A Brief History of Los Chicago Boys in Chile (and Latin America)

0:08 Hi everyone, This is Carmen and Christina. This is Istois Unknown in podcast where we've talked about Latin American history, sometimes the torrible and deals with heavy topics like racism, corruption, and genocide. But more than that, it's also about resistance, power and community. What are we what are we talking about today? Well, Carmen, in episodes sixty one through sixty five, we discussed Allende, the coup that overthrew him, Yeah, which was orchestrated by the US, which put dictator Pinochet into power, which marked the beginning of his decades long dictatorship. Yeah, that ended in nineteen ninety. And I realized that in those episodes I completely skipped over the Chicago Boys. I really only mentioned their name. Oh that's right, yeah, yeah, And they were a big part of this, But I just I was already doing so much research that I didn't I couldn't add them on. And a while ago, like almost two years ago, maybe I posted a video about the School of Americas on both TikTok and Instagram.

1:13 But on TikTok somebody commented, can you talk about the Chicago School or the School of Chicago, And I was like, oh yeah, And then I forgot about it completely until right now because I was reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and first of all, the book talks about so much. It's such an important read, especially in these times. But it reminded me to finally do an episode on the Chicago Boys because they're a big part of the book. And again, I never explained it in those episodes. I just said who. I just said, like, they did the economy stuff and they sucked. I think maybe this That's all I said. Okay, I was just going to remember do you remember the context in which they were mentioned in those episodes in a sentence where I was like, and he put the Chicago Boys in charge of like the economy you plan for his dictatorship. And that was about it. That's all I said. If I even said that much, I honestly can't remember. I think you said that because I do. They're not in my notes. Oh I do remember that you mentioned that they were had something to do with the economy. M hm, So who were they? They were a group of Chilean economists who studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman. Do you know the name? Yeah, that sounds very familiar, and at first glanced this may seem completely right, like, oh, it's just some people from Chile studying in the United States.

2:41 And for those who don't know, because I needed the refresher, I know I heard the name, but I didn't know anything else. Milton Friedman. Yeah, I recognize the name, and I'm like trying to remember for the left of me, why what specifically I know him from. I know somewhere. It's something in the economics world, obviously, but that's all I remember. Yeah, anyway, moving on, So Milton Friedman. He was an American economist and statistician. He even received the nineteen seventy six Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Scientists for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy. Stabilization policy. That doesn't sound good though to me, writing sounds like an expert in destabilizing economies. You don't say, all right, I downe foretold Okay.

3:33 In nineteen seventy he wrote a New York Times essay called a Freedman doctrine. The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, a theory that argues that the main responsibility of a business is to maximize the revenue and increase returns to shareholders. Basically, no company is obligated to engage in social responsibility. And sure whatever if this is only applied to businesses, yeah, okay, but governments and country I don't know about that, right, because, like if you wanted to, if you went and colonized the country, you have a responsibility to the people, to me to a society. If you want to be in charge of society, you need to care for the people in the society.

4:14 Things like that, right, Yeah, Like countries or governments are not businesses should not be ran like businesses. That's not how things work or should work, right, And so his little theory should have really only been ever applied to businesses. But I will add here that it should be no surprise. But guess what group of people love Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, the right wing A specific group tech bros. Do you give up? Oh wow, so I'm just way off. No, No, I mean some tech brows probably fall under this too. Capitalists, Libertarians, all libertarians. Wow, I just don't think about them, right, I forget things. Do you remember that story of that liberty are in town and it went to shit so fast town. Yeah, they had a libertarian town so in the US, and then basically no one was picking up the garbage because they no one you forget even and I think bears ended up overrunning the town. Wow, No, I don't remember where it was. I remember they tried to start like a society on a boat or some shit like that. And oh, that didn't work out for them either. It never works out. Yes, libertarians love his school of thought. Under Milton Friedman, the Chicago Boys learned to emphasize neoliberal principles. They advocated for free markets, deregulation, and privatization and presented these as solutions to countries and

