Is Brazil finally ready to fulfill on its destiny as the country of the future?
webiphany.com
webiphany.com
Internet. $200/mo USD for a theoretical 1MB connection. That's assuming the power stays on. Lots of people use the internet (mostly at cafes) but it's only for games and social networking -- nobody thinks of it as legitimate way to make money.
Crime. In many parts of Sao Paulo and Rio people don't even stop at stoplights because the risk of getting shot and carjacked is too real.
Education. Completely broken. Cheating is so rampant most teachers don't even try to prevent it from happening. That's at the private schools where my cousins have attended-- public schools are apparently far worse.
Entrepreneurs. Most people literally don't even have a mental category for this. At best they make vague negative associations about you being a "capitalist." The dream job is either working for the government or getting an engineering position at some multi-national corporation.
All of this is unfortunate because the Brazilian people are really delightful and quite creative. My wife is a designer and she says some of the best design is coming out of Brazil right now. Unfortunately corruption and regulation has completely driven out the spirit of innovation and that is unlikely to change anytime soon.
check and check, when I was 17 and 20.
Your whole assessment is perfect, enumerating most of the reasons that made me leave.
I have a feeling that it is very hard to emigrate to a better country.
The issue is in the culture itself, where corruption happens everywhere (top and bottom of the chain). This leads to a corrupt police, corrupt government and everyone trying to gain advantage on top of the others...
The public schools are really bad, but the private ones are ok. But the issue is not education, but this terrible culture of corruption.
The advent of Rio as host for the olympics is further evidence of restructuring that the Brazilian government has achieved. And despite the inevitable cost of the infrastructure development outweighing short term gains, the long term gains (see Shanghai Expo 2010) will catapult Rio into the same stratosphere as an India or a China.
On entrepreneurship, I'll be honest I am not up on details, but there have been significant articles about particularly financial start ups, which confirm the rapid evolution Brazil is undergoing.
You can't solve the country's problems with faster internet pipes; when phone companies form a country-wide lobby just so each can have their own monopoly on specific states, it's not a problem of technology or investments anymore, it's a problem of a government that overlooks things like that and of a population that ignores the issue. And this is just one example (of many).
We tend to read a lot of positive things about Brazil in the news. But after living in the country for a bit more than 30 years, I've come to understand how these are usually just overly positive spins, optimistically ignoring the larger picture of how crippling the country's culture is to any effort that is trying to move it forward.
The government hasn't achieved any "restructuring". That anyone believes that is baffling and almost offensive to me. And I'm not talking about the current or previous presidents; this is not because of an individual or a group, but rather something that is really part of the country and will take decades to change, if at all.
No one can really understand Brazil until they understand Gerson's Law: http://bit.ly/glzY06
But you forgot to mention the electronics from 2007 sold at 4 times the price of modern ones.
Now you can all see why we are in love with the internet. It's the greener grass.
To be honest, I can't see much of what you say, but then I live in Southern Brazil (Santa Catarina) which is, at least on average, a much more developed part of the country.
Sure, internet and electronics are still expensive but it's very safe when compared to Rio/São Paulo and the schools some of the best in the country. A very good place, generally speaking.
The only point where I have to strongly disagree is your statement about entrepreneurs in Brazil. In fact, when compared with other countries I know (Argentina, the UK, et al.) Brazilians are the closest to the American entrepreneurial soul I've seen. Sure, you have a bunch of people that want to work for the government because of the stability that provides and loyalty for 'the company' is still very deeply ingrained, but in general every Brazilian dreams of having their own business and the government is doing the best it can (short of cutting taxes, unfortunately) to make that dream come true.
(Lastly, and off-topic, I'd like to point out that the perception of 'regulation' as something bad is a very American concept. 'Regulation' is what keeps 'us', the consumer, safe from 'them', the faceless and impossible to sue corporations. Not the oppressive force the American free market pundits make it out to be. Corruption is a bitch though.)
Brazilian here. That seems odd.
In Sao Paulo I pay ~R$150 (~US$90) / mo for 4mbit ADSL.
The potential for growth in Brazil is amazing, but we're still very far from 1st World status. We're mostly definitely a good bet, tho ;)
I see a marked change in Rio and Sao Paulo when I visit. People in Rio seem much more relaxed, I see women using $1000 smartphones openly on the buses and subways.
Every single cab driver I talk to is positive about the war happening on the German Hill, which every here I've talked to agrees is simply to clean up the city before the World Cup and Olympics.
My point is not that everything in society has improved. It is just that there is a significant shift, and there is an immense opportunity for Internet businesses here that was not there before.
I don't agree with you about your take on entrepreneurship. I personally know many entrepreneurs here, and they are in the same boat as many of us in Portland: limited access to capital and mentorship.
I see the corruption issue largely as a result of the massive inequality-- which, like the U.S.'s inequality, tends to fall along racial lines-- and politicians have been great at exploiting it to their advantage with help from the monopolistic mass-media. Ideally a shift towards internet and social media will increase transparency and reduce corruption and the social programmes will smooth out inequality in the long run. IMO the Brazilian culture of jeitinho, taking advantage of opportunity where it arises, is very close to the America entreprenuerial spirit but adapted for an environment with a weak rule-of-law.
