Argentina today has a historic opportunity to increase the productivity of its economy through the exploitation of the hydrocarbon and mining resources that the geology of our territory offers with overwhelming generosity. The development of Vaca Muerta, the potential of lithium mining and the strategic minerals that run through the subsoil of the country constitute the material platform on which Argentina could transform itself into a country with degrees of independence like it never had to achieve, with this national purpose, a sustained process of development at all levels of its development.
The government of President Milei, meanwhile, without a national perspective on the economy, maintains with doctrinal fervor the macro ordering—the fiscal surplus, deregulation, monetary discipline—as a sufficient reason to generate the conditions of possibility that allow reaching that new stage that I like to associate, compared to any other equivalent concept, with the country’s independence as a process. In this direction, Milei concentrates on controlling the macroeconomy, but appears totally alien to the field of the real economy, despite the creaking of the foundations of the economic and social order audible to any attentive ear.
The real economy is that of the ordinary Argentine: that of the worker who observes how his salary loses purchasing power, that of the impoverished retiree with the largest adjustment in the history of humanity, and that of the small and medium-sized businessman who is forced to close the doors of the trade that represented the dream and effort of his entire life. In contrast, the cheap dollar policy, indiscriminate trade liberalization, the systematic destruction of jobs and the closure of SMEs constitute the spinal cord of an economic program that rests on the living flesh of a society exposed to a fracture with effects as dangerous as they are unsuspected.
Faced with silent devastation, which is already measured in alarming social indicators, there is added a phenomenon of civilizational scope in the face of which the national government exhibits unforgivable inattention: the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). The technological revolution that AI represents is an ongoing process that is already transforming the ways of producing, working, managing, teaching and governing. In the immediate horizon, this transformation will deepen the destruction of jobs that the economic adjustment has already begun, and it will do so with a speed and scale from which no sector of activity will be safe. The most accurate metaphor to describe what happens is that of a perfectly predicted flood; a catastrophe whose imminence the most prestigious experts, such as Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, confirm day after day, but in the face of which not a single dam is built, not a single evacuation plan is designed, nor a single mitigation policy articulated.
Very influential sectors of Argentine politics and economy share the illusion that the country will be able to reach this new stage represented by hydrocarbons and mining with the national government program without major shocks, as if the transition between the country we are and the country we intend to be were an administrative procedure that is resolved with good signals to the markets and a law of incentives for large investments. They lose sight of what is essential: that this transition will still take several years; that the path from an indebted economy with years of stagnation to an economy with productivity levels capable of supporting an exchange rate like the current one is a long, steep path full of social risks that are already materializing. Everything indicates that ahead we will have a period in which millions of Argentines will see their living conditions degrade without the new model offering them a concrete alternative. Therefore, Milei’s dogmatism becomes the main obstacle to sustaining this march, because the cost is too high for the majority of the population to sit idly by.
It is in this transition period in which everything is at stake. If Argentine society perceives that the sacrifice imposed on it does not lead to a shared destiny; if the displaced workers do not find retraining; If the productive communities of the interior see regional economies go bankrupt and if the new generations see that the labor market is contracting while technology advances without anyone offering them tools to function in this new world, social fracture will be inevitable.
If this fracture occurs – as prestigious economists, journalists and academics began to warn a few months ago – all the forecasts will collapse. The guarantees that the national government assumes are assured with the Large Investment Incentive Regime (RIGI) and the corresponding policies will collapse one by one, because no legal architecture for investment promotion resists the consequences of a broken social fabric. Investors who today look at Argentina with interest will inevitably observe this situation, which is as significant as legal certainty. A fractured country does not sustain anything, because social fracture is the mother of institutional and political instability, and instability is the declared enemy of all long-term investment, as demonstrated by the history of the countries.
For the transition to be viable, so that the path towards that Argentina of greater productivity can be followed without the country breaking up in the attempt, it is essential that no one feels that they do not belong to the same nation. And it is precisely the word “nation” that we are pronouncing the least. We talk about markets, investments, deregulation, competitiveness, monetary and fiscal variables. All legitimate words, all necessary tools. But we have stopped talking about the nation as what it is: a common home, an area in which millions of people coexist who need to be understood under the same purpose.
Of course, a nation is not built with economic rules and dogmatism. A nation is, above all, the collective certainty that there is a common destiny. It is the equivalent to the concept of home and the country to the material dimension of a house.
Argentina urgently needs to recover that word and give it the content that the time demands. It needs active labor transition policies that anticipate the impact of technological transformation instead of suffering it as a fatality. It needs a State that does not renounce its role as guarantor of social balance while opening the doors to private investment. It needs those who make the decisions to understand that macroeconomic efficiency is a necessary condition, but never sufficient, and that the real challenge is not to reach the new productive stage, but to arrive together, as a nation, with the house standing and all its inhabitants inside. Because the home is the key construction that makes people fulfilled. Consequently, the home is not financed with dollars, cannot be borrowed from the IMF, nor can tech super companies be asked to build it. The nation, like the home in a house, is a product of the relationships between those who are part of the same roof; and just as the quality of a home, in the case of a family, depends on the fulfillment of the people who make it up, in a nation exactly the same thing happens, because the nation is the home of a people, and the individual and collective future of each Argentine depends on that home. Cruelty, therefore, is the most urgent thing that we must put into crisis to get rid of so much stain of inhumanity.
Vice Governor of Río Negro
Javier Milei | Photo: CEDOC
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