Constant GDP per capita is up ~50% from 1960: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDARG
The GDP of the rest of the world went up a lot more than that [1] - and Argentina never did anything besides have decent weather and a roughly constant amount of fertile land.
It's kind of like a Dutch Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
Now they would usually be cramped in a city where the effective cost of living is much greater (leading to villas), whereas their GDP and thus income didn't grow much.
Hence why the poverty rate near instantly skyrocketed after the huge cuts to government spending recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Argentina is surprisingly comprehensive. The sidebar has agriculture at 7% of the economy. The place is not without industry, it's just making and selling things at ""wrong"" prices because of the currency issue, which in turn comes from the balance of payments issue. There's clearly substantial local commerce, just not quite enough export.
Even by world standards, 70-80% of urbanization in the 60s and 92% now is quite a lot. Especially a lot for a country which mostly exports agricultural produce. Without checking, I would expect it to be 50% in the 60s and 70-80% today.
1) I used to work in a very large IT group in Latin America, and I worked with some EngManagers who hired and managed some folks in Argentina. One interesting dynamic was due to the inflation, we used to give to folks 'monthly' salary increases to offset. Since the company captured the inflation also in the prices, for a long time offer that offset with a small plus was a very huge retention factor for us;
2) After 2015/6, our IT director started to give 1 Bitcoin or USD 500 equivalent in Bitcoin for our argentine colleagues as part of their monthly salary, and eventually those guys ended up holding or selling it with more than 10x over it.
Not sure how Argentinians are supposed to do better using cryptocurrencies.
They could just search € or USD, which they do :D But the government used to have a cap of 200$ per person and month to exchange (not sure if that still happens now with Milei)
So again, this is really a symptom of a deeper problem.
With regards to out of control spending, I think Milei is trying to get that under control. No idea if it'll work though.
The kind of intermediate-level inflation (not tour typical inflation, but also not hyperinflation) that exists in Argentina (or Turkey for that matter) is typically caused by governments addressing underlying problems by driving inflation up (it's not an unintended consequence of poor monetary policy, they aren't oblivious). Sure it's not nice, but the problem is: how do you solve the underlying problem anyway. If you just say “I'm gonna play the "strong money" card no matter what” you're not solving the problem, you're tying your own hands and now you have two problems.
Be careful what you wish for.
Just hyperinflating forever though seems to just be making the pop of the bubble that much worse.