Javier Milei strode onto the stage in Santiago, flung up his arms and gave a bow to an economist with a front-row seat: Rolf Lüders, one of the last of the original Chicago Boys.
That was in 2019, four years before Milei would win election to Argentina’s Presidency and start delivering his anarcho-capitalist style of shock therapy to one of Latin America’s most crisis-wracked countries. When the two men had huddled earlier that day, Lüders recalled, Milei eagerly soaked up the first-hand account of how a band of University of Chicago economists transformed Chile into a free-market blockbuster a half-century ago.
Lüders, 90, had a warning for Milei, one that’s often forgotten in an era of made-for-social-media politics, restive voters and fast-money global investors who can make or break a nation’s economy.
“Structural economic changes are complex,” he recalled in an interview late last month. “People don’t understand how much it cost to bring change here.
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