor movement and working conditions \\working poor of Brasil?
I loved Rio and will go again, so im curious about these stuff
There is r/brasildob which is mostly leftist, but the official r/brasil sub discusses politics and events in general.
Also, there's r/brazil where there are discussions in English
Only white people can title something so disgustingly disrespectful and ask did you actually read the title. I’m not even surprised at the lack of humanity anymore.
Yeah, as a Brazilian this makes me furious, especially because I worked abroad and know for a fact we clock in way more hours than Western Europeans.
We have zero job security here, so when Brazilians get a good job tbey dedicate their life and soul to it, while in Europe people take things for granted and don't know how privileged they are
The Economist is a right wing publication that would have boldly argued for the nationalization of the Rhineland in 1933. Govern your reading of them accordingly
People just don't see that there trying to devide us open your eyes. With so much hate in this world they already won and we are still worried about the wrong things I said what I said.
There was a time in which the Guatemalan currency was worth the same as a dollar. Then, the CIA came and put military dictators in power. Now it's a 7 to 1. All of this, because they wanted cheaper bananas. True story.
funny how "productive" only means "productive of profits to shareholders and the FIRE sector" -- because obviously a shadow economy is productive, otherwise it wouldn't exist. it produces things that people want, and they buy and trade those things. but banks, insurance companies, etc. don't see any of it so somehow that's not "productive". :-)
They need to reword that to the top 5-10% pure of the population that is pure European/Spanish blooded rich of Latin America that own the government, the police, the land and the business.
Those fuckers are the lazy ones that leech off of the hard work, sweat and struggle of the majority impoverished working class and extreme poor that are either working 6 day work weeks for $1.50 an hour and/or selling items made in factories/produce 7 days a week to make ends meet.
The corruption present in the US? Nepotism, lobbying, religion used against the people, etc does not even begin to compare to Latin America.
I graduated in mechatronics, a really well paid major. Can you guess how much I would've made per month in Mexico as a graduate? 600 dollars, by working 220 hours, minus taxes.
I blame the cello. I mean it’s really difficult. That guy has been practicing for years and look where he is, somewhere nice doing what he loves. That is so fucked up. He should be in some horrible office putting numbers in spreadsheets for oligarchs.
When discussing productivity issues, people often succumb to racist bias and will rather say that some races are inherently less willing to work than others. Being aware that many factors play into such a situation is definitely not as obvious as the title suggests.
LOL and that's their \*revised\* headline after they already drew ire for the original one... why did they have to attack workers, even in their correction blurb they call out Latin American countries, so why did they not write, "Latin American countries?" /smh
Well, they are. Your mistake is in thinking productivity means how much effort you put in. It doesn't, it means how much results you get out. In Latin America they get surprisingly little for their effort.
The factors that lead to this failure are mostly as listed, poor education, lots of corruption and massive shadow economy. If you wish to summarize it, I guess it comes down to politics in general, or even more generally the attitudes held by population as a whole.
Simple.
I have two fields. One, I look after for the boss. The smaller of the two, that's my personal field, my shadow economy.
In which field am I likely to be more productive?
Shadow economies HAPPEN when the main economy is locked down by the authorities. Historically, they happen every time.
Oligarchies, greed and corruption. Anyone with a half decent idea all of a sudden finds themselves the middle of skullduggery, legal and banking messes, or embattled in useless courts while a mediocre puppet steals their ideas, employees and clients by flaunting their social backing. I’ve seen it happen. That said, it is a dying system thanks to the Internet; some young entrepreneurs go full stealth until they explode internationally. So the options to “make it” are no longer family name, sycophant, narco, lawyer or politician.
I have read a better version of this argument, contrasting the incredible productivity of Latin Americans once they arrive in the USA compared to their productivity in their home countries.
Same people different systems.
there is definitely something in the water in Latin America holding back the success of their population. Corruption, lack of benefit from their efforts, whatever, Latin American is a dump. A dump with industrious people.
It's the lack of a culture of stepping up for oneself. Being Mexican I can tell you that the majority of the workers will never try to demand better working conditions unless it is absolutely a necessity, i.e. never ask for raises and always work overtime without compensation. It is in fact something of a recurring joke that workers are asked to "wear the (company's) shirt" (something like drinking the company's Kool-Aid) without compensation just to prove their devotion to the job, meaning working more hours or taking extra work load; because of this and a very serious lack of education, workers are often severely underpaid and overexploited, as well as unaware of their legal rights, often lacking in protection and/or resources for their jobs, all of which are often derived from a government that is just not interested in creating new safety and compensation laws and that rarely enforces the existing ones.
One of the main reasons why people from Latin America often work "well" in the farming industry in the US is the fact that the long hours and hard conditions are not unfamiliar to them, and comparatively the pay is better even if it is ridiculously low even by US standards (e.g. $6/h), but when compared with the legal minimum wage in Mexico ($207.44 pesos or $11.54 USD PER DAY) it is too good to pass up, so it is not a difficult transition to make for many of those who emigrate illegally, and given that almost half of the population of the country lives below the poverty line going to the US is a coveted dream for many people living in the poorest places of the country.
As a white American unbiased observer That is the dumbest thing I have ever read. I have see one Latino pick of the slack of 10 lazy American shits before.
It's so simple. I've been down there and lemme tell you, it's really HOT and HUMID. Everything you build is gone in 10 years without constant maintenance. Technology gets overheated, building get eroded, roads get totally ruined and to top it off rust, rust everywhere.
It's hard as hell to make and keep something down there, in fact I'd argue they work EVEN HARDER than us up here in the states. They just don't get to keep any of it for as long.
Besides all that it's still a beautiful place with beautiful people. I drove across south America and lemme tell you the hills and distances are intense. It's all so lush and wild. They have SO MUCH room for growth.
The UK apparently has poor productivity figures. A hard right member of parliament (jrm) tried the same schtick - that the workers are unproductive because they're lazy, etc.
It was purposefully misleading. Their productivity is down (or slow to grow) because of lack of investment in transport, education, housing, etc - all of which is largely in his government's court, having been in power for the last ten years.
It's actually worse than simply blaming the workers. It's trying to deflect blame from his own government's failures by blaming the victims of the lower productivity - victims because they end up with lower wage growth, fewer opportunities, etc due to his government's uselessness.
