According to BBC, Brazil’s economy has overtaken that of the UK:
CEBR chief executive Douglas McWilliams told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Brazil overtaking the UK was part of a growing trend.
“I think it’s part of the big economic change, where not only are we seeing a shift from the west to the east, but we’re also seeing that countries that produce vital commodities – food and energy and things like that – are doing very well and they’re gradually climbing up the economic league table,” he said.
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Brazilian economyA report based on International Monetary Fund data published earlier this year also said the Brazilian economy would overtake the UK in 2011.
Brazil has a population of about 200 million, more than three times the population of the UK.
The first job I had in Estacado was helping the state CPS move its computer systems. I was one of only two white boys on the crew of a dozen or so. Most were Hispanic. One of them was a Mexican-American who was trying to learn Portugese. I asked him why, when he was already bilingual in such a useful language. He said that Brazil was where it was at in South America and that there was a real need.
When I thought about it, it made sense. Brazil’s sheer size is important, of course. But I had another datapoint of interest. Back when I was in Colosse looking for work, I kept seeing what could only be described as the perfect job. Except, after having read and salivated over the job description and requirements, they would include a sentence at the end “Must be fluent in Portugese.” Aside from the frustration to putting at the end what should have been at the beginning, I found it odd that Portugese of all languages was the one barring me for a job. Spanish, I could understand. But Portugese?
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Brazil’s economic success has not affected all of its citizens equally. From what I understand, the gap between rich and poor is exponentially greater than anything you’d see in a first-world country.
Peter called it. I’ve been following expat (and a few national) reports from Brazil for a couple of decades now, and Brazil is moving in a “Time Machine” direction. The well-to-do in the cities have retreated into fortified high-rises. The poor have been reduced to an almost feral condition, and criminal gangs control swathes of the urban landscape.
I will note in passing that Brazilian labor law has nearly strangled wage labor in the mainstream economy. Most of the poor are forced to work “off the books”. Missionaries who work on human development projects consider it a great success to get someone legal employment.
That said, I also know missionaries that work among those that have benefitted from that economic growth. (This isn’t a criticism by the way. Brazilian missionaries can often gain better access to countries suspicious of Americans.) I am struck from these reports by how familiar some of the little obsessions of upper-class Brazilian Christians sound, like I was back in a conservative mainline Protestant church.
Peter called it. I’ve been following expat (and a few national) reports from Brazil for a couple of decades now, and Brazil is moving in a “Time Machine” direction. The well-to-do in the cities have retreated into fortified high-rises. The poor have been reduced to an almost feral condition, and criminal gangs control swathes of the urban landscape.
I find the ongoing Brazilian saga fascinating, in so many ways. They become more like America and America becomes more like them – what globalization has wrought, eh? I actually wrote about it in my blog a a while ago: if Brazil is going to assume global importance, I’m pretty interested in learning more about the country.
One of them was a Mexican-American who was trying to learn Portugese. I asked him why, when he was already bilingual in such a useful language. He said that Brazil was where it was at in South America and that there was a real need.
Yeah, we’ve been so dominant for so long that the very idea that anyone would prefer learning Portuguese over English seems kind of surreal. Quite honestly, I think the world will be much more interesting with several roughly co-equal powers rather than one dominant colossus homogenizing everything.
They become more like America and America becomes more like them – what globalization has wrought, eh?
Back in the early 2000s, before I discoved Ambien, there was a wee-hour show on the E! network called “Wild-On”. The host took the audience to dance clubs across the world’s urban centers. Two things occurred to me:
1. These clubs were all the same. It didn’t matter if the club was in Toronto or Sao Paulo or Dubai. They contained the same very fair complexioned people, dressed pretty much alike, dancing in the same very sexualized way to the same popular music.
2. The widespread exposure of the masses to the actual behavior of the elites of their country (and trust me on this, every house in even the favelas have a television) is something historically new and, given what I was seeing, potentially revolutionary.
Back in the early 2000s, before I discoved Ambien, there was a wee-hour show on the E! network called “Wild-On”.
I’m pretty pleased to say that I can’t decipher most of this sentence.
These clubs were all the same. It didn’t matter if the club was in Toronto or Sao Paulo or Dubai. They contained the same very fair complexioned people, dressed pretty much alike, dancing in the same very sexualized way to the same popular music.