5:45 economic crisis, which how in what world? But we know you and I know, yeah, that neoliberalism is never the answer. Yeah, that's why they were so fucked right now. Even then, though, you'll find people that still celebrate the Chicago Boys and Milton Freedmen. No way, of course. But let's go back to the beginning for a second. Where did this start? Milton Freedman, he is considered a second generation member of the Chicago School of Economics, but because he's one of the biggest reasons this was so widely implemented in Latin America. I'm not worrying about anyone else in this episode. I don't care. He along with the other main person who was teaching the Chicago Boys who then went to Chile first.

6:33 That guy's George Stigler, and so together they were the leading scholars of the Chicago School. And like I said earlier, they were all for the free market, like literal, unregulated ultimate level capitalism. They saw Keynesian economics as their ultimate enemy. And for those that don't remember, like myself, because I forgot everything we learned and ap economic I know these terms, but I don't remember what exactly. Like I know, I heard the word yeah because again Ipie econ everything went in and out my ear and I was like, I don't know, I don't care. Yeah. Anyway, basically the most basic basic explanation, Canadian economists justify government intervention through public policies that achieve full employment and price stability. Okay, so like all the stuff, yeah, all the stuff FDR did to get the US out of Keynesian Yeah, and they hated it, right, that makes sense to me that aspecting and they were like the leading economists in the US basically back then too, like because the US they did a lot of funding programs. Obviously Republicans always cut that back, right, but like that was like a fundamental thing, like create programs that create jobs things like that. Anyway, So yeah, they hated I FDR and everything he did during the Great Depression. This includes Milton Friedman, who most likely got his free marketing ideals from his parents, who were immigrants from Hungary. They arrived in the US in their early teens,

8:05 and they were really hard working, like pull yourself up by the bootstraps type people and then kick the ladder down you're there, so no one else can climb up with their boots that I got my Yeah, And that's what it feels like when you read what they did. Right, So they bought they bought a garment factory in Broadway, New Jersey, and this factory had an apartment which they lived in. And Milton Friedman himself wrote that today this factory would have been called the sweatshop. So they were paying their workers' pennies while they made profit. Right when was this and during this time when this is all pre the Great Depression? Okay, well I know back then they had people working like dogs. Oh yeah, during that was my next sentence. Basically during this time period, Marxist ideals and anarchists and then that's their words were influencing workers to demand their rights and to demand weekends off.

9:09 Like that's how Milton's father said it. It's just wild for me that, like they really expect you to do the work, and that's what they want to go back to, you know, just work, work, work, no life. You're basically are little workers and that's it. Yeah, yeah, And so eventually the factory went under, and of course Milton's father blamed the Marxists and the workers who wanted free market. Baby, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But of course this mark Milton Friedman's childhood, and after he graduated high school, he had his eyes sent on becoming a mathematician, but then he went with economics. And all of this is during the middle of the Great Depression when he's in college.

9:53 And so while other economists, while other young economists saw FDR's New Deal as life saving measures and they were, Milton Friedman and his wife described what FDR's New Deal did as quote job creation programs, or they said the following about it job creation programs such as the WPA, the Works Progress Administration CCC, the Civilian Conservation Group in case you don't remember what those acronims were from, I don't remember either, and the PWA the Public Works at Administration appropriate responses to the critical situation, but not the price and wage fixing measures. So they thought the work programs were good, but they didn't think the price and wage fixing measures of the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration were necessary. So they didn't. Okay, they didn't think it wasnt so anything that stopped the market, according to them, and stopped prices from like doing whatever, right, Like it's like interfering in the free market. Yes. Yes.