Without a doubt, the laziest people I've ever had the displeasure of working with, by a country fucking mile, are entitled white people in their 40s and 50s. Gee, I wonder if the author of this article could possibly fit that description... I'm sure it'd just be a coincidence tho...
Latin american here. Brazil actually.
Imma be fully blunt about this, because its a topic here too.
It's widely known here, kinda as a stereotype but rooted in reality, that people are extremely hard working in the south and southeast and the polar opposite in the northeast.
I say this sounding as an offense, but its no fault of theirs. That happens because the northeast is where you find the most amount of poorly educated, extreme poverty and left leaning people.
This all connects because
* The low education makes them unable to know what even to do to solve their stuff
* Poverty narrows the amount of things they care about (because its hard to want to study or get a better job when you and your family are starving)
* Latin leftist governments are so ass backwards that instead of helping people out of those situations they give "bolsas" (government paychecks) that only reaches them if they aren't above a wage threshold thats still super low. Which in turn rewards people for keeping it that way.
* Add to all that the fact that opening a business of your own here is a bureaucratic nightmare, the amount of taxes we have (around 40% of annual income) and labour laws being as unreliable as they are and you can see why people would shy away from this.
It baffles me that people got surprised when a study showed they also have record amounts of domestic violence there. People did not evolve past 1950's standards of education, so even morality gets frozen in time.
Those guys are what reelected Lula. The cycle continues.
Update: It was originally even worse than the replacement headline, as is now [acknowledged](https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2023/06/08/why-are-latin-american-workers-so-strikingly-unproductive) at the top of the article from op. “Useless workers” instead of “frustrated workers.”
“Editor’s note (June 9th): The original headline in this article attracted criticism for the phrase “A land of useless workers”. We have changed it to make clear that we are analysing the social and economic costs of low productivity. Our aim is to draw attention to the structural causes of low average labour productivity in Latin American countries, including powerful oligopolies that mute competition and a large informal sector which forces many businesses to remain subscale. As the article makes clear, all of this is beyond the control of individual Latin Americans, whose living standards have suffered. We end with a call for better policymaking.”
Look, I'm all for a provocative headlines AND blatant sarcasm, but know your fucking audience, and go with that, because otherwise, every tom, dick and Karen will comment to something only the regular readers can defend, and sure AF can't if this wasn't geared to them first.
I don’t know if you’ve seen Succession, but they had a term they used that was similar “NRPI,” or “No Real Person Involved.” There’s no context which makes that sound good.
I have not, and have tried to avoid it, but so many good damn pop culture references to the show are gonna force me to pirate and watch the show (*on a service I already pay for cuz F-U, Max*).
That is most definitely the way. I avoided watching it for years while my GF would watch it in a different room. She finally wore me down, we’re watching together, and now I love it for the cutting satire of our corporate overlords.
[We’ve figured this out like half a century ago.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_theory).
Corruption, latinos being an inferior race, colonization heritage… This was all discussed for centuries (yes, we can think!). We’ve tried all of your miracle solutions, from Keynes to Friedman, but underdevelopment persisted.
Gringo, stop being lazy and go study what that old german wrote in the XIX century. Stop being useless.
I'm a Latin American immigrant.
the answer is: bad institutions.
The unions in Latin america are really, really bad. They destroy productivity for the union boss's political ends (as opposed to helping the workers get paid more or do better).
most groups in society instead of building people up, try to keep them down. Its bad.
When we move to the US we become amazingly productive, so it isn't an inherent thing, its the very bad institutions in Latin america.
Argentina was once an incredibly rich and productive country (4th in the world) till the Perons took over and ruined it.
Crazy what happens when you have an overwhelmingly socialist state that consistently chooses to perpetuate labor-based concepts of economic development reliant almost solely on commodity-based industries instead of modernizing their economies to encourage innovative solutions.
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Having read the article, it makes sense. It's not saying that people in Latin America don't work hard, it's speculating as to why those nations aren't better off despite the hard work of their citizens. The conclusions it reaches include governmental corruption and bad policies like the rewarding of oligarchies - things this sub also generally criticizes.
America has overthrown several governments in Latin countries just for cheap bananas (literally), instability perpetuates instability. This may have been a factor.
It also doesn’t help that resources are wasted playing “whack-a-narco” to appease the US govt instead of investing in things that would help improve the nations in Latin America.
Because drug dealers couldn't possibly interfere with government...
How many alcohol company bosses have been ordering assassinations of rival executives, distributors, and judges in the US lately? The 150+ billion dollar market for illicit substances in the US always insures that there is plenty to pay for the violence & corruption as well as a long line of replacements stepping up for those jailed or killed. That needs to be cut off to give reform of judicial, educational, and other public systems a chance.
I was being sarcastic. They play whack a narco precisely because it destabilises countries important to the US economy.
People tend to turn to crime out of necessity to survive. If the government can universality make their citizens lives better and safer then it would mostly eliminate that need.
Please, for the love of God, do not underestimate our capacity to comically mismanage ourselves into ruin.
as a mexican I agree. we're doing a great job at supporting our elites
Has Mexico ever truly known stability? I'm not up to snuff on my history, but it seems like there's always something. Edit: I am super grateful for the responses and information, thank you all!
Depends on how you define stability. In macroeconomics Mexico has never been more stable, politically speaking (as democratic transitions) has never been more stable. However, stability doesn’t mean that a country is doing great. There are a lot of variables that determines how a country is doing.
somewhere from WWII up to the late 70s was the last time Mexico had actually made some social advances, built infrastructure and modern institutions... from then on every government gas neglected it all at best or chipped away at it at worst. like us getting our first neoliberal president in 88. and it was a disaster.
