“Statistics serve precisely so that we do not have to feel.” The phrase is not from Toto Caputo. It is not from President Javier Milei. It is not translated from some lost German quote by Hayek or Mises. The quote belongs to Iván Schargrodsky. Someone whom no one, with a minimum of intellectual honesty, could confuse with a liberal.
Why do I start this column with that quote? Because if one turns on the television, listens to the radio, or reads the newspapers that, until not long ago, represented the voice of the Argentine “center-right,” it would seem that the country is plunged into a terminal crisis. That the economy is not taking off. That there is no employment. That inflation is not easing. The narrative is coherent and consistent. But above all, completely disconnected from the numbers.
The cold numbers tell a very different story. The main problem of the major Argentine media is their chronic AMBA-centrism and an intellectual laziness that prevents them from seeing beyond the Greater Buenos Aires area. Argentina is not the downtown of Buenos Aires. It is not Palermo. It is not La Matanza. And yet, those geographical and mental coordinates define the agenda of almost all national press.
What is happening in Argentina is something that has no recent parallels in our history, but it does have parallels in world history. Federico Fernández, president of the Fundación Bases, always says that the undertaking that Milei is carrying out is comparable to what former Prime Minister Mart Laar did in Estonia and Leszek Balcerowicz in Poland after the fall of communism. Balcerowicz, the Polish Minister of Economy, is the father of the so-called “shock therapy”: price liberalization, trade opening, and fiscal adjustment simultaneously, all at once, without gradualism. At the time, it was devastatingly unpopular.
Today Poland is the most successful economy in Eastern Europe. Those countries emerged from the yoke of central planning with radical market reforms, painful in the short term and undeniably transformative in the medium and long term. Argentina is in the midst of that same kind of process.
This transformation inevitably results in a reassignment of resources. Productive factors —capital and labor— move from less productive sectors to more dynamic and competitive sectors. This process is not painless —it never has been in any country in the world— but confusing the pains of childbirth with a terminal illness is a serious analytical error, or a deliberate political operation. In either case, it deserves to be pointed out.
Our country has immense comparative advantages in extractive industries and natural resources that, for at least thirty years, had been relegated, stigmatized, and explicitly plundered by successive governments. We are talking about oil —constrained for decades by the local barrel—, mining —prohibited or blocked in large parts of the national territory due to ideological and corporate pressures—, and agriculture —shamelessly plundered through quasi-confiscatory withholdings that discouraged investment and rewarded unproductivity—.
It is natural —even more, it was predictable— that just by lifting the boot off the neck of these industries, they would show exponential growth. No miracle is needed. It is enough to stop suffocating what inherently wants to grow. Vaca Muerta did not appear out of nowhere in 2024. It was there. Waiting.
And it is false that these sectors do not generate employment. Agriculture represents between 20% and 25% of total employment in the country. Mining generates 4.4 indirect jobs for every direct job. The oil industry generates 7. They are the longest and densest value chains in the real economy —those that drive truck drivers, metalworkers, service providers, businesses in cities that Buenos Aires doesn’t even know exist.
The other side of that same coin is the sectors that survived thanks to artificial demand. Whether due to tariff protection —industrial manufacturing, which flourished in the shadow of a state that blocked competition—, due to excessive consumption as a reaction to a peso that depreciated by the minute —restaurants, clothing, mass consumption—, or due to disproportionate demand in the absence of viable investment alternatives —construction as a vehicle for savings in a country without a functional capital market—. Those sectors suffered. And they had legitimate reasons to do so.
But the data from INDEC itself shows that the adjustment is being absorbed: comparing the first quarter of 2026 against the same period in 2025, construction has accumulated a growth of 2.1% and hospitality 0.9%. The manufacturing industry remains in negative territory for the quarter (-2.3%), although with a rebound of +4.6% in March that suggests the bottom has already been left behind. Two of the three sectors that critics point to as victims of the program are already growing compared to the previous year. The suffering was real. The terminal diagnosis, not.
Let’s then look at the numbers that this column came to show. The EMAE —the Monthly Estimator of Economic Activity from INDEC— closed 2025 with an accumulated growth of 4.4%, surpassing market expectations that hovered around 3.5%. But the most important data is not that: it is what we saw in the first quarter of 2026. The EMAE recorded three consecutive months of 0.4% growth in the trend-cycle —an annual rate of 5%— reaching a new historical maximum of economic activity. The accumulated growth for the first quarter of 2026 shows a growth of 1.7% compared to the same period in 2025.
Simultaneously, the dollar has experienced months of stability that would have seemed like science fiction just two years ago, while the BCRA meets its reserve targets for the entire year in just five months. Finally, the data indicates that the inflation rate may have found a ceiling and is heading again towards a path of disinflation.
With these numbers, social mood —particularly outside the AMBA— should start to turn around and guide the government towards greater chances of a second term. Statistics, as Schargrodsky said, serve so that we do not have to feel. The problem is that in Argentina we feel too much and look at the numbers too little. And when we look at them, we look from only one corner of the country. There is an Argentina that is soaring. It has the decency not to appear in the news.
Now the important thing is that the government does not make political mistakes that could tarnish all the economic achievements that have cost so much effort.
