How can we make “possibilism” more possible?

Sir, Richard Lapper, July 31, while reviewing Latin America’s Political Economy of the Possible by Javier Santiso, MIT Press, makes a very good point bringing forward how “Chile controlled its exposure to world financial markets [resulting in] a relative smooth encounter with globalization.” Controlling the short term capital flows is indeed one of the most important musts for any small nation that has to travel the oceans in a bathtub. Many countries should be adopting something similar to Chile’s flow controls but instead even Chile was prohibited from using them any more, for no very good reason at all, when this was so required by the United States as a condition to sign the US-Chile Free Trade Agreement. Sir, is there any way you can think of how to get Washington to be less extreme in their preaching on free-market faiths? This would no doubt be the best way of helping the Latin America’s economies to avoid finding so much attractive in extreme populism and allow them to go more for the rational way that Santiso calls “possibilism”.

Javier Santiso Chile possibilism