10:55 He would later say that the new Deal was the wrong cure for the wrong disease. I'm like, bitch, what does that mean? It helped the United States? Like, wow, well, I think they meant the free market what have you eventually fixed everything? Yeah, that's what they meant. The federal and according to him, the Federal Reserve was to blame, and unregulated, unregulated capitalism was the answer that would have fixed everything. Okay, just what I said. Yeah, and then in nineteen forty six, Milton Friedman began to teach economic theory at the University of Chicago, where he taught for the next thirty years, and there he taught his school of thought, the free market. You know, that's why it later he was a pioneer of this. Basically, Freedman and his followers used models and statistics to prove that this would work better than any Keynesian economics or any other existing economic theories principles. But they had no way to prove it because nowhere in the world was this taking care.

11:56 I was just going to say, like, real life is not like statistics, Like that's not how it works as much as you wanted to. Yeah, And they had nowhere to actually carry out their theories until until, yes, until Chile, Oh my god, and the Chile Project ridiculous. So Argentina, Chile and other Latin American countries had been closing the gap between the poor and the wealthy for a while, usually through leftist governments like Peron in Argentina, at events in guatemalac and Allende and Chile, And can you tell me what all of those hadn't come in they? Uh?

12:38 Did they tried to kill all of themen. They were all overthrown all of them. Sorry, I can't remember that word, but oh it's fine. I knew where I knew where you were going. I just wanted you to be the one to say it. But I'm sorry, let me down. But that's okay. Yeah. And of course the wealthy they didn't like this, because do we This work of closing that gap between the poorland wealthy often involved nationalizing industries where outsiders currently had the little greedy fingers in giving land back and these companies, we would lose money if these governments kept going right, so Q the CIA and the toppling of democratically elected governments to supposedly fight communism.

13:29 So in nineteen fifty three, two Americans met in Santiago, Chile to discuss this growing problem of THEIRS, the nationalization of industries, these governments, these leftist governments being elected workers demanding rights. And before anyone says ayend, there wasn't an office until way later than this meeting nineteen fifty three. I know, but like this type of like covert work, two topple institutions, it begins decades before actual cups take place. Plus there was a time because he ran for president three times. I think it was before he won. I don't remember if TV won, and he was in the Senate too, right, and I don't remember if he won on the third or fourth time that he ran. But so like he was gaining more and more followers at supporters every time he ran, and more support for these leftist ideas, and so he was identified as a threat even back then. Yes, they could see where the tides were going. And so thus this meeting in nineteen fifty three between these two American men in Santiago, Chile. These two men were all Beyond Patterson, the director of the US International Cooperation ADAMAN in Chile. And side note but this is the predecessor to the US AID. Oh yes, and Theodore Schulz, the chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, again where Milton Friedman was teaching. Okay, so these two men were both concerned with these growing

15:01 leftist movements in Chile and the economists participated in these movements and how it affected their profits. Apparently they called this pink economists. I've heard that before. I think they're meaning just leftists policies like leftists economists, because like, if you google that right now, it shows up like queer people. But that's not what it meant back then. So I think that's what I inferred, at least that that's what they guess. That would make sense to me. Yeah, and like, of course the book I was reading didn't really explain what it was. They just assumed because it was written in and seven. So we're like, bitch, I'm dumb. I don't know. Yeah, but that's my guess. So one of them told the other quote, what we need to do is change the formation of the men to influence the education, which is very bad. Say that again. What we need to do is change the formation of the men, formation of the men. So the way these men think, okay, we need to influence their education because right now it's bad because they keep coming up with these pink economists. Okay, okay, I see, yes, yes, So both men already believed the US wasn't doing enough to fight Marxism, which they were again intervening everywhere, right and together, the men came up with a plan that would be called the Chile Project.

