To many, the enormous economic and social progress that Chile has achieved in the last four decades seems to be in full contradiction with the crisis that broke out in October 2019, characterized by mass demonstrations, coordinated violence by small groups, and demands by the political left and others to abandon Chile’s free-market model. The crisis upended Chilean politics and society, leading to a planned referendum on writing a new constitution.3 Some have described Chile’s current situation as a “paradox” (Edwards 2019). Indeed, it seems paradoxical that a country that has achieved so much prosperity has bitterly turned against the very institutions that made that prosperity possible.
Part of the explanation for the rage showed by the Chilean population has to do with the collapse in public trust of traditional civic and state institutions, including democracy. Between 2009 and 2015 people who believed that Chile’s democracy worked well or very well plummeted from 26 percent to 10 percent, and those who believed that it worked poorly rose from 16 percent to 32 percent (Aninat and González 2016: 3). From 2015 to 2019, the first group shrank further to 6 percent and the second group rose to 47 percent. (CEP 2019). Institutions such as the Catholic Church, radio broadcasters, the police and armed forces, political parties and businesses have experienced similar or in some cases even more dramatic declines in public trust (Aninat and González 2016: 4).
Chile has also experienced a systematic decline in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, which assigns countries with higher public perceptions of corruption a lower ranking. From 2012 to 2018, the South American country’s corruption perception index fell every single year—that is, the public viewed it as progressively more corrupt—ultimately dropping a total of six positions to become the 27th least corrupt country among 183 nations (Libertad y Desarrollo 2019). Even more troubling are the results of a 2017 OECD report on the level of trust Chile’s population has in its judicial system. Chile scored last among all of the nations the OECD surveyed, with the exception of the Ukraine, lagging behind countries like Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Russia, among others (OECD 2017). A more general survey in 2019 showed that 58 percent of Chileans believed that state institutions in Chile were corrupt (Datavoz 2019: 4). In a 2017 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) study, 34 percent of Chileans surveyed declared to have been mistreated by a public employee (PNUD 2017: 211).
Not only corruption but also chronic inefficiency contributed to the loss of legitimacy of state institutions. According to the 2016 World Economic Forum Competitiveness Index, government inefficiency was the main obstacle to doing business in Chile (World Economic Forum 2016: 144–45). All these problems have led to major proposals for reforming Chile’s inefficient state apparatus, which is a crucial step for strengthening its democracy.4
Without a doubt, the recent decline in public trust of Chile’s private and state institutions contributed to the climate of discontent and frustration that manifested in the crisis that broke out in October 2019. But this alone cannot explain Chile’s departure from the free market formula that made it so successful. If Chile’s elites and general population truly understood that free market institutions are crucial for the country’s continued path to prosperity, then large groups among the protesters and the intellectual and political elites would not be demanding drastic changes to what is derogatorily referred to as Chile’s “neoliberal” system.
If, as Friedrich Hayek believed, ideas and ideologies are the main drivers of social evolution (Hayek 2006: 98), then Chile is a clear example of how ideas hostile to economic freedom and favorable to state interventionism can gain traction, which in Chile’s case undermined the legacy of the Chicago Boys. Indeed, material equality, the old obsession of the left, became the creed of the majority of Chile’s political and intellectual class. Material equality was also endorsed by the Catholic Church, a large part of Chile’s business community and highly influential among its cultural elites. The results of this egalitarian narrative were gradual institutional changes that over the years, leading to declining rates of economic growth. As René Cortázar, former minister in Michelle Bachelet’s first administration, put it:
Growth, which had enabled a sharp increase in wages, employment and consumption, and that had allowed the emergence of new middle sectors, began to be taken, by many, for granted. It was forgotten that accelerated growth was not an attribute of the national soul; that in general our development had been mediocre; and that only the implementation of good quality rules of the game, and the construction of consensus around them, had made it possible to jump to the first place in the region [Cortázar 2019: 11].
