As someone who comes from a very poor country, I feel like academics don’t do enough to help understand why some countries succeed and why some don’t. They blame “colonialism” or some such thing, but that doesn’t explain this. Argentina was rich in the early 20th century:

> Something has gone awry in what was the most successful of all the 19th-century liberal republics in Spanish America. In the early 20th century, Argentina’s per capita GDP ranked among the world’s top ten, on a par with Australia and Canada and ahead of France and Italy.

What explains the coups and political instability? If the GDP is the same, why is the government of Canada and Australia so much more stable than Argentina? This seems to be one of the biggest things holding back Latin America, but there seems to be no effort to understand what’s causing it.