16:22 This was their plan. The US government would pay to send Chi then students to study economics at the University of Chicago, which at the time was considered the most anti pink So that's why I thought pink men left. Yeah, because it was the most conservative school at the time. I don't know if it still is. Maybe it's like because you know how red it was, like the red scare, like communist color or whatever. Like maybe pink because these were like students. I don't know, oh, maybe, and Theodore Schulz and Milton Friedman would be paid to travel to Santiago to conclude research into the economy and to train students in the Chicago school ways. And when al Beyond Patterson approached the dean of the University of Chile and offered a grant on top of the program, the dean declined why because he saw the program for what it was, US intervention. It was basically telling the US telling Chile what their top students should be learning. Yeah, and then dictating that education. And so yeah, he was like, no, no, no, no, thank you. But do you know but do you know who Albion went to next, who then said, yes, Milton, No, Milton is his colleague in this. Oh my god, so each other? What other university would he go to that wasn't the University of Chile but in Chile. Yes, yes,

17:57 I don't know. I'll tell you, okay. The dean of Chile's Catholic University, Oh my god, I should have known that. Yeah, I thought you were. You know, your brain's not here today. No, I'm just kidding. And if you recall from the Chile episodes we did again, like sixty one through sixty five or something like that, the Catholic Church was one of the biggest supporters of Pinochet. They were very conservative and they wanted to maintain that. Yeah, so of course they said yes. Also, the Catholic University at the time had no economics departments either, and so they said yes so fast. They were like yes, like in media. Yes, And this is the official birth of the Chila Project. And the program would only be open to select students. And this was intentional because they wanted to produce quote, ideological warriors who would win the battle of ideas against Latin America's pink economists. Wow, yes, yes and quote. The CHEEA project officially launched in nineteen fifty six with one hundred students pursuing advanced degrees at the University of Chicago. Their tuition and expenses all paid for by US taxpayers and some US foundations, but mostly taxpayers. Wow. Ten years later the program would also accept students from all of Latin America, but three countries saw the most participants. Do you want to try and gas those or no? No? Okay Aargentina, Brazil, and Mexico. I was going to say, Afgentina, that's one of them. Yeah, And the Ford Foundation further funded this program,

19:33 and then this led to the Center for Latin American Economics Studies to be placed at the University of Chicago. In this program, there were fifty Latin American students studying graduate level economics at all times, and it achieved what it wanted in ten years. This extremely conservative school was the place for Latin Americans to study economics and then they would return to their countries and shape policies there decades. Under this program, students were taught disdain for policies that alleviated poverty. The first group of students that returned to Chile were quote even more freedman nights than Freedman himself. Wow, so not good. No, Then these students that returned to Chile became professors of economics at the Catholic University, where they trained even more Chilean students in this school of thought to do more influencing. Yes, and by nineteen sixty three, twelve of the thirteen full time faculty members at the University of the Catholic University in Chile were graduates of the Chicago School. Wow. Students who graduated from the program, whether they were in Chicago or in Santiago at the Catholic University became known as Los Chicago Boys. Then, with USAID money, they went on to set up similar programs as far as Colombia, but also at Jentina, Brazil, Uruguay.

21:07 At first glance, this plan to influence Latin America was very slow going, like it even seemed to be failing. They're like, where are they, When are they going to start becoming more conservative? When are they going to let us? Yeah? But then in nineteen seventy Chile elected Salvyende, like we know from all those episodes, and all three major political parties in chileg were in favor of nationalizing the copper mines, which at the time were controlled by US mining companies. These companies had invested over one billion dollars in the last few years before nineteen seventy and their profit was seven point two billion, damn And so yeah, they were like, we don't want this to be nationalize. That's what we make money. And then when all seemed like all hope was lost, Nixon was elected in the US and we know what this means. He gave the CIA the order to make the quote Chilean economy scream end quote. And like we discussed in the Chile episodes, they flooded money into anti Allende propaganda. They also created policies that would hurt the Chilean economy under Allende, like denying loans. And this is on top of the CIA's like pouring money into this like this is also US mining companies along with the International Telephone and Telegraph Company Purina, like the Dog Food and Bank of America and Pfizer. They formed a committee whose sole purpose was to get Agenda to back off nationalizing industries by making him face economic lapse.

