At first glance, Sunday's results appear to signal a Copernican shift in the country's values, indicating—according to all polls based on plausible second-round scenarios—a potential return of the right to power. This conclusion, however, may be misleading. In my opinion, what happened is that a significant number of Chileans abandoned the left, and faced with the implosion of the political center, found no other space available than the right. People did not become “right-wing”; rather, they moved away from the left, at least for now. While there is a conservative shift on issues of order and security, the evidence does not show a structural shift to the right in broader values; what prevails is a reaction to political performance rather than a profound ideological shift. These elections should be read more as a failure of the left than as a triumph of the right. This raises the inevitable question: where did...

The accelerated authoritarian drift of the United States under the Trump administration poses serious risks to democracy and stability throughout Latin America.

As an economist trained at a public university in Colombia, I grew up surrounded by talented people determined to overcome their circumstances. Today, when many of my classmates and I have achieved goals that once seemed unattainable, I recognize that our progress cannot be explained solely by innate abilities or economic resources, but by something less measurable: mutual support, companionship, friendships, and bonds of trust that sustained us through the most uncertain times. In the midst of chaos, when we didn’t know what to do or how to solve difficulties, it was those human relationships that allowed us to overcome them. This experience leads me to question how economics has defined poverty and quality of life, and to what extent its indicators have overlooked what is most essential to social life: our connections with others. Beyond income For decades, academia and international organizations have focused the debate on indicators that reduce poverty...