Planning is good. You plan your day, your month, and at a stretch your life. Adults do. Children don’t. It’s only prudent to plan to get that report done by Thursday, to study for the exam at the end of the month, to marry with love until death do us part.
Of course, plans don’t always work out. The future is unpredictable. Sure, the sun will come up tomorrow. You can plan on it. But the report due on Thursday may hit an obstacle. You may not get that grade of A on that exam you planned for. However hard you plan and try to carry out the plan, as the strange little book of the Hebrew Bible, Ecclesiastes, says “the race is not to the swift. . . nor wealth to the discerning, . . . for time and chance overtake them all.”
That’s one reason why Lula’s plan to introduce a massive industrial plan is a massive mistake. It sounds prudent. We’re going to lay down the Brazilian future. Ha, ha. Time and chance overtake all national plans in which the state chooses winners. It did the first time, in 1956, leading to inflation at 90%.
Another reason the analogy with your individual planning is a massive mistake is that you know what you want to achieve and, especially, have as an adult a pretty good sense of how to do it. Put the car in at 9:00, collect it at 4:30. A nation doesn’t know what it wants, because it’s not an “it.’ Brazil, viewed as a free society and not an anthill, is 214 million individual people, with billions of plans for today, for life. Maria Alice plans to open a little shop selling pão de queijo. Her aunt had such a shop, and Maria Alice worked in it as a teenager after school. She knows how to pick a winner. Brasilia does not know.
And Maria Alice bears the risk if she plans badly, or if she doesn’t work effectively, or if time and chance happens to her. It’s another reason why “planning” makes no sense if run from Brasilia. Lula and Rousseff were not famous for honest administration of the public purse.
Want to try it again?
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.