Explaining Brazil #224: A rigged social ladder

Imagine income brackets as a ladder with 100 rungs. If you’re on the first rung, it means you’re in the bottom 1 percent of the country in terms of income. If you are on the 100th step, you’re part of the top 1 percent, and you’re super rich. A recent study by Brazilian researchers shows that the social ladder offers little mobility in Brazil.

If you’re at the top, chances are you won’t drop down too much. But if you’re at the bottom, the path for you to climb upwards is very narrow.

For those born into households on the bottom 20 rungs of the ladder, there’s a 2.5 percent chance they will reach the upper levels. That’s much lower than what we see in developed nations.

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Guest:

• Lucas Warwar is a Brazilian economist conducting pre-doctoral research at Bocconi University, in Italy.

This episode used music from Uppbeat. License codes: A2SPG00WU8UXGQL1, FKIRIX6THLVYDWDP

Background reading:

• Read the “Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality” study, by Diogo Britto, Alexandre Fonseca, Paolo Pinotti, Breno Sampaio, and Lucas Warwar.
• The idea of meritocracy is fairly popular in Brazil — but it is a fallacy, as our reporter Amanda Audi writes.
• A cornerstone of neo-pentecostal Evangelical churches (which have become increasingly popular in Brazil) is the so-called “prosperity gospel” — that is, the belief that it is God’s will to bless His most loyal followers with wealth.
• People in the top 1 percent of Brazil’s income scale held 44.2 percent of the country’s wealth in 2000. Twenty-one years later, their share of the pie has grown to 49.3 percent.
• Studies show that malnourished youngsters face a series of physical, social, and mental issues, making it hard for them to ever reach their full professional potential in adulthood.
• Brazil’s Human Development Index has basically returned to 2014 levels, when the country’s development index sat at 0.754 — a greater decline than the global average, which has fallen back to 2016 levels.

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• #inequality
• #poverty