🚀 go-pugleaf

Latinamerican countries follow all 'recipes' of academia and yet fail
to achieve sustained development. Could it be that people actually
*behave* differently from the way people behave in countries that have
achieved development?

Man is supposed to act economically as a self interested (quasi)
rational entity following his own satisfaction without regarding that
of others. But waht if people actually take others into account when
performing economic activities?

My experience trying to make a living in Mexico taught me that the
norm is precisely to take into account the welfare of others, but in a
*negative* way. Competition is normally seen as a zero sum game, I win
what you loose, but I've seen many times behaviour of the type "we
both loose", even when there were known options where both of the
parties would win. More often than not, the party choosing the
loose-loose option would have been the party winning the least in the
win-win option (though sometimes that wouls be true considering nit
the actual payoffs only but total earnings after several games). This
behaviour I call envy.

So it may be that generalized envy lies at the core of the
underdevelopment  phenomenon.In countries where wealth has
historically been concentrated in a very few hands ans is not easily
aquired by most, this kind of predatory competition is bound to
happen, particularly if it is preceived that noveau riches will
readily support the statu quo and help keep the socioeconomical
differences. Though laws may be passed to curb down unfair
competition, there remain many opportunities to put obstacles to the
activities of others.
Within firms, envy would keep costs at a higer level for a given
technology due to employees' internal struggles. At hte industry and
interindustry level output would be lower than optimal due to firms'
inefficiencies and lost business opportunities. Generally,
overachievers and efficiency would be punished while underachievement
and slugishness would be rewarded, since that would make others
achievements stand out. The net effect would be an economically
depressed level of output where the economy would reach equilibrium in
a local maximum and that equilibrium would be stable due to the
equalizing effects of envious behaviour, in a similar manner as a
keynesian economy stabilizes at a high unemployment level.

In an envy pervaded economy governmental policies would be less
effective than expected both by officials' missapplication ("all they
need is money") and the reaction of economic agents ("they can be
better than me"), so a classical governmental policy solution to
underdevelopment is not feasible.
What would then break the underdevelopment impasse? As many times has
been pointed out, education is essential, but not in the sense of
spreading technical knowledge but rather with the goal of changing
basic social values to make individuals more cooperative and less
sensitive to people's conditions.

Underdevelopment can be considered as an economy at some
quantity/quality of Chaos. Development would have a lower
quantity/quality of Chaos (disorder). Borders are necessary to keep
the differences, though in the border there should be a very
interesting non-smooth mix of chaotic regions, ie, a more chaotic
system, but only in the fringe (can lead to quiet static dynamic
states). Ideally, the more developed region shoud be "moving" into the
less developed region to absorb and "fix" the state of development
once the differential levels start smoothing out due to economic
interactions of free agents (may depend on institutions). At the
border both levels of development must mix and flux; by moving the
border at a given moment of time the new desired level of development
would be fix and absorned into a sustainable dynamic. Here it is
important to notice that bussiness cycles must be shallower in
developed countries than in underdeveloped countries. Due to the
butterfly effect, underdeveloped (more chaotic) regions must
experiment bigger, more notorious effects for a given disturbance.
(Mexico gets the flu when America sneezes, etc.) Definitely, even
though we can see order in current economies and create deterministic
models, the underlying dynamics are chaotic, the smoothness is only
apparent at the surface as an epiphenoma, like temperature (a single
figure) being the result of the chaotic interaction of molecules.
Developed countries would look as a very well mixed yoghurt, while
underdeveloped economies would look like frappe.


These cursory analysis can be mathematized. Volunteers?
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Danilo J Bonsignore