This is Planet Money from NPR.
Welcome back, everyone, to Planet Money Summer School World Tour, the only international economics degree
that studies the flows of capital, goods, and lost luggage.
I'm Robert Smith.
Every Wednesday this summer, we are visiting a different continent, listening to some classic Planet Money case studies,
and figuring out the economic lessons we can bring back home.
I hope you packed a sweater today because where we're going, it is winter in August.
Where the tango is smooth, the soccer is aggressive, and the monetary policy is a cautionary tale.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets once said there are four sorts of countries,
developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.
The point of the observation is that there's nothing
in world history quite like the rise and fall and rise and fall and fall and rise of Argentina.
In 1910, it was one of the richest countries on Earth.
The people there had more wealth per person than France or Germany.
Argentina had natural resources, a cultural capital to rival Paris and dreams of being a superpower.
But it wasn't going to happen.
Argentina became instead a country of lost hopes, as one government after another made economic and political choices
that erased much of the wealth over the last hundred years.
Entire books have been written about what happened to the Argentinian economy.
Here's a quick and simplified recap in 35 seconds.