So the optimism is because all the fundamentals are there -- a growing, young, tech savvy population that loves social media & open source and a government using a commodities boom to invest in education and social programmes. There are plenty of startups-- http://www.predicta.net, for instance, or follow this blog: http://startupi.com.br/ Obviously it's all very fragile but I remain hopeful, the people are amazing and there's nothing I'd like more than to be able to go back.
India is in the same position. Cheating is of no consequence when they aren't enough schools to accomodate the population. And the disparity is not minor, it is catastrophic.
These middle income countries are all in a precarious position, so writing any one or all of them off is uneducated and foolish.
Brazil doesn't suffer from novel and "culturally" inherent problems. You would never say that Brazil is culturally inferior to another country because that is bigotted and ridiculous. The country is suffering the same developing bottle necks that others have and continue to face. Look at where the country has come from, look at where it is now, and I implore you to actually compare Brazil to the other (B)RICS etc. since they offer the best contextual comparison.
The most incredible thing about Brazil is that despite the insurmountable odds whether it is the wheels of capitalism, passionate people, or government involvement - or perhaps a hybrid - Brazil is not lost.
Cynicism has its place too, but in an objective analysis of Brazil's prospects on the world stage, leave it out. I respect your experiences and what you have contributed, but the points of information you have provided are without the global context necessary to understand Brazil's place.
Will Rio offer the world the next Silicon Valley? Only time will tell, but its clear to me that it has a damn good shot.
He has never told me how, but one day he left his job and started a small manufacturing business, partnering with the manager from his very first job who he had befriended.As soon as he could afford it, he took my mother and sister and moved to the United States.
I lived in Brazil for almost five years after grad school. My father passed away just last year, and I promised him to go back and look for entrepreneurs like him to fund with micro loans.
My father represents the entrepreneurial spirit that you claim is lacking in Brazil. I know that you are wrong when you say Brazilian culture cannot support a Silicon Valley.
Brazil has a lot of positive things going for it, but when you have a cultural background that's as rotten as Brazil's one is, you can count on everything to fail stupendously.
I hear the right-wing free-marketeers crying "regulation! socialism! welfare state! high interest!" and the rest. Yet, what works best for the US might not be what works best for Brazil. Just saying.
I'm wondering if the same thing could work in Brazil. A leader that decides to pursue anti-corruption almost to the exclusion of other duties could do a lot if the people are sick of having to deal with the extra hassle that corruption imposes on everyday life. The question is, are the Brazilian people ready?
I recall seeing an article a while back about some successful entrepreneurs from Brazil and I know a guy that is trying to get a VoIP startup off the ground there. If anything, I'd say that technology is Brazil's best chance at becoming the eluded "country of the future". I mean, voting machines and Lua came from there, so it's not like there isn't potential.
But when you need to invest 4x more on hardware and software to have something that is 2 years older than standard hardware and software, all inside a bureaucratic state that adds dozens of legal impediments or delays to anyone who wants to make some honest money, it's easy to see why any potential entrepreneur has to tread much more dangerous waters in Brazil than it would anywhere else.
Then I saw that Brazil has 200 Million people. So there goes that argument?
Moreover, I also tried to argue about it on geographic size, only to find out that the US is only nominally larger in land size than Brazil.
So, maybe it's because of culture? As in, we have so many different races and religions and creeds, all with their own individual thoughts and beliefs, and all of them can't _possibly_ get together as one and get stuff done. I know, pathetic excuse, right? I've heard that so many times about why Asia gets fast bandwidth, cheap mobile voice/data and bullet trains and universal healthcare and why we can't.
So, maybe it's because of culture? As in, we
have so many different races and religions
and creeds, all with their own individual
thoughts and beliefs, and all of them can't
_possibly_ get together as one and get stuff done.
And the US produces 4x as much oil as Brazil uses.
The reason Brazil is able to be energy independent is because of poverty. They use less energy because fully 1/3 of the country is poor on a level that is incomprehensible in the developed world (living in shanty towns and slums without access to clean water or sewers).
I mean, compare the poverty threshold is US$10000, wherein 15% of Americans fall in. Additionally, 6-7% fall in extreme poverty, where US citizens make less than 50% of the poverty threshold[2].
So, as in your argument, it's all about scale.
[1]http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2007/09/20/2954375.htm
[2]http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/the-poorest-sta...
The poverty thresholds are different. (In addition, the US, the poverty numbers don't always count govt aid received.)
Would you rather be poor in Brazil or poor in the US?
There's also the fact that Brazil has a great sugar cane growing climate which the US lacks... I'm not actually sure whether ethanol production is a significant enough factor to cancel out the fact that US oil production is nearly twice Brazil's.
One way to approach this is to reduce our oil-specific energy needs (for example, gas cars) and migrate those to energy agnostic needs, so that your car can be fueled by a hydro plant in Washington State, a solar farm outside Vegas, some Brazilian Ethanol, some Virginian Cole, and some Saudi crude -- depending on each resources' availability to the grid.