Por eso es que estamos como estamos, part 72,000,000
According to El Nacional, over the last 11 years, prices have gone up 733%, while remunerations have risen just 571%. Ergo, since 733-571 is 162...purchasing power has fallen 162% since Chávez came to power!
Somebody pleaaase save these people from themselves!
Just so it's clear. Lets say back in 1998, the price of 100 potatoes was Bs.100.
Today, in 2010, prices have gone up 733%. Those same 100 potatoes now cost Bs.733. (So a single potato costs Bs.7.33). In the meantime, your salary has only gone up 571%, to Bs.571. How many potatoes can you buy for Bs.571?
Ummm…571 / 7.33 = 77.89.
So you can buy about 78 potatoes! Not negative 62 potatoes!
Your purchasing power dropped 22%, not 162%…it takes only a second's reflection to realize purchasing power can't drop more than 100%!!
Juan Cristobal
Francisco Toro
lgg.jpg)
.gif)
Venezuelan pupils: the worst in Latin America
Let's remember this:
Maths and Venezuela
From The Economist, showing results for maths and reading/comprehension for 13 Latin American countries in 1998.
That was the last time Venezuela took part in an open evaluation test of its pupils.
The government thinks it can solve issues by shoving every illiterate person into university, the universities think the government should solve the problem by...oh, they don't say anything, just "con nosotros no te metas".
Los unos se merecen a los otros.
And journalists come from there.
esta es nuestra culta prensa...
So, Nacional's journalist and editors show excellency of our Central, UCAB and other "Comunicación Social" schools... Nothing new...
More interesting: following Quico's calculus, purchasing power dropped 22% between dec. 1998 and dec. 2009.
Nevertheless, following not-chavista-at-all Miguel Angel Santos, consumption per capita rose 49% between 1998 and 2009.
http://miguelangelsantos.blogspot.com/2010/03/update-marzo-2010-de-persp... (slide #19)
¿alguna explicación?
Exijo una explicación
¿alguna explicación?
Yes, the drop in purchasing power is based on the increment of the minimum wage, but the purchasing power of corruptos and ladrones isn't affected by that. And corruptos looooove their bling.
Remember that Venezuelan economy operates by Trickle-Down-Corrupto-nomics where most of the money that moves from one hand to another has nothing to do with legal salaries and such evil capitalist nonsense.
PPP
Purchasing Power of Bs. salaries expressed in US$ at the official rate has gone crazy up for years, the consumption trends are consistent with external consumption of tradables trends, that is, IMPORTS...
II
So it' because purchasing power of Bs. has fallen (inflation) in a context of a fixed exchange rate, that consumption has gone up. Perfectly consistent.
Small correction
If the price goes up by 733%, the new price would be Bs.833, not Bs.733..
At least someone around here knows math
This is correct. (If you don't believe it, try increasing a given number - like 100 in the example - by 100%, and then another 100%, and so on. When you reach 500, you're up 400%, not 500%.) So the actual calculation would be 671/833, which equals about 80.6.% So poder adquisitivo has fallen just under 20%.
Still not good news for your average Venezuelan (nor for Quico on any upcoming math test).
To the other anonymous (@16:52), consumption rising while purchasing power falls is actually quite logical. Normally, people (society writ large, not necessarily each individual) are also saving and investing. If purchasing power is falling, that reduces incentives to save or invest. And people are more likely to spend on durable goods, for example, which counts as consumption. There could also be some differences due to methods of determining prices, or values over time. (You can see a reflection of that, perhaps, by the fact that the numbers on slide 19 don't match those on slide 18.) Plus, he's going by BCV numbers, which might be...fudged...here and there, and not necessarily in a consistent way.
maybe too inequalities reduction?
Consumption has gone up, i.e. people have money to go shopping.
I agree with you, it is possible that people spent more now because they save and invest less, but at the same time, I think that incentives to saving in 1996-1998 were very very low (inflation rate 103% in 1996).
