Astral Codex Ten

Central America

7 min read

Central America

Article

Central America is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between July 05, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “financial hub for Central America”; “It’s the largest greenhouse in Central America”; “6% were born in Central America”. It most often appears alongside Mexico, India, Africa.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 8
  • Issue count: 8
  • First seen: July 05, 2021
  • Last seen: April 01, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Model City Monday
July 05, 2021 · Original source
I’ve been thinking about this after reading How Asia Works. If Studwell is right, financial hubs are a completely different thing from large-scale development. The great charter city success stories - Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong - are all stories of cities that became financial hubs. These are great, but you can only have so many financial hubs in a certain region before it gets kind of saturated. If eg Prospera becomes a financial hub for Central America, that’s great and they can be really proud of themselves - but it wouldn’t necessarily be a scaleable plan to lift all of Latin America out of poverty.
Inline links: How Asia Works
21
November 08, 2021 · Original source
Econ Americas interviewed (44-minute video) Guillermo Peña, [Orqueida ZEDE]'s Technical Secretary. He summarizes Honduras's recent political and economic history (and seems to believe things are getting better). Orchid has 400 employees already and the locals are typically doubling their income. They'll start exporting in January 2022. They'll invest $85 million over four years with 2,700 employees eventually. It's the largest greenhouse in Central America, exporting vegetables and flowers, over 160 hectares. While all three opposition parties are opposed to ZEDEs, Pena is pretty optimistic that the ZEDEs won’t be shut down, at least immediately, if the opposition wins the November election (see 35:25).
Inline links: interviewed
Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?
September 21, 2022 · Original source
V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)
Inline links: Carolina Demography, Okies
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail
August 25, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
North America & Central America
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Maximillian Seunik, $50K, for Screwworm Free Future. The screwworm is a nasty flesh-eating parasite that infests cattle and occasionally humans. It was laboriously eliminated from the US in the 1960s, from Mexico and Central America in the 90s, and finally fought to a standstill along the defensible chokepoint of the Panama isthmus in 2006. Since then, the US has regularly dropped sterile male screwworms over Panama; these distract the females and prevent them from advancing back north. During COVID, the parasite breached the barrier; it’s now back as far as Mexico, and likely to re-enter the US soon. SFF wants to encourage the development and testing of genetic biocontrol approaches, alongside other technology, to rapidly suppress screwworm populations. If these techniques work in screwworms, they could later be applied to mosquitoes, ticks, and other pests.
Inline links: Screwworm Free Future
Political Backflow From Europe
February 11, 2026 · Original source
This makes it tempting for US right-wingers to center their discussion of immigration around stories, narratives, and images from Europe. No-go zones, grooming gangs, rape statistics, sharia law, and asylum seekers are all parts of the European experience with limited relevance to an America where most immigrants are Mexican, Central American, or Indian.
There is unclear suggestive evidence for Hondurans, although this doesn’t extend even to other Central American groups.
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
North America & Central America