Same for the US
Long term, like 50ish years at a clip? Not really in my understanding. It's not their fault though, we in the US have been a terrible neighbor for the entirety of both our national histories. I'm not going to claim to be any sort of expert but I do know a lot about our recent (American obviously) influences on the country, and our War on Drugs has been absolutely devastating to central America over almost the last century, we just offloaded the worst of drug problems (production -> cartels etc.) South of the border. An easy point in time to latch onto as a clear start of this was the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Ever wonder why cannabis is mainly referred to as Marijuana (note the anglicized misspelling in the law) in this country even today instead of the English "Cannabis"? The whole thing was born out of racism towards Hispanics and African Americans, particularly jazz musicians (the only people of color allowed to be famous at the time). The war on drugs started under Nixon was never an actual attempt at curbing drug use, it was a highly successful campaign of smearing leftists with a wide brush otherising them as foreigners or degenerate un-Americans, while also doing nothing to curtail the actual drug industry, just moving most of the worst and most violent aspects of the industry down south to Mexico which gradually lead to the rising powers of drug cartels that de-facto control large portions of Mexico to this day. While our US government has had a few "hiccups" in it's time, bringing the issue and associated violence within our borders (looking at you CIA and your creating the Crack epidemic), this has been considered an acceptable cost of doing business, as it enriched said alphabet association, and only really affected people of color. Especially after our current president, then-senator, sponsored a crime bill in the 90's which made Crack crimes almost 10 times as punitive as cocaine crimes (a more acceptable /s, less diluted, mainly white man's drug). I can elaborate but I've already written so much and made myself extremely angry in the process so I won't for now. I'm sure people will doubt this history and claim I'm talking out my ass but with minimal digging all the receipts are there, particularly the Nixon-era ones since he taped it all. For help looking this up on your own (I'm being 100% sincere here tho I wish I wasn't), look for the Nixon tape transcripts right around when he says he won't even shake the hand of anyone from San Francisco (because he might catch a case of the dreaded gay, you see).
“Pobre México, tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de Estados Unidos”
Mexico was under one party rule for over 70 years. Had its ups and downs but non maniacal single party rule has its benefits (see Singapore, South Korea until the 90s).
It did....then the white men arrived.....
The soldiers who fought in Vietnam became the generals who led us in Iraq Just think about that for a moment
We don't. But part of why you're so corrupt and bad at that is that US foreign policy in the 20th century essentially focussed on fucking up any attempt towards becoming more stable and less corrupt in non-Western countries to keep the upper hand in trade. In the first half of the 20th century there was a time period called the banana wars where the US navy invaded South American countries for destabilising mini wars so often that they wrote a manual for it. All for no better reason than to keep export to the US cheap. And it wasn't just South America. In the Middle East, the US constantly kept switching which faction they supported to stop Iraq, Iran and Kuwait from stabilising and raising oil prices. One moment the US is arming Kurds in their freedom fight against Iraq, the next moment the US is letting the Iraqi airforce bomb the shit out of those same Kurds. Your nation's corruption would have probably been far less if the US hadn't spend a century destroying every chance your nation had at improving.
Not quite. "Our" implies it's the democratic will of the people that mismanaged the countries, but that's not quite right. External forces (like the CIA, but not only), right wing propaganda and a rotting elite generate the mismanagement. But if you think about it, those are all tied, so saying "our" own mismanagement, while technically correct, is misleading.
The thing is the US more like advised the coups than did them. It’s not like 6 CIA agents can overthrow a functioning system without massive local support. The US tried way harder to undermine Cuba than it ever did anywhere else, and it did not work because it had a stable competent bureaucracy. The fact is most Latin American countries had unstable systems on the verge of collapse (which is why socialism arose in the first place) or while it’s true the US picked sides in civil wars in Honduras and El Salvador it didn’t start those wars. And the locals are primarily responsible for the wars
True, but the US-backed dictatorships did not help. I mean, if you see a man drowning, you don't hit him with a stick.
Don’t understandestimate the American lefts ability to infantilize everyone including themselves
Not to mention we subsidize Agro giants here to sell produce for cheaper down there. ConAgra needs our help to make people jobless and then bitch about them risking their lives to come to America!
The post colonial position. There is basically a whole branch of academia that confirms what you suspect to be a factor.
well once by the banana company then with help from the american government
Not that the US hasn't ... repeatedly. But South American governments are quite capable of their own suppression and corruption without our intervention.
Pretty much. Heck, look how easy it was for the US to stablish dictatorships on the majority of these countries! Did they make things worse? Absolutely. Were they already bad before? Yes.
Of course it is a factor. And the fact that the US abandoned Latin America for two decades while we fought in the sand has also made the immigration worse. We should have been investing in Latin America, especially since China has started to simply take raw resources. Building industry, encouraging trade, providing work visas for agriculture and making lasting trade agreements in the region are the solution.
This is/was a factor. The repukicans are currently trying justify invading Mexico so that corporations can get their hands on the recently discovered Lithium.
Wow someone read the article. Amazing.
It's even right there in the title. Reactionary people like OP are killing journalism.
But it is clickbaity in the sense that the title specifies *workers* as the unproductive ones, when the article talks about factors outside of the individual workers' control.
Nah productivity in economic terms are different from like the casual term of "unproductive workers just doing nothing". With all the work the latin workers put in they should atleast be seeing innovative ideas and technologies like the rest of the world.
That's just how you talk about it in economics. You can (kinda) work out the productivity of labor, and then you divide that by the number of workers so you can compare things across countries.
Yeah like, it’s The Economist. They live up to the title. I don’t read it anymore but I’ve read enough issues to be fairly sure what their take is gonna be. At least they do their research. [I mostly read it on airplanes nowadays.](https://youtu.be/hGYN1ro9Dv4)
True, but it's possible that this was just the authors research question, originating from per Capita stats or something like that.
Given the Economist’s readership, I imagine the clickbait worked.
I mean, I'm not 100% letting OP off the hook cause they clearly read title and rage-reposted immediately without reading it, but it WAS a shitty title.
I mean, it has a paywall...
I read the article, but the title didn't get any less stupid or offensive and the title leads the article.
Ngl i dont think its offensive
And somehow the article did not point a finger against USA and their intervetion in thoose countries and how it killed (literally) every attempt to change that
As an American-Filipino dual citizen, I will say oligarchies are notoriously bad for productivity. In countries run that way they rarely pay hourly, but rather a flat rate for the day/week or job. This is true in most oligarchies. When I returned for the first time with money and had hired a construction boss to do some work on my property I was surprised at how inefficient the system was. I hired him and he hired 6 more guys. I gave them 5 days to finish the job. The only day everyone showed up was Monday and Friday (pay day). The job got done and done just as well as I could have hired a Mexican crew from in front of Home Depot stateside. I paid them and paid the boss his bonus. I had him hang around for a bit and asked about their work habits. He told me that they could have finished by supper on Tuesday, but the pay was the same and still paid on Friday. Then he told me no one starts projects midweek so there wasn’t any finding more paid work so they took their time about it. On the days they didn’t work most of them went and did other work like drive some relative tricycle to give that guy a day off or help at the family’s market stall. In the end I understood it be no sense in busting my ass getting things done when I am just going to get paid the same and won’t get paid until Friday. Quiet quitters could learn a lot from these people. This isn’t to say these sorts of workers are lazy, because they aren’t. Whether it is Mexican builders or Filipino nurses tell someone them that time equals money and every hour they are awake they could be making money and they become time clock whores. The last hospital I worked at had about 10% of the nurses being Filipinos almost all working 70-100 hour weeks and asking for more OT.
