A couple of weeks ago I was in São Paulo for only two days, the shortest trip to Brazil I’ve taken among a dozen or so trips to the Land of Samba since the early 1990s. It’s a 9½-hour overnight flight from Washington, though unlike a west-to-east trip there’s not the vicious jet lag from crossing many time zones.
I was there to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of Universidade Estadual Paulista, a splendid and balanced occasion. On the same morning, the first day of the two, a couple of liberals gave speeches justifying liberalism, and then three leftists gave speeches justifying economic leftism. Most economics in universities in Brazil is leftist, including post-Keynesianism and Marxism.
But, you know, a large number of young people in Brazil lean toward liberalism, real, classical liberalism, not Bolsonaro’s Partido Liberal. The second day, before my overnight flight back to Washington, I stopped in at the annual meeting of Students for Liberty and gave a little talk. The drive to get to the meeting was long. I experienced again the immense size of São Paulo.
Then, after another long drive, I met for an hour or so with my colleagues at Folha. I had not been to their building before. I was impressed by the intellectual quality of the journalists who chatted with me, for example, about the stress on newspaper journalism from the internet and now from AI. You don’t know how lucky you Paulistas are that Folha, unlike many newspapers worldwide after the height of print journalism sixty or a hundred years ago, is financially healthy.
Earlier the same day I had a long, lovely lunch at a fine restaurant serving Brazilian haute cuisine with two dear friends, Ramon and Ana. The last time I saw them both in São Paulo, something like a decade ago, it was just before Carnival, and we went one evening to a samba school in a high-school gymnasium. It was a wild, crazy, gloriously Brazilian experience.
Ramon is an economist, an Argentinian who fled the generals there and has spent the rest of his career in Brazil. Ramon and I share an interest in economic methodology and the history of the science. Ana is a professor of linguistics who works on one of the fascinating native languages of Brazil. Being a big fan of linguistics, I love talking to her, too.
Ramon and Ana are moderate leftists. We disagree respectfully. Ramon is accustomed to my liberalism from our long acquaintance and was not surprised at my liberal opinions. Ana knows me less well. So when I would say things like, “The big danger is the government armed with guns, not the corporations like Folha armed with advertising,” she disagreed.
“What about the rich owners of corporations taking over the government?”
“Good point. Let’s stop it and be democratic. But the rich have always done so, haven’t they?”
“Sure.”
Respectful, real conversation. We need much more of it across ideologies. When Ramon and Ana come to Washington and stay with me, we’ll do it. And talk about economic methodology and native Brazilian languages, too.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.
““The big danger is the government armed with guns, not the corporations like Folha armed with advertising,”
Trademark that one.