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, 14 tweets, 5 min read
Today's @bopinion post is about how amazingly well Chile has done since it got rid of Pinochet.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Since the restoration of democratic rule in 1990, Chile has outgrown practically every other country in the Western hemisphere, including the U.S. and Canada.
And while it was growing, Chile was becoming a more equal country.
Thanks to fast growth and falling inequality, Chile's relative poverty rate is now BELOW that of the U.S., and similar to that of Japan.

statista.com/statistics/233…
Chileans' health has improved too.

Chile's life expectancy has passed that of the U.S.!
Just three decades after getting rid of its dictator, Chile is now ranked as a substantially more free country than the United States!

freedomhouse.org/report/countri…
And Chile's corruption rating is not too bad...better than South Korea or Taiwan.

transparency.org/cpi2018
And Chile scores ahead of the U.S. in terms of freedom of the press!

rsf.org/en/ranking
So given all this amazing success, why are Chile's major cities filled with angry protests right now?

There are many possible reasons.
One additional possibility, which I don't see discussed much, is that this is just how things are now. That no matter how equal, rich, or free a country is, social media makes it so easy to whip up an angry protest that protests are a permanent thing.

amazon.com/Revolt-Public-…
But I have a different theory.

I'm guessing that it's a "revolution of rising expectations".

My guess is that Chile did SO well in 1990-2012 that the slowdown since then has led to frustration.
This idea is not my original idea; it's been used to explain lots of historical revolutions, protests, riots, and unrest.

fff.org/explore-freedo…
Obviously Chile's government should try hard to reduce inequality, reduce consumer prices, and clean up corruption.

But in the end, maybe the only thing that will stop the protests is time. Time for expectations to reset.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Oh, and in case you were wondering, here's a thread about why Pinochet, in addition to being a brutal fascist dictator, was bad for the economy. Kicking him out was what started Chile's economic boom.

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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
On one hand I agree with Obama that much online dialogue is unhelpful and goofy (though this is a general phenomenon, not confined to woke dialogue).

On the other hand, I think wokeness addressed some real thorny problems in our society that had previously been hard to address.
In the 20th century we outlawed racial discrimination, sexual harassment, etc. But although those legal changes helped a lot, there was a lot of tacit discrimination and quiet sexual harassment that the legal apparatus couldn't root out.

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citylab.com/equity/2019/10…
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Today's @bopinion post is about an epochal change that will soon happen to American society: The end of the Age of Oil.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Electric vehicles are going to take over the world.
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Poor American kids whose parents were born in India or China tend to make it into the upper middle class.
In general, mobility tends to be higher for Americans whose parents are from Asia, the Middle East, South Europe, and South America, and lower for those with parents from the Caribbean, Central America, and West Europe.
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I Want the Truth!
@DougieFreshii
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