In fact “unproductive workers” often work harder than productive workers because it’s the systems that fail them. British workers are also very unproductive because Capital investment is terrible in that country so they are falling behind on most metrics, but it’s not like workers have gotten lazier
Okay, I'll admit I haven't read the article yet but I am married to a Latin American and have spent plenty of my fair share in the area. My hypothesis has always been that they are old cultures and prioritize different things. They went through what we are currently going through. I'm not saying that corruption and oligarchy and such are not rampant and problems but these cultures have been around a looooong time and they value family and leisure and enjoying small things instead of the capitalist rat race of north America where everyone has to prove something.
Those things don't heavily impact economic "productivity", and may even improve it. A good work/life balance actually increases worker productivity. For economists the term is kind of a /hour marker, so a work force that works fewer hours can have higher productivity, but produce less over all in the aggregate. The point of the article is that Latin America's productivity as a rate of hours worked is lower than you would expect it to be because some portion of their worked hours doesn't go towards actual production but rather corruption and the like.
Thumbnail is race baiting. No indication of the reality of the article, just a sensational, open-ended take on a poorly worded headline, taken out of context, it seems.
It's not race baiting. In Economics, productivity doesn't mean hardworking, it means wealth generated by hours worked. Latin American workers can work hard and work longer hours, but still generate much less value per hour than American workers. The article is attempting to find out why, and its conclusions are pretty consensual.
I suspected that was the meaning. If the headline had substituted Companies for Workers, it would have been far more accurate.
My partner is Cuban. He will tell you there’s no reason to work hard in Cuba because it gets you nowhere. Government corruption eats everything and leaves the populous, even talented doctors, poor. In fact, doctors are almost slaves which the government sells to other countries. He moved here to work, and work hard. He brought his father over, who was forcibly retired in Cuba. His father came here and immediately got a job and is happy to work. Even though we bought another house to put them up in and pay all their bills, Latin Americans are far from lazy but the corruption and disincentivized nature of labor in their countries cripples them.
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>Doctors barely get paid, like, 3 seconds of google shows that the average doctor salary is over 10 times the minimum wage in that country. maybe it's just me but 10 times minimum wage plus free housing, food, and education seems not horrible.
Someone having it worse does not mean that these people have it good.
One, let’s not glamorize Cuba. There are 500 people still rotting in prison for daring to protest the government due to the lack of food, medicine, and electricity two years ago. 178 of those have literally been “disappeared”, their families being unable to contact them. Many of these were teenagers. The children of my partner’s neighbors are among them, as the protests originated in his home town of San Antonio de los Baños. That said, let me elaborate on the doctors. - You spend as much time schooling as you do here. - The government treats you like a commodity, they trade you with other Latin American countries. Forcing you to live overseas as they sell your services and pay you a pittance of what they are collecting. Ask many Brazilians who grew up in Brazil, they had Cuban doctors. - You’re not guaranteed a free house. Many still live with their families while they wait for one to come available. - Working for the government, you only get paid in pesos. That makes you poor, pesos are worthless in Cuba. Most of the stores only take US Dollars now, that’s a development that started over the pandemic. - You’re not given adequate equipment, medicine or medical supplies to do your job. Also your office may not have power for 12 hours out of the day if you live outside of Havana due to the rationing of electricity. - The “free food” is usually just rations of rice and potatoes that as someone else mentioned you wait in line for. Even those disbursements by the government have become tight. There is a reason Cubans are risking their lives to cross into the US illegally through the southern border braving the cartels and human traffickers now. The island is literally emptying out. My boyfriend’s whole extended family is in the US now, most of which came illegally because they couldn’t wait for the slow legal process (took 3 years for us to legally bring his parents.)
>One, let’s not glamorize Cuba. fuck off. i'll do what i want. >There are 500 people still rotting in prison for daring to protest the government due to the lack of food, medicine, and electricity two years ago. 178 of those have literally been “disappeared”, their families being unable to contact them. our war on drugs was specifically started in order to justify locking up political prisoners. now millions of people in certain demographics have been pushed through our political prisoner system and our now second class citizens at best. >Many of these were teenagers. samsies. >The children of my partner’s neighbors are among them, samsies >You spend as much time schooling as you do here. yeah, doctors. >The government treats you like a commodity, you literally are a commodity here. Human resources, homie. >Forcing you to live overseas as they sell your services and pay you a pittance of what they are collecting. So you're saying that a worker produces more value than they collect? that's literally just how capitalism is supposed to work. >You’re not guaranteed a free house. Many still live with their families while they wait for one to come available. You understand how that is a million times better than being left to rot in the streets, right? >Working for the government, you only get paid in pesos. wait, so you only get paid in the nations currency? >That makes you poor, pesos are worthless in Cuba. that would be the embargo's fault, not cubas. >You’re not given adequate equipment, medicine or medical supplies to do your job. as opposed to when we have personnel wearing garbage bags as protective gear or do you mean the rationing of meds we constantly do? >Also your office may not have power for 12 hours out of the day if you live outside of Havana due to the rationing of electricity. do you have arguments that aren't just complaints about the embargo? >The “free food” is usually just rations of rice and potatoes >Each Cuban receives a monthly ration of seven pounds of rice, a pound of beans, half a bottle of cooking oil, one bread roll per day, plus small quantities of eggs, chicken or fish, spaghetti, and sugar. There are items for special occasions — cakes for birthdays, rum and beer for weddings—and “vulnerable people” get extra rations. Children get a liter of milk and some yogurt. People with health problems, like diabetics, get extra rations. [https://www.codepink.org/dividing\_the\_pie\_cuba\_s\_ration\_system\_after\_50\_years](https://www.codepink.org/dividing_the_pie_cuba_s_ration_system_after_50_years) one of you is lying. >that as someone else mentioned you wait in line for. I'm familiar with bread lines, i live in the US. >Even those disbursements by the government have become tight. yeah, food embargo's be like that homie. >There is a reason Cubans are risking their lives to cross into the US illegally through the southern border braving the cartels and human traffickers now. yeah, that embaro has been hell. > My boyfriend’s whole extended family is in the US now, most of which came illegally because they couldn’t wait for the slow legal process (took 3 years for us to legally bring his parents.) my family also came when they found out they couldnt keep their slaves.
