No one likes to be the butt of a joke. Or an object lesson. Or, really, the "before" picture (or except when that "before" picture is of early career Mickey Rourke). Sadly, Argentina is often just that. If I had 10 centavos for every time an Argentine told me how this country had the 7th largest world economy in 1910 (or whatever), I would be an extraordinarily rich man (and I'd possess tons of monedas, thus making me doubly rich).

The most current example of this is Alan Beattie's new economic history, False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World. Ostensibly just what the post-colon title says, it takes as its leaping off point one simple question: If the U.S. and Argentina were so similar at the time of the Great Depression--rich agricultural immigrant hotbeds--why did one end up so rich and the other so, well, economically fucked (well, we're all fucked right now, but you know what I mean)? There are two reviews of this worth reading, one in the New York Times and the other on Bloomberg News. I'll let you read them without comment, except to say that the NYT review has an especially scathing review of the divergent path these countries took over the last 70+ years:

The United States swiftly enacted the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Argentina ended up electing Juan Domingo Perón, who tried to seal off Argentina from the rest of the world economically. Over the years, the country would endure huge deficits, runaway inflation and a host of other maladies that contributed to economic collapse. To this day Argentinahas not recovered.

Ouch. In the words of Sistah Souljah, if the truth hurts, you will be in pain, and if the truth makes you crazy, you will be insane.