Because of their authoritarian recurrences, populisms understand better than anyone that management and permanence in power depend on the creation of efficient ecosystems for inefficiency, based on two key variables: bureaucracy and information.
This explains many things about our history, especially government malpractice. Without going any further, we are facing a government that with the best terms of trade of the century and in the midst of an export boom despite the drought, has achieved something unprecedented: the most backward wages in dollars, the lowest tax collection and inflation of more than one hundred percent per year. With the best economic conditions, the worst for the people.
It had already happened in 2002, when with the asymmetric pesification they made one of the most unfair and disorderly transfers of wealth in memory. And you could go back with the examples; It's not worth it, so sad. But to understand the challenge so that the change that Argentina needs is not frustrated again, knowing that it is not a matter of voluntarism and courage only.
The next government will face a colonized bureaucracy with thousands (literally) of recent appointments in key bodies for the management of the State. The paradigm is a bureaucracy that hinders, and a fragmented information and managed by a few, that nobody knows who they are.
It is clearly seen with the social plans. It is a perverse regime, with allocations contained in rules that few understand and almost no one controls. A trap, but not economic, but to ensure a regime of dependencies and loyalties that ends in a diminished democracy and a federalism of vassalage.
The information is disseminated in ministries, between bureaucratic cracks and pointers eager for undue advantages.
It doesn't end there. From the provincial mining cadastres to the violent ones in football. Always the old and sad system of uncertainty on purpose: bureaucracy and information for discretion, opacity and corruption.
But here is the opportunity, because it is a new world that operates with an old scheme. And the new world is the consequence of such a profound mutation, which has created an unprecedented reality: artificial intelligence not only stores information from thousands of years of our culture, but processes, creates and transforms it. It is enough to imagine the revolutionary scope that it can have applied to the functioning of the State.
This is the tangent to get out of a line of continuity of failure. In order for a fluctuation not to be cancelled, a threshold must be crossed for information to circulate freely and transparently, and that can be achieved with artificial intelligence put to work for the State.
It's not so much about shrinking it. Yes, to break the perverse scheme, with a bureaucracy committed from technology with a core republican value, transparency.
Why not think of a transformative agency that cuts transversally the integrity of the estates of the State? All available information, public, so that a child effectively receives his subsidy and does not depend on the grace of a pointer. Or a barrabrava cannot enter the field because the security forces have the same information. Or a mining cadastre can be accessible to any investor and not only to the friend of the holder of the registry, appointed by the governor on duty.
Argentina needs to get out of the critical vacuum in which it is immersed. The old recipes of populism are not enough. Technology and advertising, for the republic of the XXI century.
See also
Chaco, Jujuy and the populist masquerade
See also