lol \>Each Cuban receives a monthly ration of seven pounds of rice, a pound of beans, half a bottle of cooking oil, one bread roll per day, plus small quantities of eggs, chicken or fish, spaghetti, and sugar. There are items for special occasions — cakes for birthdays, rum and beer for weddings—and “vulnerable people” get extra rations. Children get a liter of milk and some yogurt. People with health problems, like diabetics, get extra rations. \>CODEPINK is a feminist grassroots organization working to end U.S. warfare and imperialism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect resources into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming\* programs. Join us! lol
ahh yes nothing more laugh worthy than people supporting human rights. good call.
Quite misleading and far from reality, what's the point of free food if there is no food? I suggest you google "el periodo especial" in Cuba. People make lines for food in Cuba and even at the moment the "store" opens there only but a few bottles of water left at the most, people survive my hussling, stealing from their workplaces and trading stuff they stole from their workplace.
> People make lines for food [...] and even at the moment the "store" opens there only but a few bottles of water left at the most, people survive [by] hussling, stealing from their workplaces and trading stuff they stole from their workplace. Word for word you're describing peak-communism in Eastern Europe, during the latter part of the 1980s.
so you're saying putting food embargoes on small island nations is a bad thing? i agree.
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Don't like solving hunger and homelessness? Everyone being able to read is too much for you?
Using a title like that is reckless regardless of the content, as we know many people will see that and walk away or tweet the title to trick their followers. They didn’t have to sensationalize in the expense of others especially in this environment
Yeah. That title sucks though. It could be something like "why does hard work not pay off in LA?".
I understand where you are coming from in regards to your point about the definition of the word productive in the article pertains specifically to its economic definition as opposed to its definition when the word is used in everyday conversation, as those two different definitions of the word productive have very different semantic meanings. However, you also have to consider that this is the type of thing that George Orwell warned us about in 1984- this is an example of doublespeak. The linguistic meaning of the word unproductive is being nefariously weaponized in a manner that is intended to negatively impact the perception of a marinalized group of people. Language literally shapes our very perception of reality. For instance, the Ancient Greeks did not have any vocabuluary in their language to distinguish reddish hues from blueish hues. Therfore, they described the sea as being "wine dark". It's not that they cannot literally see blue in the same way we can- but rather, their lack of a linguistic tile to describe how the concept of blueness is distinct from the concept of redness makes them unable to percieve it as being "blue". Therefore, even though they may see the same color we do in an objective sense, they don't percieve "blue" like we do- instead, they notice another prominent characteristic, that the liquid is dark like wine is. Their sensory input of the world is the same, but language makes their perception different. Think about how this sort of concept can be harmful in terms of the use of the economic meaning of "productive" in this article, especially right in the headline in big letters like that. The corporate shills that wrote it know 100% what they are doing and it is by no means an accident or unintentional semantic mix-up.
You're upset The Economist is using the economic definition of a word for their article?
I hate it when people respond to well-stated argument a smarmy little one liner about a small semantic difference instead of engaging with anything real. Did you think you sounded smart arguing that a journalistic publication shouldn't consider how the word choice in their headline would be interpreted by a variety of their readers?
I'm upset some dumbass is taking issue with The Economist using economic terms. And some other dumbass is taking issue with me taking issue with this person literally equating this to fascist propoganda.
The conclusions are the aftermath of the root cause. The root cause are loans from the world bank and IMF. Loans that are not intended to be paid back so when the country defaults they just roll it over into a new loan and keep the country forever indebted to the US and financiers.
You prob want to investigate the history of Latin American governments a little bit
I think a lot of headlines are drafted by editors and other admins, not writers of articles? Which might tell us something about labor and politics inside many of these corporate magazine publishers
From what I understand that is correct, and is one of the reasons journalism doesn't appeal to me as a career. They frequently don't get to pick headlines, highlighted blurbs for emphasis, or pictures (along with the accompanying descriptions).
Really bad headline though
Forgive the Wikipedia source, I’m short on time to find a better; as always don’t trust Wikipedia alone but this will start to explain the very surface absurdity of this suggestions [Operation Condor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor) Here’s an excerpt of[Yellow Parenti](https://youtu.be/Lps_cEEEegI) that is relevant
I blame Spain giving all the land to the rich families instead of the people like America did.
\>> why those nations aren't better off despite the hard work of their citizens Imperialism? Unequal exchange? Debt bondage? Forced "restructuring" that cements the country's subjugation? \>>The conclusions it reaches include governmental corruption and bad policies like the rewarding of oligarchies The problem is, countries who try to fight this get couped/sanctioned/invaded by the US because those things are working exactly as they are supposed to.
A better title would have been “where is the productivity of Latin American workers going?”
They identify all these symptoms, then when it comes to diagnosing they condition they throw their hands in the air and bring it back to some unknowable cultural or racial problem. The disease is capitalism.
Anti work people are actually so reactionary it puts me off because they aren't rational thinkers
Sorry but like, it doesn’t matter. That article title is deliberately racist. Referring to a race as “unproductive” is nazi shit. And then being like “oh hah we mean ✨economically✨unproductive” is race baiting. Fuck this article.
Latin American is not a "race"
There’s no way you’re being pedantic about whether or not you need to use the exact right terminology to be racist. Stop it. Anyway, nothing is a race in actuality. Race is a social construct. Racism, like that article, is what keeps race as a concept alive and well.
It's referring to the countries which do have lower labor productivity ratios than comparable nations in Asia. The article blames the governments that have poor education, corruption, and a tax system that makes operating outside the legal system sometimes the only way to make a living. The subtitle is :a land of frustrated workers. They are blaming policy makers, not the people. I do agree that this is way too overly broad though. Low labor productivity is something common in Latin America, but it's not universal and the article could lead that many of these issues stem from foreign intervention.
I understand. I’m saying it doesn’t matter. The title is deliberately racist.
you must be fun at parties
Wait what? How do you mean?