I’ve noticed this, too. There are all kinds of things you might say about it, but something that amazes me about the phenomenon is how it informs middle class behaviour and expectations.
I think that many or most middle-middle-class Americans don’t really realize that there are socioeconomic classes above them that live differently. These middle-classers have a vague sense that “rich people” exist; they’ve heard of country clubs and big houses and fancy cars; but they don’t really grasp that there is a distinct upper culture.
I sort of learned this first-hand when I vaulted from my lower-middle-class upbringing to meeting classmates who had grown up in globe-trotting families. I never could understand the tales my friends would tell of going to clubs in Thailand or wherever. “They have Western-style clubs in Thailand?” I would wonder. And this is part of the reason the phenomenon fascinates me so much: because I grew up thinking that Sao Paolo (for example) was, like, a foreign country where they do things differently. But that’s a middle-class assumption.
The widespread exposure of the masses to the actual behavior of the elites of their country (and trust me on this, every house in even the favelas have a television) is something historically new and, given what I was seeing, potentially revolutionary.
But again, I think this is similar in America (and Canada). Because they don’t realize that this overclass culture exists, middle-classers assume that the people on TV are other middle-classers. I was in my early to mid-twenties, I guess, before I realized that what you see in movies is not really representative of American life, and that when a watch a movie, you’re actually only seeing a (likely Jewish) Hollywood director’s view of how people live.
Because they don’t realize that this overclass culture exists, middle-classers asssume that the people on TV are other middle-classers.
There’s a lot to unpack here. You may be on to something, but I would be careful generalizing from the American experience.
I’m a lot more sensitive that I once was to the apparent economic status of people in TV world. It probably has something to do with my late-life realization that I have probably topped out lifestyle-wise. This doesn’t bother me in and of itselfl — I consider myself as having done far better than I had any reason to expect — but I aware that it is below that of my father and of my own childhood expectations. But just the other day I was watching the movie No Strings Attached and thinking early on that the families of the protagonists were exceedingly wealthy, and that no one in the movie found this remarkable, like the audience didn’t even need a backstory about how everyone came to earn the kind of money that purchased these SoCal mansions.
But my present reaction may be atypical. Americans are remarkably free of class envy, and our elites are not perceived as insulated from ordinary life as they actually are. But throw in Brazilian levels of destitution and the situation changes. Then throw in a very traditional moral culture such as provided by Islam and the security of visibly decadent elites becomes even more precarious.
But my present reaction may be atypical. Americans are remarkably free of class envy
Holy smoke, I don’t know if I can agree with this! Well, that is to say, maybe they are by global or historical standards. But I tell you, every time I visit the States one of the things that always strikes me as a major difference between America and Canada is the extent to which class matters in America. It’s even in the little things… the way you get treated at the airport. Although I suppose the mere existence of class differences may, strictly speaking, be different than actual envy.
I’m not even sure what we’re talking about anymore.
I’m sorry I couldn’t get back on all of this quicker, but I have been a combination of sick (in a light-headed and drifty sort of way) and out-of-pocket over the last couple of days.
Before I start responding to individual comments, I just wanted to say that the discussions of Brazil and class are fascinating and much more than I had hoped for from a very dashed-off post. Awesome!
Yeah, we’ve been so dominant for so long that the very idea that anyone would prefer learning Portuguese over English seems kind of surreal. Quite honestly, I think the world will be much more interesting with several roughly co-equal powers rather than one dominant colossus homogenizing everything.
To clarify, he already knew Spanish and English. I don’t know how good his Spanish was, but I assume pretty good. His English was probably high school level. In his place I would say “Hey, I know the two most valuable languages of the region!” and be satisfied. I found that his enthusiasm about picking up a third (even if it’s tied to one of the two) impressive. And it got me thinking that maybe there are three strongly important languages in America and points south (if we include Canada, I guess we’d have to include French as the fourth?).
1. These clubs were all the same. It didn’t matter if the club was in Toronto or Sao Paulo or Dubai. They contained the same very fair complexioned people, dressed pretty much alike, dancing in the same very sexualized way to the same popular music.
This reminds me of a story I heard about some exchange students who were horrified when they arrived in Kalispell and found that America was nothing like they’d expected. They took a trip to LA and reported back that they actually enjoyed Kalispell more because LA was just like the city that they came from while Kalispell was something new to them. How LA could be just like Milan (I think?) I am not sure… save for some of the touchstone similarities of “international cities” you refer to.
