Typically when someone says an economic theory or political idea has been "debunked", it hasn't really been debunked, they just hold the opposing position ideologically. There are circumstances when thats not the case, but it usually holds true.
That may be so, but I can't take responsibility for the poor arguments for others.
In general, any economic theory from before the era of mass computing (when very large datasets could be analyzed on a budget accessible to university economics departments and when the internet made datasets more widely available) is probably seriously wrong in some particular. Whether the theory was a darling of the left or the right behavioral economics and serious computer modeling and statistical analysis based on actual real world data (rather than the rather simplistic mental experiments that were possible before) have been knocking over fundamental pillars hither and yon.
So you are saying the problem was the level of education in Argentina?
What I am saying is that Argentina has followed an economic and political trajectory on par with other states that started the 20th Century with similar literacy levels. The evidence is very strong that had each generation been better educated, Argentina would have had higher growth rates and better political stability over the 20th Century.
Of course, the state of Argentine education in 1900 grew out of the kind of 19th Century Argentina had. The long civil war between the Federalists and the Unionists, the tensions between the powerful city of Buenos Aires and the provincial elites, between the cuadillos and the government all took their toll. That said, Argentina did have a series of fairly competent governments at the end of the 19th Century and the start of the 20th Century, so their problems in the 20th Century weren't predestined - I think things would have been much better had the country avoided the "Infamous decade" of 1930-1943 where instead of a competent response to the Great Depression Argentina got a coup and more than a decade of government-backed anti-Semitism and anti-Catalanism, flirtations with Fascism and Nazism, and the most extreme corruption in favour of the beef industry and the British who were the main importers of Argentine beef.
That said, Argentina was hardly alone in falling into the hands of self-destructive extremists during the Great Depression. Regimes across Europe and South America - especially in poorer countries with lower literacy rates - would do similar things. So while Argentina certainly had another path available and could have taken it, we shouldn't think that it was some special Argentine failing that led to the country falling to Uriburu and his successors.
I don't have a particularly good view of Peron either, but I think he is overly blamed for Argentina's problems. The man is the source of some of Argentina's problems, but not all of them.
Personally, I wonder if part of Argentina's problem has also been that it was peripheral. In Europe and East Asia, the United States and in time the EU played a big role in rescuing countries that had fallen to self-destructive extremist regimes. If Spain were part of South America, not Europe, might its economy and politics look more like those of Brazil and Argentina today? I suspect it might.
The tl;dr of this is that Argentina has behaved like most countries that started 1900 with less than 60% literacy have, but that there were opportunities to overshoot the pack that were missed.
What were the factual inaccuracies and debunked economic theories in the video?
I went through my period of enjoying VisualPolitik years ago (as a Falkland Islander, the VisualPolitik videos on Argentina used to be a guilty pleasure since they paint a picture of a country so messed up that we Islanders don't need to worry about what is a hostile neighbour even now...) and now Simon Whistler's presenting style is just very aggravating to me. So please excuse that I won't be doing a detailed takedown of the material.
In general, it misrepresents the history of Argentina, missing out the context for why Argentina reached a high in prosperity in the early 20th Century (namely, there was a commodities boom followed by WW1) and why Peron formulated the ideas he did and why those were attractive to millions of voters (basically, the Infamous decade and the extreme classism and anti-immigrant sentiment of Argentina at the time). I don't remember the VisualPolitik series delving into the Infamous decade at all, and that is a BIG omission, nor do I remember it really examining the sins of Argentina's military governments and the economic consequences of those sins. How the international community, especially the British and the US, treated Argentina could also use more discussion. Argentina has for most of the 20th Century been very exposed to the ups and down of foreign trade (and when it has been less exposed, this had been under unsustainable regimes) and to neglect what was happening in international trade and credit markets when talking about Argentina's economy and the history of its debt is... Well, it is a serious omission.
Taken all together, the omissions in the VisualPolitik series are so severe that they are either a testament to towering ignorance, or the writers of the material wish to paint a false picture of Argentine history. Or maybe it is a little of both.
As for debunked theories, as I mentioned before, most older economic theories don't add up now that we have the data and the cheap modeling to really test them. Add to that, I can't think a single time when the sort of IMF-favored policies that VisualPolitik's writers like have actually worked in the real world. (Though one can make the case that in some cases these policies can work as a short-term measure to demonstrate determination and political strength, and such policies can be used to deflate a bubble before it grows too large, as a measure to stimulate economic recovery, they have never worked.)
The video Matti posted a link to is a much better starting point:
fasquardon