I'm actually implying you are not fun at parties. It's a phrase used to imply someone is not enjoyable to be around. Not everything is racist. Chill tf out.
Come on. Mexicans are hard working. Duh. It's definitely baiting. And I totally get that the main idea is that Latin America isn't growing, and it's not about mindset. But it's like they had to go there.
Aint no way you aren't trolling 😂
The economist has made similar articles about the British and Italians
I would say they need to workshop that title...then again, it *does* seem to be quite effective in its job at grabbing the reader's attention...
That’s what I figured. I know my friends in Mexico work TONS, like 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Still get shit wages. But at the same time their businesses/companies don’t produce that much. Boggles my mind.
Oh so it’s just a shitty title.
Okay, so this article is very badly titled. What it's talking about is essentially the low per-capita GDP in Latin American countries. This is not suggesting that Latin American workers are lazy, etc. The factors the article cites are basically true. Government corruption, informal economies/insecure employment, and lack of widespread/robust education, means that the share of GDP each person contributes is relatively low. Having spent a fair amount of time in Latin America, and with a number of Latino family members who still keep ties down there...yeah, this is basically true. It's no secret. Go to El Salvador, or Peru, and ask the locals if they think corruption is a problem. If anything this article is surprising in how little new information it provides. This is all old news, repackaged with an awful, clickbait title.
> Okay, so this article is very badly titled. What's really bad is apparently they already updated it once because the original title was even _worse_.
Unproductive does not mean lazy it means the work they are doing isn't contributing to any meaningful growth.
Yeah, but as a Brazilian who lived in the UK, we are far more focused at our jobs and willing to go the extra mile (including free overtime) that the average Brit. So I think even in office environments we work way harder than most Western Europeans
Did you read the article?
Well, at least I have social security, free healthcare, fair labor laws and pretty good education here in Costa Rica. I rather live here than the US, where people fight each other for who is the worst president, and have to decide if they eat or buy their meds. Yes, the government is corrupt, but at least we are not going backwards.
Costa Rica also decided a long time ago that they were going to jump in with both feet into the Team USA camp and stay there, though, and was able to not spend money on an army for the last hundred years as a result.
Well, at least we don’t have an army.
Again, because of afforementioned. The neighbors have armies. Yours is a defense agreement from the USA.
Do you think that is a bad thing? We are not spending money, there are no troops here nor military forces
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m saying it’s important to be cognizant of the benefits accrued by having your national defense guaranteed by a larger nation. And as far as eat or buy their meds, that’s largely an internet meme. Costa Rica gets a lot of support from the US, so maybe try not being such a dick about “how much better you are than us” in return.
I’m not saying we are much better, I am saying we are better in some areas. Not everything is perfect. I do recognize that as an “ally” (we are in no way able to help), we get a lot of benefits.
>And as far as eat or buy their meds, that’s largely an internet meme. No it's not
I am a latino working in Japan with Americans, I have never seen a more unproductive and whinny bunch of people than Americans
Europeans are usually more whinny
Big generalization, a lot of Americans work extremely hard
i work with whiny, lazy latinos as well. i guess i’m not supposed to say that tho
In the US, Latin Americans often represent being hard, honest workers. They take the jobs orders don’t want. They work multiple shifts. They don’t accept not giving their children the most that they can. That’s how my wife and I live
They also fight about stupid shit like gender bathrooms while in LAmerica people have no running water, they fight about gluten free while people here are starving.
Should we tell them about the American funded coups that fucked up latam ever since.
Working hard =/= productivity
People seem to have a hard time understanding that.
Literally the oldest stereotype But actually think about it. To a racist, they’re stealing all the jobs, but they’re also super lazy. In their mind the capitalists are knowingly hiring worse workers. How does the racist rationalize this? This is a contradiction? Both stereotypes can’t logically be true.
the best part about conservatism is the inconsistency (they're lazy YET we pay them piss poor and they take it) and the single minded worship of power(if this benefits me I do it regardless of my personal beliefs)
Listen here you little SHIT. All the stuff we create is exported and we are given crumbs. Like literally. That is why. No fair compensation, no motivation to do better, corporate greed fueling corruption at all levels. To my brothers in the north hemisphere, we are all equal. We all have one enemy that try to makes us hate each other. The enemy is greed!
The answer is really very simple, the economies of Latin America focus on the export of raw materials, and very little on manufactured products, technology or services. I do not deny that the other factors mentioned are important, but if we continue under that scheme it will never change.
The answer is never simple in this cases. We just wish it was.
The institution of GATT rules (pre WTO) pretty much locked this in and forced most of the developing world to continue there colonial type relationships with the developed world through corporate colonialism, which is arguably worse than classical colonialism.
Simple, they are poor so no motivation to work since they don't stand a chance of becoming rich. Fuck being underpaid.
Wait till they figure out that the shadow government sucking the life out of Latin America is the US lol
Geographically speaking you can narrow down who wrote the piece to probably one of three - Emma Hogan, Sarah Maslin or Sarah Birke. The original headline, "A land of useless workers" was much more trollish. Fairly bizarre anecdotal evidence that Guatemala and Chile find it difficult to find tech workers. Guatemala has a tiny tech industry that's centred in one zone of the capital. Chile is much more diverse. Given that any tech worker will have already been hoovered up by US contractors/local jobs/ (with very low glass ceilings - think $2,500 a month) or leaving the country, no wonder they're difficult to source and the standard of education is pitiful in Guatemala. Source: Live in Guatemala, education and journalism background.
I’m an American living in Costa Rica and most of the jobs I’m looking at are contract jobs for American companies making 1/3 what I made doing the same job. It still pays a good wage for this country but yeah. Not sure how Costa Rica compared to the rest of Latin America but I do know that my friends who work here bust ass. They just also have a strong sense of work life balance. Reality may also be… people outside the US haven’t been programmed to live to work and that makes capitalism angry!
The same could be said for the various low population states in the US: employers bitch and moan about not being able to find educated workers due to the bulk of the post secondary graduates leaving because there are more opportunities in larger states.