At the same time, we had reduction of inequalities during this time (Gini coefficient drop considerably in 11 years), because of massive money transfers via misiones, etc. So, people completely excluded from consumption start to buy... Finally, in a probably non-sustainable way, we had impoverishment of the middle-class (often employees/wage earners) with moderate enrichment of very poors (often not-employees)... and very strong enrichment of the old and new bourgeoisie (probably statistically irrelevant).
Someone special should read this
And by someone special, I mean Ravell :3
http://twitter.com/AlbertoRavell
"AlbertoRavell
Correccion.Poder adquisitivo ha caido 162% durante el gobierno de Esteban.Asi es q se gobierna."
I remember...
Around 3-4 years ago, at a Book Fair in Mérida, I saw MHO and his followers, they all so nice and culturey, las viejas cacatúas dressed so finely, with so much exquisite taste, talking and talking about this and that other book...
One of them was going to read poetry, and she asks to the Non Plus Ultra of the Venezuelan cultural elite "Does anyone of you know what is a 'derviche'"? Not a single one of them knew that word, that I knew since I was 11. One of them managed to say "it sounds like 'fetiche'". Pena ajena, sinceramente. Finally she read the poetry without knowing what a 'derviche girovago' was. Pathetic. A group of around 8 members of the haute elite and not even one of them knew that. Me da úlcera.
Guido in your case 'knowing' is the booby prize
Guido you say:
"Me da úlcera."
Maybe you knew the word derviche but you don't know the meaning.Some people know the meaning even if they don't know the word.If you truly understood 'whirling dervish' you could read a poem like Rumi's and make sense of it when he says:
"When you do things from your soul, you feel a river
moving in you, a joy."
Try understanding the meaning and take away your ulcers.Better not to feel such hatred for those you don't understand.
ROFL
Hatred? I pity the country, and I pity its 'intellectual elite'.
And of course I can understand Rumi. What is sad is that you go out of your way to defend these posers.
guido..i do not defend anyone here
Guido I defend them not.What I say is that there is no reason for such hatred and no reason to feel superior to others.
The dervish knows that, which was my point, nothing else.
BRB
Dis Gringo off to Google Up derviche
You are not running a newspaper
And you are not with 7 more people pretending to be soooooooooooooo educated and well read.
Negative purchasing power
You are missing the point here. If purchasing power falls 162%, that means instead of you paying $100 for potatoes, the producer of the potatoes pays you $62 to take them away. Simple (but stupid).
Derviche girovago simply
Derviche girovago simply means whirling dervish in Espanol - a seldom used term, for sure.
I think the point that the original poster was making was that at virtually every level of Chavismo, especially at the level orf fine arts, the red shirted ones prove themselves an embarassment though intellectual charades and cultural ignorance. Within certain much or the Bolivarian rebolution, intellectual acument is seen as borgeois posturing.
Why else would we have dottering Cuban rubes running the banking, energy, civic planning and public health sectors?
Juancho
firepigette's reply to Juancho
Juancho,
What you said is perhaps true, but still no reason for the commenter to act 'superior' by name calling, when he himself shows his ignorance of the true meaning of dervish.
There is an elitism in Venezuela that does a lot of damage to the opposition.The posturing, the denigrating words,the undeserved feeling of possessing superior knowledge, the lack of self awareness etc. that is perhaps equal to the posturing of the 'Cuban rubes'.
On a deeper level whirling dervishes could be said to embody wholeness and integrity( no division between me and thee, or in other words no hatred, no posturing , no elitism, just God):
"Depending from where they are seen: from the front or from the back. Viewed from the back they seem to turn counterclockwise."
How many elites do you think know that one?
Firepigette
Esteee
Juancho:
They were not chavistas, they were part of the followers of Miguel Henrique Otero. My point is that in this country even the supposed selected elites are pathetic. Come on, Emeterio Gómez an intellectual? LMAO
Whirling Dervish Video
For those who know, from reading and literature, the metaphorical meaning of the term "Whirling Dervish", but not the origin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJIofU-0jC0
That group included me up until about ten years ago, when I got curious and looked it up.
Lies, Damn lies, and the poor use of Mathematics...