22:43 That was a Britain goal, and their plans included blocking loans to Chile, having US private banks do the same, delayed buying any theme from Chile for six months, and so on, but Allenda was still holding the majority of the support in Chile despite all of this Wow and then because their plans were working too slow again, the Catholic University became one of the meeting places for the planning of the coup. Orlando Science, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, then recruited top Chicago Boys to design alternative programs to government programs like financial or economic one economic ones, and then they would pass these programs, these planned programs onto the armed forces. The Chicago Boys, led by Sejo de Gastro and Serjo Unduruga, who knew that said he was such a cursed name, they held weekly secret meetings where they discussed how to remake their country into neoliberal lines. And so they, along with the majority of these companies and the military, planned the overthrow of Allende.

24:00 And they, I'm sure we said it in the somewhere in the five six episodes that we did, but they received seven to five percent of their funding from the CIA, and by the time the coup was said to take place, the Chicago Boys had a five hundred page economic program to guide the junta. And the junta we said in those episodes, but they were the three military heads that would govern Chile, but then Pinochet took charge. But that's the junta. This five hundred page program was known as The Brick. It was put together by ten principal authors, and eight of those ten were Chicago Boys University of Chicago graduates. And although the military was responsible for the physical overthrow of Agenda, the military part of the fighting.

24:46 This was an equal partnership between the army and the Chicago Boys. Each page of those five hundred pages of the Break was approved by someone in the military by September eleventh, nineteen seventy three. Because when you look up the Chicago Boys first, the one they're celebrated two people try to make it seem like they didn't know that this was going to be a dictatorship, or that they didn't know they by landed. They knew they worked together all along. Yeah. So, following the coup, Pinochet named several Chicago Boys as senior economic advisors, including Steel Castro. During the first year and a half of his regime, Pinochet followed all of the rules laid out by the Chicago Boys.

25:28 He privatized state owned companies, not all of them, but most of them. He let in foreign imports, he eliminated price controls, and he cut government spending that was not the military, and that was instead increased. The Chicago Boys insisted that without government involvement in all of these areas, the natural laws of economics would bring equilibrium and inflation would go down. Stupid yeah, because within the year inflation had risen three hundred and seventy five percent. It was at the time the highest in the world. Wow. Unemployment hit record levels because free trade was flooding the country with cheap imports. People were losing their jobs. But the Chicago Boys insisted that it was because the rules of their program weren't being followed with the right amount of strictness.

26:18 So they advised even more cuts and more privatization, and Pinotet did it. And the only people benefiting from this was foreign companies. Of course, Yes, that's why they wanted this. Those were planned all long. Oh yeah, one hundred percent. At this point, even previous business owners in Chile that had cheered for the overthrow Byende were starting to want his return because they knew it was still better. Damn. It was so bad that they brought in Milton Friedman himself in nineteen seventy five, so he could fix the problem, but he was also stupid. Well, Milton freedman solution was something called the shock treatment, and shock treatment or shock therapy is a group of policies intended to be implemented at the same time, all at the same time, a bunch of different policies, all implemented at the same time, to liberalize, liberalize the economy. And that's like the economic version of shock treatment. But then like the overall now known like term or term or known definition for shock therapy is for governments to put out a bunch of changes, not just financial changes, but a bunch of changes at the same time to like overwhelm people that might want to guy studying is now they were calling it when yeah, when he was announcing executive orders. Yeah, I forget what they call liberals like flooding the system or some shit