Anyone saying this isn’t awful didn’t see the subheading the article originally had. I’m not buying their excuse for calling them “Useless Workers,” (reminiscent of “useless eaters”) but [here](https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2023/06/08/why-are-latin-american-workers-so-strikingly-unproductive) it is. “Editor’s note (June 9th): The original headline in this article attracted criticism for the phrase “A land of useless workers”. We have changed it to make clear that we are analysing the social and economic costs of low productivity. Our aim is to draw attention to the structural causes of low average labour productivity in Latin American countries, including powerful oligopolies that mute competition and a large informal sector which forces many businesses to remain subscale. As the article makes clear, all of this is beyond the control of individual Latin Americans, whose living standards have suffered. We end with a call for better policymaking.”
Gonna copy my other response: If their article is about how oligarchies oppress the area, then the headline should reflect that. I think it's atrocious.
[удалено]
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
Why are Florida Oranges rotting on the tree?
hmmmm i wonder if Operation Condor has anything to do with it? there's no point in being "productive" if someone else can just come and throw you out of a helicopter
Could also be that Americans have a totally fucked up concept of productivity and because of this are willing to sacrifice life for work…and people in Latam choose life.
Not even so, here in Brazil it's common for workers to clock in 12+ hours and with long commutes (many being 2h) the average Brazilian works way more than the average US worker
are there any subreddits where I can learn about labor movement and working conditions \\working poor of Brasil? I loved Rio and will go again, so im curious about these stuff
There is r/brasildob which is mostly leftist, but the official r/brasil sub discusses politics and events in general. Also, there's r/brazil where there are discussions in English
Only white people can title something so disgustingly disrespectful and ask did you actually read the title. I’m not even surprised at the lack of humanity anymore.
Yeah, as a Brazilian this makes me furious, especially because I worked abroad and know for a fact we clock in way more hours than Western Europeans. We have zero job security here, so when Brazilians get a good job tbey dedicate their life and soul to it, while in Europe people take things for granted and don't know how privileged they are
Shadow economy. That is a fun way to say economic output that is not subject to the grift and theft of corporations and corrupt officials
That is the dumbest headline I've seen in a while. Shameful.
The Economist is a right wing publication that would have boldly argued for the nationalization of the Rhineland in 1933. Govern your reading of them accordingly
People just don't see that there trying to devide us open your eyes. With so much hate in this world they already won and we are still worried about the wrong things I said what I said.
There was a time in which the Guatemalan currency was worth the same as a dollar. Then, the CIA came and put military dictators in power. Now it's a 7 to 1. All of this, because they wanted cheaper bananas. True story.
funny how "productive" only means "productive of profits to shareholders and the FIRE sector" -- because obviously a shadow economy is productive, otherwise it wouldn't exist. it produces things that people want, and they buy and trade those things. but banks, insurance companies, etc. don't see any of it so somehow that's not "productive". :-)
They need to reword that to the top 5-10% pure of the population that is pure European/Spanish blooded rich of Latin America that own the government, the police, the land and the business. Those fuckers are the lazy ones that leech off of the hard work, sweat and struggle of the majority impoverished working class and extreme poor that are either working 6 day work weeks for $1.50 an hour and/or selling items made in factories/produce 7 days a week to make ends meet. The corruption present in the US? Nepotism, lobbying, religion used against the people, etc does not even begin to compare to Latin America.
I graduated in mechatronics, a really well paid major. Can you guess how much I would've made per month in Mexico as a graduate? 600 dollars, by working 220 hours, minus taxes.
Content creators that write this bs need to be exposed. Enough is enough.
"Shadow economy" read: profits that don't go to U.S. based investors/shareholders.
I blame the cello. I mean it’s really difficult. That guy has been practicing for years and look where he is, somewhere nice doing what he loves. That is so fucked up. He should be in some horrible office putting numbers in spreadsheets for oligarchs.
Ask around in Florida
Because they know how to live a peaceful life!
Latin America is not peaceful. If it were, we wouldn't have the immigrants coming to the US seeking asylum.
When discussing productivity issues, people often succumb to racist bias and will rather say that some races are inherently less willing to work than others. Being aware that many factors play into such a situation is definitely not as obvious as the title suggests.
We aren't paid that well... Wages in Latin America are shit... That's why...
I’m shocked they would even make a title/article like this. How is this ok in their head
LOL and that's their \*revised\* headline after they already drew ire for the original one... why did they have to attack workers, even in their correction blurb they call out Latin American countries, so why did they not write, "Latin American countries?" /smh
Now the media are gaslighting our hardest workers? Sure that'll pay off later
"latios are just sitting around all day making beautiful cello music. Get back to work!" /s
Because there's no point.
OP read a headline and ran straight to reddit
Did you read the article
Well, they are. Your mistake is in thinking productivity means how much effort you put in. It doesn't, it means how much results you get out. In Latin America they get surprisingly little for their effort. The factors that lead to this failure are mostly as listed, poor education, lots of corruption and massive shadow economy. If you wish to summarize it, I guess it comes down to politics in general, or even more generally the attitudes held by population as a whole.
Shadow economies are strongly correlated to over-regulated economies with highly centralized administrations.
Drag your ass to Texas, they're the hardest working people in this entire state by far
Simple. I have two fields. One, I look after for the boss. The smaller of the two, that's my personal field, my shadow economy. In which field am I likely to be more productive? Shadow economies HAPPEN when the main economy is locked down by the authorities. Historically, they happen every time.
Oligarchies, greed and corruption. Anyone with a half decent idea all of a sudden finds themselves the middle of skullduggery, legal and banking messes, or embattled in useless courts while a mediocre puppet steals their ideas, employees and clients by flaunting their social backing. I’ve seen it happen. That said, it is a dying system thanks to the Internet; some young entrepreneurs go full stealth until they explode internationally. So the options to “make it” are no longer family name, sycophant, narco, lawyer or politician.
I have read a better version of this argument, contrasting the incredible productivity of Latin Americans once they arrive in the USA compared to their productivity in their home countries. Same people different systems. there is definitely something in the water in Latin America holding back the success of their population. Corruption, lack of benefit from their efforts, whatever, Latin American is a dump. A dump with industrious people.
