On how making a lot of dough doesn't mean too much for the poor...

     Argentina has had Chinese style GNP growth patterns over the past few years, over 8 percent while high rise luxurious apartment buildings are growing like mushrooms in well-to-do neighborhoods and you can hear the sound of drills and hammers and smell freshly grilled  meat near construction sites.

    And, well, if you are an optimist, or a government supporter, you might blow up your chest and assert, as the Ministry of Economy did recently, that over the past four years unemployment dropped from 20.4% to 9.8%; poverty (incomes of 912 pesos or less) from 54% to 26.9% and abject misery (incomes less than $428)  from 27.7% to 8.7%.

     Looking a bit deeper, though, you might discover that 57% of today's unemployed come from sectors that could be loosely be defined as "middle class." What's the angle? Well, most of the new jobs are menial and bad paying: lower class economic groups accept them; the middle class doesn't.

       The middle class complain but are able to say no to a job paying $800 pesos, for example, but that's not the case of the poor: "They have to accept any job offered them and at whatever wage," says Julio Godio, Director of the Instituto del Mundo del Trabajo in Clarín June 19th, "because they have not other option. That is the real situation in Argentina today."