1. MHO is a Mathematics graduate from UCV in the early seventies. He should know better.
2. Perhaps he knows better, but he lets it slide; after all, most journalists go to that school in order not to study that much: in a sense, they'll be repeating other people's words and content for years on end. And they will only have a short course in statistics. And most of his readers won’t notice it, either.
3. This will be no better for any other High School graduates. I work at a University, and our remedial courses -in both Language and Mathematics- are now compulsory.
4. Inequality, as well as having an influence in consumption and saving trends, has a very strong influence in access to a decent education. However, the general trend is downwards: graduate students of Mathematics or Pure and Applied Sciences are so scarce in our Education Schools, that most specialisation programs have been shut down. Most public high-schoolers graduate without ever even meeting a Science professor.
5. In a somewhat humanities-led intellectual world, numbers dazzle. And among the blind, the one-eyed rule: that is why we take whatever comes out from a simple set of data from Datanalysis, Hinterlaces and others (not IVAD, by the way). That is why we gulp down BCV and Planning data, that is why we are all duped by pseudo-numbers and pie-chart fluff (we're led by engineers who barely passed calculus and who love Power-Point auto content wizard, in a Tuftian nightmare).
6. In that sense, is no wonder that we are easily bamboozled by certain numbers, almost hallowed as if they were baseball records: "80% poverty", "162% fall of purchasing power", etc. I guess most of the media-men that roamed against our institutions, liked to trample on them regardless of the actual facts. Let us lie, and let us believe our own lies.
(6.b.Incidentally, even though we love baseball -which is a numbers game- most of our sports journalist are anti-statistics, preferring old-school non-arguments such as passion and drive, and whatnot)
7. And even as I said that ours is a somewhat humanities-led intellectual elite, I must add that almost anything passes on now for "deep thinking". This should depress us greatly, because these are our peers, and we are judged and given accolades by them. Had some of us not gone outside the country, we would never have realised our true intellectual standing.
8. No one knew what a dervish is? And we are supposed to be a country with certain above-average knowledge of the Middle-East.
9. This is why I read El Universal.
Good points. Now: can you explain
further point 4?
I did not get the "however" in particular.
Clarification...
... on an badly written bit.
What I meant to say is that even though the poor generally will have only access to badly paid and ill-motivated educators (exceptions notwithstanding), a current Venezuelan High School graduate will know and handle much less information and abilities than his predecessors. Regardless of their social origin and education, -whether they come from a Liceo or Los Arcos or Fe y Alegrìa- they'll read less and worse; their maths and logic skills will be fuzzy. And this is why most Universities have adopted remedial courses.
OK
I agree absolutely.
Magic numbers
There has been one thing that strikes me when I read Venezuelan media: how out of context they present all the numbers, they seem to pop out out of the blue and there is little questioning or real analysis of what they say or whether they can be falsified or anything.
That is so damaging! When people read "this week 30 murders", "that week 34 murders" etc people start to think about murder as if it were the average weekly temperature or some random figure, perhaps they start to become alarmed, perhaps they realise the situation in Venezuela is very bad...and still most Venezuelans don't realise how bad it is:
there is no real comparison through time or space.
That is how Hugo of Sabaneta can tell the people "well, in Italy there are also murders" or "Suarez has more murders than our capital".
I have kept bugging El Nacional and Notitarde to publish charts showing how the situation has been deteriorating through the years and how it is compared to the rest of the world. Only recently has Notitarde started to publish some graphics once a year about the evolution through one year or so. And last week I saw for the first time in El Nacional, after decades, that they present some comparisons to some other countries in South America.
This referencing is necessary specially in a country where the great majority of the population has never been elsewhere and where schools do so very little about analytical thinking.
Even the source was wrong
The accumulated inflation using Jan. 1999 as an index and calculating through Jan. 2010, the accumulated inflation is 734%, not 733%. This would be a minor issue except that the reporter and his editors trusted some guy (Jose Guerra) with the normal failings of human memory, and apparently didn't go to the Central Bank website and do his own math. How hard would that have been?
Also - I don't know if this rumor is true, but I hear that this article was basically dictated by MOH, and the reporter didn't even interview the source. If it really resulted from a telephone game between the source and the reporter, through the director of the paper, no wonder it turned out so well.