But just the other day I was watching the movie No Strings Attached and thinking early on that the families of the protagonists were exceedingly wealthy, and that no one in the movie found this remarkable, like the audience didn’t even need a backstory about how everyone came to earn the kind of money that purchased these SoCal mansions.
It’s hard to say without watching the movie, but let that not stop me from popping off anyway. The extraordinary costs of real estate in certain parts of the country are often overlooked in fiction and often don’t seem all that strange to me as a midlander until I consider the geographic context. I know people who have lived in what can be described as mansions (in a place where mansions are cheaper, to be sure). There is the vague sense of knowing where their money came from (usually a chemical company IPO), but it is not something really talked about even internally. It’s a part of the class non-discussion I’ll write about in a minute.
For both Phi and Samson, the following questions come to mind: “Live different” how? How rich does one have to be in order to “live different”? How poor does one have to be to be lived differently from? I ask this from the perspective of someone that comes from a household in the bottom half of the top 20% (depending on when the snapshot was taken), which can be considered wealthy (by Sheila) or not-wealthy (by the 99% who insist that I am among them).
But I tell you, every time I visit the States one of the things that always strikes me as a major difference between America and Canada is the extent to which class matters in America. It’s even in the little things… the way you get treated at the airport. Although I suppose the mere existence of class differences may, strictly speaking, be different than actual envy.
I think it’s at least partially a difference in consciousness. Or rather, how we think of the class differences.
When I was last in Canada (Ontario – this was a long time back) there were some discussions about Quebecois that might have made me blush. They played for me some comedy thing that poked at them. The entire gist of the humor is “these are people that live like poor trash.” The sort of thing that would be considered provocative (if aimed at poor whites) or racist (if aimed at anybody else), but definitely class in nature. But nobody thought of it that way, I’m sure. They thought of it as entirely cultural. And in the US, we think of things culturally or racially. And often it is cultural or racial. But there’s a class element, too. We can focus on culture, race, or class. We’re unlikely to talk about it being all three (and sometimes all three don’t apply), but I think we are least likely to talk about it from a racial standpoint. At least here in the US.
I could write a huge thing about how a lot of the sniping (that which occurs within the white community) between urban and rural is often a proxy for social and economic class. But almost nobody, on either side of the discussion, views it in those terms. Rural don’t like to think of themselves as a lower class. Urban don’t like to think that they’re picking on a lower class. So nobody sees it this way.
Let me try to be more specific about the class envy thing. What I’m trying to get at is there doesn’t seem to be much social energy behind the notion that, say, the Buffets and the Gates are bad people, or representative of a bad society, merely by being rich. Heck, even the Democrats aren’t especially motivated to raise taxes, despite the periodic campaign talk. This isn’t the same thing, and may be in some ways the exact opposite, of class consciousness, and I would agree with you that class is at least covertly much more important to Americans than to more equalitarian countries like Canada.
“Live different” how?
Speaking for myself, I mean transnationality. Which may or may not be relevant to our discussion here, or what Samson intended.
I think it is probably relevant to party-town outposts in the Muslim world. Extravagant wealth sharing a jurisdiction with grinding poverty will always be politically problematic, but when the lifestyle of the rich becomes morally offensive to the poor, you have a recipe for . . . well, 2011 now that I think about it.
I contrast this with, say, the English aristocracy of yore, which was, and perceived to be, morally elevated. One of the reasons that the Hanoverians didn’t go the way of the Bourbons, I suspect.
“Live different” how?
Speaking for myself, I mean transnationality. Which may or may not be relevant to our discussion here, or what Samson intended.
Yes, that was my answer as well.
What I’m trying to get at is there doesn’t seem to be much social energy behind the notion that, say, the Buffets and the Gates are bad people, or representative of a bad society, merely by being rich.
And you’re saying there is in Brazil, for example? Shows how our assumptions can mislead us, I guess. I would have tended to assume that societies where people “know their place” have *less* envy – because people know their place! But I could have that completely backwards.
Big middle class… Economic success… who would have thought?
🙂 I know a little of the languaje and I think I will be picking it up as my wife picks up Italian. I guess I will have to break down and pick up the last romance language since she has French already.