Brazil’s recently mounted an ambitious combined military/police effort to bring a particularly notorious gang-dominated slum under effective government control. Initially, the incoming troops were greeted as liberators. A week later, Alexei Barrionuevo reports:

Residents watched stone-faced as Mr. Beltrame passed. No one applauded or rushed to shake the hand of the man who had orchestrated the program to “pacify” Rio’s slums ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. Instead, a 54-year-old mother confronted him for several minutes, telling him that a Military Police officer had entered her home, pinned her against her kitchen sink and demanded her son’s money. [...]

After a week of searching here and in another slum, the police said they had recovered about 34 tons of marijuana; 692 pounds of cocaine; well over 400 pistols, rifles, machine guns and grenades; but comparatively little cash: about $68,000. All of the money, moreover, was recovered by the army and the federal police — Rio’s own forces turned in none — raising broad suspicions of police corruption. [...]

Even military officials have expressed concern that their soldiers would be “contaminated” by the “culture of corruption” inside Alemão, a high-ranking military officer acknowledged. And despite the community being surrounded by about 2,600 personnel from the police and the military, most of the traffickers somehow escaped, fueling an investigation into whether officers helped some of them.

My thoughts naturally turned to Afghanistan. Think of the drug dealers as the Taliban, the Brazilian military as the US military, and the Rio police as the Afghan security forces. Obviously, the parallels aren’t perfect but I think the comparison is instructive especially because there’s no “ideological” or “ethnic conflict” element here and yet a somewhat similar underlying dynamic can clearly exist.

Having secured election as the first woman president in the history of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff said she wants “fathers and mothers to look their daughters in the eyes and say, ‘Yes, a woman can.’”

Irin Carmon is a bit dubious:

Perhaps it would be more accurate in this case to say, “She can, with the most powerful man in Brazil backing her,” in this case term-limited president Lula, for whom Rousseff served as chief of staff and energy minister. Just about every man/woman on the street interview yielded a mention that the voter hoped it would mean another term for the wildly popular Lula. (In the AP: “If Lula ran for president 10 times, I would vote for him 10 times…I’m voting for Dilma, of course, but the truth is it will still be Lula who will lead us.”) Rousseff has never run for office and just about every story about her refers to her lack of charisma, despite a dramatic past as a guerrilla fighting Brazil’s dictatorship.

I think this is a bit unfair to Rousseff and her very real achievement. Successions of this sort in which a popular term-limited leader tries to hand power off to a less-charismatic subordinate happen in politics all the time. Think of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush or Bill Clinton and Al Gore. And the point in all cases is that attaining the status of “heir apparent to hugely successful politician” is itself a pretty impressive achievement. Here in the United States, after all, the appointment of a woman chief of staff would be something of a milestone all its own. Nobody gets ahead in politics without patrons, and Rousseff is no exception, but she had a very substantive role in Lula’s administration and there’s no reason not to point to her accomplishments in the general spirit of “yes, a woman can do it.”

Chana Joffe-Walt’s main focus is on how Brazil tamed inflation, but read this lede and I think you’ll see Brazil next big financial problem:

I met a 19 year-old girl in a mall in São Paulo who had financed nearly every item she was wearing.

Célia de Resende paid for her red t-shirt in 3 monthly installments. Her sneakers were on a six-installment plan. She couldn’t remember how many more payments she owed on her black pants but she’s sure they were bought on credit.

This is the way Brazilians now shop. Consumer credit is a brand new concept and it’s wildly popular. Three Brazilian banks are among the world’s top 10 credit card issuers.

I can’t prove it, but dollars to doughnuts says Brazilians are taking advantage of their newfound creditworthiness to blow up a consumer debt bubble. This, rather than the allegation that it’s totally useless, strikes me as being the real problem with financial innovation. New products come in and blossom like invasive species with no natural predators. It’s an environment where unscrupulous sellers, thoughtless buyers, and all kinds of fraud and stupidity run amok. Once the cycle’s burned out it becomes very unlikely that the exact same problem will recur in the near future. But the problem is that the same kind of thing is extremely likely to happen again, just with some new instrument.

Gideon Rachmann pushes back a bit on Lula hagiography, but then ends up with a pretty positive assessment:

Yet, for all the inevitable qualifications, Lula will deserve much of the hoopla and praise that surrounds his retirement. He will go down as the president who oversaw two historic transitions.