27:49 like that. Yeah, that's that's a term that kept going around. And so shock treatment is what Milton Friedman described this, but like the financial version, but it's really all the same. Yeah, but he really thought it was going to help. I don't know. He advised the cutting of government spending by another twenty five percent in six months. And then he said that unemployment, the unemployment problem would only last months at most. And then he returned to the US and he wrote about Pinochet in such a nice fashion, even though at the time it was already known that he had stadiums full of preous torturing. Yes, and the disappearances it was like already speculated worldwide. So but he wrote, quote, the general was sympathetically attracted to the idea of a shock treatment, but was clearly distressed at the possible temporary unemployment that might be caused. And it's like, please, Pinochet didn't care about the people. He just cared how it would make him look. But he didn't care that his people would be out of work. He was again everyone knew he was massacrering, committee massacres and torturing in the stadiums, but this didn't matter to Milton Friedman. He willingly went to go to a country in a dictatorship and a right wing dictatorship and advised them, Yeah, and this wasn't the only one. He went to uruway, he went to Argentina. Gone, he went to like a couple more in like Asia, like whow And of course this didn't matter to the

29:20 Chicago boys either, right. Pinochet was all in on Milton Friedman's plan, and he fired the economic minister and then gave that job to said hell Castro, So the like main Chicago boy at this point, and said hell Castro, then filled the ranks with even more Chicago boys, and together they privatized more than five hundred state owned companies and banks. By nineteen eighty three, one hundred and seventy seven thousand industrial jobs were gone. That is a lot. Unemployment reached twenty percent, the highest in Chile. Do you know what that unemployment was during Nayenda? Do you remember three percent? So they it was way less, That's all I remembered. And why less compared to twenty percent? Yeah, and this unemployment lasted years, not months. Unlike what Milton Friedman said. What happened. Basic things like bread cost a chi Land family seventy four percent of their income, and Pinochet simply told chi Lands to forego luxury items. And do you know what he considered a luxury item, oh, basic necessities? Milk? Milk. Wow, there's also a milk program where kids received milk at school. That was one of the first things cut wo Yeah, but no, the Chicago Boys continued despite all of this. The public school system was replaced by vouchers and charter schools. Kindergarten was privatized.

30:45 That's what they're trying to do here every This is what they've already done in New Orleans after Hero Get Katrina. But it's so true what they say about fascism being it. What do they say, It's something turned inward. It's going to come home. I don't know what they say, but basically, to me, it's gonna come home. The US has been perpetrators night perpetrators, has been the person behind installing these fascist governments elsewhere to their benefit. But eventually it's going to get to the point where it has to happen here, and that's where we are. So kindergarten was privatized, cemeteries were privatized, healthcare privatized, Social Security privatized. My god. And the argument for this system, for those who still believe it works, including libertarians, say that if a country can hold out in the short term, then the long term is better. But that's not true. It's literally the same thing they're fucking saying right now. It's gonna get worse until it gets better or something like that. It's gonna get worse until it gets worse and worse and worse and worse. It's not going to get better unless we fight.

32:00 What is short term is what I'm wondering, because in ten years Chile was worse than it had ever been, and you can still find people saying the same thing I just said. How if a country can hold that short term the launchm will be better. I know you just said. They're saying it about here right now, but they've also been saying it about Argentina and Milay, of course, because that is one libertarian ass government. He cut so much, the inflation has gone up so high since he took office. And also who was he friends with Trump? Yeah? And Israel. So But back to the nineteen eighties and Chile. By now, Chile had a crewed fourteen billion dollars in debt due to implementing the practices of the Chicago Boys. The economy crashed in nineteen eighty two, and the only thing that saved the economy was that Pinochet had not privatized the copper mind company Godero. He did privatize others, but and Codelgo generated eighty five percent of Chilis export and that was the state's steady source of income, the one copper company that he had not privatized. And what does that tell you that nationalization of resources is the answer. Yeah, and the already richest of the rich were the only ones who got more rich under these policies. Of course, by nineteen eighty eight, when the economy economy was considered

