Although the trajectory of Argentina’s tax burden has been more volatile than Brazil’s, today the countries share a similar level of taxation. This similarity reflects the fact that neither has experienced threats to private property profound enough to spur the rise of a powerful anti-statist bloc. The most significant redistributive reform wave in Argentine history occurred under Juan Perón (1946-1955), who mobilized workers and expanded the welfare state. However, like Getúlio Vargas, Perón spared private property and opposed socialism. As a result, he failed to provoke the formation of an anti-statist bloc capable of acting as an enduring constraint on public sector growth. Instead, he aggravated private sector divisions, strengthened labor and forged a broad populist electoral coalition. For decades, military intervention kept statists from wielding power in a sustained fashion. In addition, hyperinflation and the global ascendancy of neoliberalism pushed even a peronista president to adopt neoliberal reforms in the 1990s. Gradually, however, these constraints have fallen away, and the superiority of statist forces has come to be reflected in heavy taxation and social spending.

In this chapter, we review how economists and linguists have problematized the relationship between economy and language, focusing on their methodologies, theoretical toolboxes, and ideologies. One of the striking differences lies in the ways they conceptualize languages, viz., as strictly denotational for economists but both denotational and indexical for linguists. We show that by approaching them as abstract, asocial, ahistorical, and statistically measurable entities, economists treat languages as resources whose economic consequences for individuals or societies can simply be derived from their intrinsic nature. By contrast, examining languages as practices grounded in their sociohistorical ecologies, linguists have been more interested in the valuation of some languages as capitals that can outweigh others economically or symbolically. Overall, we highlight the interdisciplinary nature of “economy and language” as a research area, showing how complex it is and how productive it should be to build an intellectual bridge between the two disciplines.

Like the bittersweet drama of tango dancers performing on Calle Florida for shoppers leaving Buenos Aires’ posh Galerías Pacífico shopping center, Argentina’s political and economic leaders stepped out of Latin America’s sorrowful “lost decade” of the 1980s with a series of dramatic policy changes that led the country through grand successes, devastating failures and postcrisis resurgences. Like the dancers shifting to changes in musical tempo, Argentine presidents and ministers of the economy responded to fluctuations in global markets and domestic politics with dips and twirls, driving forward and occasionally reversing direction with great fanfare. Their moves generated both praise and scorn, winning Argentina the diverse imprimaturs – at different moments in time – of “poster child” of the Washington Consensus, “defaulting pariah” of international bondholders, “vanguard” of Latin American populism and the “victim of vulture investors” that threatened to undermine debt restructuring agreements around the globe.