The first was the completion of Brazil’s embrace of capitalism and globalisation. In his early campaigns for the presidency, Lula had denounced “neoliberalism”. In office, he tackled inflation, paid back debt and fostered the conditions for Brazilian business to thrive internationally. As he noted wryly in a recent FT article: “There is no little irony in the fact that the union leader who once shouted ‘IMF out’ in the streets has become the president who paid off Brazil’s debts to the same institution – and ended up lending it $14bn.”

I would put this point a bit differently. What you see around the world is that policies of economic “neoliberalism”—fiscal discipline, controlled inflation, private ownership of businesses, openness to trade and investment—succeed in producing growth. In principle, this growth can make everyone better off. But what leaders like Lula, or the post-Pinochet leftwing governments of Chile, or Bill Clinton, or the Blair and Brown governments in the UK bring to the table is to actually deliver on that promise through tax and welfare policies that ensure growth is broadly shared. Then on the other side you have things like the center-right governments in Sweden and Denmark (and perhaps the Cameron/Clegg government in the UK) who are succeeding by persuading people that some budget cutting needn’t presage a wholesale gutting of the welfare state.

Either way it’s global movement toward a model in which the government intervenes in the economy primarily through tax-and-transfer functions rather than through planning. Nothing’s perfect in life, but this trend has served the world pretty well and I think both sides of the equation are very much necessary. This progressive liberal synthesis is taking over pretty much everywhere in the democratic world except the United States, where the GOP remains ideologically unreconciled to the welfare state and I keep coming across odd columns urging us to try to emulate the alleged successes of Chinese central planning.

Brazil has made substantial economic progress over the past fifteen years, but Alexei Barrionuevo reports that its levels of educational attainment continue to lag:

Brazilian 15-year-olds tied for 49th out of 56 countries on the reading exam of the Program for International Student Assessment, with more than half scoring in the test’s bottom reading level in 2006, the most recent year available. In math and science, they fared even worse.

“We should be ashamed of ourselves,” said Ilona Becskeházy, executive director of the Lemann Foundation, an organization based in São Paulo devoted to improving Brazilian education. “This means that 15-year-olds in Brazil are mastering more or less the same skills as 9-year-olds or 10-year-olds in countries such as Denmark or Finland.”

Of course the Finns have the best-performing students in the world, so the no shame in a poor country lagging behind them. But Brazil does considerable worse than Chile or Mexico. Here’s the math stats:

These kind of things don’t turn around overnight. What you hope for is a mutually reinforcing pattern where growth makes more resources available and then if those resources are invested well educational attainment improves and lays the groundwork for more growth.

Drake Bennett has a good piece about the idea of helping the poor by giving them money rather than through “aid programs” in which much of the appropriated funds end up being used (or, worse, misused) by aid providers and administrators rather than the intended recipients. The jury is hardly fully in on this subject, but the initial evidence seems reasonably promising.

My main concern about this would be that if you don’t design the program right, you’re going to in effect be instituting very high tax rates on the poor because they’re going to lose their eligibility for cash grants. Obviously that can be avoided by phasing the grants out very slowly or making them universal, but an idea that starts out looking like a pretty cheap way to help the poorest of the poor starts looking very expensive when you go big. For example, giving $150 a year to every citizen of Benin costs about $1.3 billion (admittedly, less than we give Israel). And of course at that point, cutting so many checks would probably just end up having weird distorting effects on the economy in terms of raising the price level rather than living standards.

That in turn is why it’s no coincidence that the big examples here at Brazil and Mexico—middle-income countries with a lot of inequality rather than very poor ones. And I think there’s a lot of evidence that this is the way for such countries to go. Rather than try to mitigate inequality through direct government intervention in the economy, try to adhere to the neoliberal orthodoxy and add on a generous dose of redistributive taxation.

Tom Shannon is a career foreign service officer. He’s also US Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere. Has been since 2005. Was appointed to the job by George W Bush. Five months ago, Barack Obama appointed him to be Ambassador to Brazil. He’s obviously well-qualified. He sailed through committee. And then because Jim DeMint is a bad human being, he was subjected to a months-long hold. Then DeMint relented. So now it’s Senator George LeMieux of Florida’s turn to screw things up with a hold.

Neither DeMint nor LeMieux invented the abuse of the hold procedure, but the Republican Party of the 111th congress has taken this to such new heights that it’s about time the Senate take some responsibility and start organizing itself like a legislative body of an important country and not like a country club. The ability for one senator to delay confirmation of key executive branch personnel indefinitely for no real reason has never been a good idea. At times, this power has been abused to advance policy goals I believe in. Oftentimes it’s used to advance bad policy goals. More recently, it just seems to be being used as a matter of principle—maximum feasible obstruction. It needs to be changed.