33:31 stabilized by everyone else, forty five percent of Chela's population was under the poverty line. Wow, that is again a lot. But the richest ten percent saw their incomes increased by eighty three percent. Oh my god. Wow. Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. And the effects of the Chicago Boys in Chile can still be seen today. Milton Friedman went on to advice similar regimes in Latin America, from Brazil's junta to Agentinas kunta to Urduai's dictatorship. Like he just went from dictatorship to dictatorship, advising them that is deplorable, Like you should be able to It's like, when we what did we talk about? I think we were talking about Coca Cola way back, and I think I mentioned because in the book that I listened to for that episode, they mentioned the United Fruit Company and someone, some professional whatever was talking about the United Fruit Company and she's like, if doing business in a country requires you to work with paramilitaries, and maybe you shouldn't be doing business there. And it's like this fool should have had the ethics and morality to be like, hey, about to work with an authoritarian dictator who is mastercreing, massacreing, committicilling his people, then maybe I shouldn't come here to advise them. Like shouldn't that

35:02 be a given? You would think, you would think, But no, And just like in Chile, Chicago boys in other countries like Argentina, they were giving key positions in Argentina's junta And like you just said, like personally, it's an extremely bad look when far right dictatorships love your economic theories and they're the only ones using them today. Some would still see what happened in Chile as a success. Sure, Chile's GDP grew from fourteen billion in nineteen seventy three to two hundred and forty seven billion in twenty seventeen, so a lot, but like, what is the true cost? Because almost thirty percent of all of Chile's income becomes belongs to one percent. There's not good ratio. Wow, it's one of the most unequal countries. The student protests we talked about way back when we talked about Negro Matabacos and the dogs both times were a direct result of the Chicago Boys' economic policies, so much so that protesters were yelling chow Chicago, oh wow in the streets because they were fighting the privatization of schools and like the voucher system, if you remember that in those episodes. And that's literally from this. In his twenty nineteen book Desi wil Dad or Inequity, former Treasury Minister Nicolas A. Saguirre wrote Chile was a laboratory for neoliberalism in its most

36:33 pure or extreme version. Drastic reforms that would be unthinkable in a democracy were executed as military orders without criticism or opposition, and at an enormous social and human cost, thanks to a dictatorship that used blunt forced to block any debate and home and yeah, he's right, yep. Pro or free market people love to point to Chile's raising GDP as a success, but like again, when you took a closer look, it's not great, Like, yeah, it's gone up, but fifty percent of Chilean workers are the best. Didn't see that any of that. No, only the top top percent. Like I already said, it's a very unequal country where one percent of people hold thirty percent of all income in the whole country. Fifty percent of Chieland workers are in less than six thousand, three hundred and twenty dollars per year. Wow. A small number of families in Chile dominate the economy with companies that include like pharmacies, banking, and phone services. And in these companies of these families there has been cases of collusion, tax evasion, illegal payments to politicians, and consumer fraud which no one ever served any jailt time for even though they were found guilty punity mm hm. And everywhere the School of Chicago alumni the Chicago Boys went, they faced similar numbers. In Argentina, in nineteen seventy, the richest ten percent of the population earned twelve times as much as the poorest, but by

38:05 two thousand and two, the riches earned forty three times as much as the porous Wow. And so I guess if their goal was to increase the gap between the wealthy and the poor. That they succeeded probably was yeah, because yeah, that gap grew and only the richest of the riches benefited from these policies. And that's what happens in a free market world and where unregulated capitalism is the norm, that's what happens. And like I said, Argentina is currently going through the same thing again, but this time enacted by Melay. Inflation has skyrocketed as a result. And this brings me to where Carman, you and I find ourselves today in the US, like many of our listeners areas because the big beautiful bill that just passed has very much the same kind of Chicago School principles that these same governments in Latin America, which were dictatorships, implemented big cuts to programs that aid the poor. Education cuts, cuts everywhere, cut cuts, cuts and increases to military funding or in our case ice. So yeah, that is the infamous School of Chicago aka Lost Chicago Boys. Wow, the destabilizers of economies. Yeah, And it's just it baffles me that they're celebrated by so many, but of course it's it's the same people infecting us everywhere, like a disease. Yep.