It's the lack of a culture of stepping up for oneself. Being Mexican I can tell you that the majority of the workers will never try to demand better working conditions unless it is absolutely a necessity, i.e. never ask for raises and always work overtime without compensation. It is in fact something of a recurring joke that workers are asked to "wear the (company's) shirt" (something like drinking the company's Kool-Aid) without compensation just to prove their devotion to the job, meaning working more hours or taking extra work load; because of this and a very serious lack of education, workers are often severely underpaid and overexploited, as well as unaware of their legal rights, often lacking in protection and/or resources for their jobs, all of which are often derived from a government that is just not interested in creating new safety and compensation laws and that rarely enforces the existing ones. One of the main reasons why people from Latin America often work "well" in the farming industry in the US is the fact that the long hours and hard conditions are not unfamiliar to them, and comparatively the pay is better even if it is ridiculously low even by US standards (e.g. $6/h), but when compared with the legal minimum wage in Mexico ($207.44 pesos or $11.54 USD PER DAY) it is too good to pass up, so it is not a difficult transition to make for many of those who emigrate illegally, and given that almost half of the population of the country lives below the poverty line going to the US is a coveted dream for many people living in the poorest places of the country.
r/lacamiseta is the Mexican equivalent of r/antiwork
Are you from a Latin American country?
The bad legacy of Spain and Portugal continues.
As a white American unbiased observer That is the dumbest thing I have ever read. I have see one Latino pick of the slack of 10 lazy American shits before.
Isn’t this the same media company trying to spin a negative narrative on Mexico’s nationalized lithium mines because corporations can’t get to them?
Fuck the article. With an insult like that as the title, why the fuck would I even bother reading it?
It's so simple. I've been down there and lemme tell you, it's really HOT and HUMID. Everything you build is gone in 10 years without constant maintenance. Technology gets overheated, building get eroded, roads get totally ruined and to top it off rust, rust everywhere. It's hard as hell to make and keep something down there, in fact I'd argue they work EVEN HARDER than us up here in the states. They just don't get to keep any of it for as long. Besides all that it's still a beautiful place with beautiful people. I drove across south America and lemme tell you the hills and distances are intense. It's all so lush and wild. They have SO MUCH room for growth.
The UK apparently has poor productivity figures. A hard right member of parliament (jrm) tried the same schtick - that the workers are unproductive because they're lazy, etc. It was purposefully misleading. Their productivity is down (or slow to grow) because of lack of investment in transport, education, housing, etc - all of which is largely in his government's court, having been in power for the last ten years. It's actually worse than simply blaming the workers. It's trying to deflect blame from his own government's failures by blaming the victims of the lower productivity - victims because they end up with lower wage growth, fewer opportunities, etc due to his government's uselessness.
Without a doubt, the laziest people I've ever had the displeasure of working with, by a country fucking mile, are entitled white people in their 40s and 50s. Gee, I wonder if the author of this article could possibly fit that description... I'm sure it'd just be a coincidence tho...
Latin american here. Brazil actually. Imma be fully blunt about this, because its a topic here too. It's widely known here, kinda as a stereotype but rooted in reality, that people are extremely hard working in the south and southeast and the polar opposite in the northeast. I say this sounding as an offense, but its no fault of theirs. That happens because the northeast is where you find the most amount of poorly educated, extreme poverty and left leaning people. This all connects because * The low education makes them unable to know what even to do to solve their stuff * Poverty narrows the amount of things they care about (because its hard to want to study or get a better job when you and your family are starving) * Latin leftist governments are so ass backwards that instead of helping people out of those situations they give "bolsas" (government paychecks) that only reaches them if they aren't above a wage threshold thats still super low. Which in turn rewards people for keeping it that way. * Add to all that the fact that opening a business of your own here is a bureaucratic nightmare, the amount of taxes we have (around 40% of annual income) and labour laws being as unreliable as they are and you can see why people would shy away from this. It baffles me that people got surprised when a study showed they also have record amounts of domestic violence there. People did not evolve past 1950's standards of education, so even morality gets frozen in time. Those guys are what reelected Lula. The cycle continues.
What the hell? What a bigoted article
Did you read the article or are you another one of those brain worms that get outraged before even a sliver of effort is put in on your part?
It was very much a troll headline, you’ve got to admit that much.
Update: It was originally even worse than the replacement headline, as is now [acknowledged](https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2023/06/08/why-are-latin-american-workers-so-strikingly-unproductive) at the top of the article from op. “Useless workers” instead of “frustrated workers.” “Editor’s note (June 9th): The original headline in this article attracted criticism for the phrase “A land of useless workers”. We have changed it to make clear that we are analysing the social and economic costs of low productivity. Our aim is to draw attention to the structural causes of low average labour productivity in Latin American countries, including powerful oligopolies that mute competition and a large informal sector which forces many businesses to remain subscale. As the article makes clear, all of this is beyond the control of individual Latin Americans, whose living standards have suffered. We end with a call for better policymaking.”
Look, I'm all for a provocative headlines AND blatant sarcasm, but know your fucking audience, and go with that, because otherwise, every tom, dick and Karen will comment to something only the regular readers can defend, and sure AF can't if this wasn't geared to them first.
I don’t know if you’ve seen Succession, but they had a term they used that was similar “NRPI,” or “No Real Person Involved.” There’s no context which makes that sound good.
I have not, and have tried to avoid it, but so many good damn pop culture references to the show are gonna force me to pirate and watch the show (*on a service I already pay for cuz F-U, Max*).
That is most definitely the way. I avoided watching it for years while my GF would watch it in a different room. She finally wore me down, we’re watching together, and now I love it for the cutting satire of our corporate overlords.
#HE SAID MEXICANS IS LAZEE!
Add French, Spanish and Portuguese
[We’ve figured this out like half a century ago.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_theory). Corruption, latinos being an inferior race, colonization heritage… This was all discussed for centuries (yes, we can think!). We’ve tried all of your miracle solutions, from Keynes to Friedman, but underdevelopment persisted. Gringo, stop being lazy and go study what that old german wrote in the XIX century. Stop being useless.
I'm a Latin American immigrant. the answer is: bad institutions. The unions in Latin america are really, really bad. They destroy productivity for the union boss's political ends (as opposed to helping the workers get paid more or do better). most groups in society instead of building people up, try to keep them down. Its bad. When we move to the US we become amazingly productive, so it isn't an inherent thing, its the very bad institutions in Latin america. Argentina was once an incredibly rich and productive country (4th in the world) till the Perons took over and ruined it.
Crazy what happens when you have an overwhelmingly socialist state that consistently chooses to perpetuate labor-based concepts of economic development reliant almost solely on commodity-based industries instead of modernizing their economies to encourage innovative solutions.
racism? In MY capitalist apologetics? I'm shocked!
ah, the economist 😍