Pierpaolo Barbieri: belief

Transcript context

…Take Chile — they’re fairly wealthy by regional standards. They have reasonable state capacity. Yet, even with their economic growth, they don’t seem to have made much of a dent in their inequality problem, and the quality of their educational system for maybe even the bottom two-thirds still seems quite poor. Why is that such a hard problem for them to fix? That’s another great question. I’m not an expert in Chile. I would think that Chile went a little bit too far in the neoliberal playbook, and there are certain things in Chile that are private or overwhelmingly private that make it difficult for social mobility to exist. The amount of privatization in the healthcare sector and in the education sector make it difficult for families from the lower-income quintiles to have the ability to access the services needed to move to the third or second or first quintiles, and that reduces social mobility. However, you should still think about Chile as an amazing success story of the last 40 years — development, much lower poverty, much lower hunger, much higher educational achievements. I think Chile is still a success story, especially when you compare it to Argentina, which has created net poor people in the last 30 years versus reducing it. But I think it could have been done in a smarter way if healthcare and education had had more of a public element than they have had. We now move to the overrated versus underrated section. I toss out an idea, name, or thing. You tell me if it’s overrated or underrated. The French author Michel Houellebecq — overrated or underrated?…

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