39:37 But yeah, unless you have anything else to add, this brings us to the end of the episode. M I don't think I have anything to add except that what is that saying history doesn't repeat itself at rhymes or some shit like that. But the thing is, I don't know where it's like full circle, what's like a fitly loop, like the same happening again and again and again and again. Yep. Yeah, And it's not that it's repeating, it's that it never went away and it's just getting bigger. Right. That's yeah, it's an infinity loop everywhere, right, because like you mentioned at Quintina is going to do it with me lay this extreme free market neoliberal whatever. Uh. We're seeing people, these rich people, rich companies trying to do use Latin America as their own experiments to enact this kind of stuff.

40:29 And we've seen that in Prospera a. I don't know if it's an island or a city in Onduras, but it's they're trying to create like modern company towns. I forgot what they're calling them, like free free something fancy name to highly find that they're company to company towns. Like it's not New Yeah, and it's literally like extreme versions of this yeah. Yeah, And I highly recommend my main source for this, which was The Shock Doctrine. There is an other book that's focused on the Chicago Boys, but honestly, it's very biased towards them, Like they don't even praise them. Yeah, they like pass over the fact that they were literally part of the coup and they were like, like the book even mentions like, did does Chicago boys know of the violence? It's hard to say, and it's really not like said he there's evidence, Yeah, what the top Chicago boy was rising through this position by Pinochet, Like they knew, There's no way they didn't know, But the book glazes over that and like gives them the benefit of the doubt. So I don't recommend that book.

41:38 If you want a real picture of what they were doing, definitely read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. And it's also like she uses the Chicago Boys a lot as an example of this type of thing, but she also talks about how this type of thing where something happens where basically a region is destroyed either through war or through these type of policies, and then free market pro capitalists companies come in to do the fixing, and instead they create this hyperinflation like they happened in Iraq. It happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. So weren't they trying to do that also in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Yeah, And I don't know if they did or didn't because I haven't looked into it, but I know Thailand when there was a and the book also mentions this, but there was a national disaster in Thailand, and I think it was the tsunami, and Thailand worked with their government, never let in outside companies from the US, and they rebuilt.

42:40 The fishermen worked with the government to rebuild their own and they rebuilt. They rebuilt everything for them and it worked for them. And they even had this group of survivors from Hurricane Katrina go and see what Thailand has rebuilt at getting chills just talking about it because the Hurricane Katrina it was the opposite situation. They were basically abandoned. It was forever changed. Yeah, for the worst. And one other survivors like cried and was like everyone needs to follow this. This is what everyone needs to do when there's a disaster. You cannot let these outside contractors crying. And yeah, I highly highly recommend the book because wow, also shadowt to I don't know how she or they pronounced their name on socials, but on Instagram and antic talk it's the same. It's like a yeah, okay, I think I'll put it in the show notes. But she was like, here's the books I've read to keep me sane, and it's but it's all like books to inform you on the situation, and the Shock Doctrine was one of them.

43:47 And I was like, oh, I've read some of these, but I still need to read the Shock Doctriner. And I was like, I expect you to read it because I know you'd be reading because she follows us on StoryGraph and so she's like, I expect to see this and I did. I read it for these notes, so shout out out. That was the push I needed, and also to finally write these notes. And yeah, that was a one mess. It's already unknown or I hope I said that wrong. Goodbye everyone, and we hope this was one mess. Is Studia Unknown for you? Yes? Bye bye. Astoria Unknown is produced by Carmen and Christina researched by Carmen and Christina, edited by Christina. You can find sources for every episode Attoria Unknown dot com and in our show notes. Creating the podcast has a lot of work, so if you want to help us out financially, you can do so by supporting us on Patreon at patreon dot com. Slash She studied as an own podcast