Cortázar, an MIT economist at the center-left think tank CIEPLAN, crucially noted that the “emphasis was placed only on distributive aspects” adding that “distributive results were criticized with bitterness” although wages were rising like never before (Cortázar 2019: 12). By far the most aggressive egalitarian government along the lines denounced by Cortázar was Bachelet’s second term (2014–18), in which several statist reforms were passed with the aim of “terminating neoliberal vestiges,” as Bachelet herself put it.5 Bachelet’s labor, tax, and educational reforms, combined with an extremely hostile narrative against businesses and market ideas, caused one of the most unprecedented economic downturns in decades. Indeed, between 2014 and 2017 Chile’s average economic growth rate was 1.8 percent, the lowest since the early 1980s and almost a third of the rate of 5.2 percent achieved in the previous four years of Sebastián Piñera’s 2010–14 administration (Bergoeing 2017: 7).6
Many on the left tried to blame Bachelet’s poor economic performance on international factors, but during her “anti-neoliberal” administration the world enjoyed an average growth rate of 3 percent. As economist Raphael Bergoeing pointed out, international conditions were favorable to Chile’s economic growth under Bachelet. Moreover, a moderate estimate indicates that in absence of Bachelet’s statist reforms Chile would have grown at rates of 4 percent a year (Bergoeing 2017: 7). The climate of uncertainty that Bachelet created was clearly reflected in the rates of investment. Since data collection began in the early 1960s, until Bachelet’s administration, Chile had never shown four consecutive years of decreasing investment (ibid.: 12).7
A crucial document for understanding the Bachelet administration’s anti-liberal philosophy was a book written by five members of her brain trust shortly before she was elected for a second time. The book was titled The Other Model: From the Neoliberal Order to a Regime of the Public (El otro modelo. Del orden neoliberal al régimen de lo público), and the cover showed five workers destroying a brick (Atria et al. 2013).8 “The brick” was the name given to the economic program written by the Chicago Boys in the early 1970s and implemented after the fall of Allende. The message of the cover—and the book itself—was clear: the Chicago Boys’ economic model had to be terminated, and Bachelet, who was the star speaker at the book’s launch in 2013, should lead that process. According to The Other Model, neoliberalism and individualism had created an unequal, selfish, and unjust society where a privileged few had access to things that should be considered rights for everyone. In the view of the authors, governments were responsible for making sure that no differences existed when it came to economic goods such as education, pensions, or anything else the authors defined as a “social right.” The authors further argued that it was only when the market logic had been expelled from these spheres that an equal and fair society based on solidarity could emerge. Although it did so in different terms, The Other Model presented and defended a socialist ideology and political system. Bachelet’s second government embodied this radical ideology, and the reforms followed.
Due to the persistence of the egalitarian narrative over the years, large parts of the public bought into the idea that neoliberalism had led to more inequality and injustices even though income inequality was actually decreasing. When, in February 2020, Bachelet, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, declared that inequality was the cause of the demonstrations in Chile and Ecuador, she reinforced the perception of large parts of Chile’s population.9 Indeed, according to opinion polls published in December 2019, Chileans believed that the main reason for the social crisis had been the high level of income inequality (CEP 2019). ECLAC’s 2015 Index of Perceived Inequality showed that Chile was the country with the highest perceived income inequality in Latin America. In addition, the same index showed that the perception that income distribution was unfair had increased over the years.
If the consensus among elites was that inequality was Chile’s main problem before the social crisis, it is no surprise that after the crisis broke out this consensus was reinforced. In reference to the popular explanation for the crisis, Carlos Peña, an influential center-left scholar, observed: “If we take at face value the immediate reactions of these days, the cause of the phenomena would be injustice and especially the unquestionable inequality that affects Chilean society” (Peña 2020: 11–12).10 Peña himself correctly noted, however, that the country had never been more prosperous and equal than in present times. This meant that the well-established idea that economic inequality had been the cause of the social crisis was “intellectually incorrect” (ibid.: 13). Instead, Peña rightly argued, it was the perception of inequality that had changed. Thus, even if inequality had decreased in Chile, people had become more sensitive to it because the feeling that the existing inequality was legitimate had eroded (ibid.: 128–29). It was precisely this feeling of unfairness, to a large extent created by egalitarian narratives, which paved the way to the disastrous reforms of Bachelet’s second administration. In turn those reforms created additional frustration with the system by bringing the train of economic progress to a halt. After Bachelet, Piñera came to power a second time by promising to bring back “better times,” in the words of his campaign slogan. After failing to deliver, the social crisis erupted.
Part of the reason why the crisis will be so hard to resolve in Chile is that opinion makers do not realize that its origins are mainly ideological. It is through this lens that the widespread attacks on the free market have to be understood. Center-left sociologist Eugenio Tironi was correct when he argued that the massive demonstrations of 2019 were ideologically opposed to the economic model of the Chicago Boys (Tironi 2020: 26–27). Like Peña and many others, however, Tironi did not seem to understand that perceptions of that model’s legitimacy had been eroded by the egalitarian ideologies that intellectuals like himself and others had popularized. This shifted the country’s political and economic institutions almost entirely towards redistributionism.
As Douglass North (1988: 15) observed, ideologies refer to the “subjective perceptions that people have about what the world is like and what it ought to be.” Insofar as ideologies entail a prescriptive component, they “affect people’s perception about the fairness or justice of the institutions of a political economic system” (ibid.). Moreover, because the ideologies and beliefs available in a given culture ultimately define the form of government that determines the formal rules of the game—namely, property rights and enforcement characteristics—it is not a surprise, said North (1993), that efficient economic markets are so exceptional.
North (1990: 110–11) also argued that ideology is key to understanding the poor economic performance of Third World countries, since their ideologies usually promote policies that provide institutional constraints and discourage productive activity. Indeed, in the case of Chile, the nation’s egalitarian ideology led to changes in its formerly free market institutional framework, transforming its system into one increasingly incapable of delivering beneficial economic results. This fueled egalitarian narratives even further because, as is typical of ideological dogmatists, proponents of the egalitarian system refused to change their views. Against all evidence, frequent repetition of the idea that the country’s troubles were the result of extreme inequality and social injustice ended up convincing many people that the system had to be socialized further. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman has argued, “a reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth” (2012: 62).