Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World (4 page)

Water, per se, is too heavy to economically transport over long distances, but in a water-scarce era, “virtual” water exports in the form of food will be of growing importance. Discussing Brazil's preeminence in biofuels, Henry Mance wrote in the
Financial Times
, “No other country has the land, water and the know-how to increase production so easily.”
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This is just part of Brazil's story as a richly endowed country that was poorly situated to exploit its natural wealth when its resources were cheap, but will be better placed as those resources grow more expensive.

The redoubtable Amerigo Vespucci, who first reached Brazil in 1501, famously said, “If paradise on earth exists anywhere in the world, it cannot lie very far from here.”
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Brazil is lush like no other place. In a sense, the difficulty of accessing and exploiting Brazil's vast resources has served to make Brazil a reserve for humanity's future.

Brazil is widely agreed to have the greatest biodiversity of any country on the planet, with the most known species of plants, freshwater fish, and mammals. It has high numbers of amphibian, butterfly, bird, and reptile populations, and is thought to lead the world in number of insect species, with 10 to 15 million.
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As I explore in Chapter Three, Brazil's development was hampered for centuries for geopolitical reasons. Unlike the United States, Brazil lacked a favorable “specific coastline” in the terms set out by Nicolas Rashevsky in
Looking at History through Mathematics.
Rashevsky argued that Europe led the way in economic development because its “specific coastline,” the ratio of coastline to its surface area, was almost 10 times higher than that of China, for example.
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That made for much cheaper transport of goods and more profitable trade. Through most of history, shipping cargo via water was up to 30 times cheaper than hauling it overland. In that sense, the configuration of the land itself helped determine the difficulty and the capital intensity required to exploit its riches. This is why much of Brazil remains thinly populated and unexploited. By point of comparison, Brazil's landmass is almost three times larger than that of India, with less than one-sixth of India's population.

What was not obvious to Amerigo Vespucci and other early explorers of Brazil was that while it may have been “paradise on earth,” Brazil was not paradise on the cheap. Development came with remarkably high capital requirements. Seen superficially, Brazil would have appeared to be favorably endowed with specific coastline, as its ocean shore extends for 4,650 miles, and Brazil also contains the greatest part of the world's largest river basin, the Amazon. Yet other than the Amazon, which drains an area of tropical jungle, most of Brazil's rivers flow north and west and are better suited to hydropower generation than navigation, given their passage through deep valleys with rapids unsuitable for cargo vessels.

Brazil is the world's largest tropical country. For most of its history, Brazil's tropical environment has been seen as a drawback. Tropical jungle is a difficult setting to adapt for economic activity. Clearing the land alone requires much more work than clearing temperate forest. Jungle soils tend to be poor; the climate too humid for grain to ripen and too infested with pathogens to avoid large losses from crops that do grow.

Even planting a crop in a jungle area like the Amazon basin entails discomfiting encounters with all manner of hazards, from killer caterpillars (
Lonomia oblique
) and the deadly marble-coned snail (one drop of snail venom can kill 20 humans) to the tiny and beautiful but deadly poison dart frogs. The jungle and the rivers are full of thousands of exotic species of animals; ferocious piranha fish, snakes, spiders, and insects that would like to taste the blood of humans. Disease-bearing mosquitoes (carrying malaria and dengue fever), along with venomous spiders and tarantulas abound, including the most dangerous spider in the world: gigantic Brazilian wandering spider. Possessing leg spans of up to 5 inches, it is listed in the 2012 Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most venomous spider, so toxic that it has practically become a cliché that 0.006 mg of its venom can kill a mouse.

Far from encouraging low-cost exploitation of Brazil's bountiful resources, the jungle environment (along with other geographic features, such as Brazil's mostly unnavigable waterways) helped preserve them. Brazil's topography and climate were obstacles hampering development—or rather delaying it—until returns could repay a high cost of exploitation.

While in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the natural endowments of the United States seemed almost ideally conducive to prosperity, the tide is now turning in Brazil's favor. As the era of cheap energy expires, Brazil's natural advantages are growing in relative importance while those in the United States decline. Brazil is already one of the world's largest generators of hydroelectric power. Some 82 percent of Brazil's electricity is produced through clean renewable sources compared to 11 percent in the United States. Brazilian energy demand is growing 10 times faster than that of the United States, principally because it has the scope to grow. On a per capita basis, Americans devote more energy to heating their homes than Brazilians do for all uses.

As the world grows colder (talk of global warming notwithstanding, I argue that it is growing colder), Brazil's relative advantages will compound. To the extent that I'm right, Brazil's much warmer climate will give it a comparative advantage over cold latitude economies.

Brazil enjoys another distinct advantage in a bankrupt world. Its government is not insolvent. The multitrillion-dollar bailout and stimulus packages in the United States lavished on efforts to relaunch consumer spending are unaffordable in an era of slow growth or stagnation. As U.S. deficit spending is inevitably curtailed as a result of a growing solvency crisis, Brazil's comparative advantage will increase.

As a result of what I've just described, you will see Brazil trade places with the United States in the decades to come as the foremost haven of economic opportunity and of upward mobility in the world. As American actress Karen Allen famously said, “Someone born in Brazil is an American.” This is a long-established belief, but it represents an important permutation of James Truslow Adams's concept of the American Dream. Adams wrote of:

that American Dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank, which is the greatest contribution we have made to the thought and welfare of the world. That dream or hope has been present from the start. Ever since we became an independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces which appeared to be overwhelming it.

Writing in the depths of the Great Depression, Adams went on to say,

possibly the greatest of these struggles lies just ahead of us at this present time—not a struggle of revolutionists against the established order, but of the ordinary man to hold fast to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” which were vouchsafed to us in the past in vision and on parchment.
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This concept of the American Dream, which now seems such a crucial component in the self-image of residents of the United States, was in fact a phrase first articulated by Adams and popularized in his
The Epic of America
published in 1931. “The pursuit of happiness” may seem uniquely Jeffersonian, but it did not begin in Philadelphia with the Declaration of Independence. Its origins lie at least as far back as Aristotle, teacher of Alexander the Great. Aristotle wrote, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

In that sense, the American Dream of upward mobility manifests a universal, human longing. It is no less present among the displaced farm workers crowded into windowless air raid shelters under the streets of Beijing, among the shop girls of Moscow, the samosa vendors of Delhi, or in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro than in small town America. The magic that associated it so closely with the United States was rapid economic growth fueled to a large degree by access to abundant, cheap energy. Of course, the time when the United States enjoyed that energy advantage has come and gone. With it went much of the success in upward striving that earlier generations considered a birthright of life in the United States. As reported in
Investors.com
, the web site of
Investor's Business Daily
: “Over the past decade, real private-sector wage growth has scraped bottom at 4 percent, just below the 5 percent increase from 1929 to 1939, government data show.”
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In other words, real wage growth in the United States over the first decade of the twenty-first century was even slower than in the Great Depression.

An unspoken assumption in this analysis of the American Dream is that it consists of an expectation of ever-rising material consumption, as compared to relational goods like social status. Horace Kallen observed in 1936 that “the American Dream is a vision of men as consumers, and the American story is the story of an inveterate struggle to embody this dream in the institutions of American life.”
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The question for the next generation is whether the eclipse of upward mobility in the United States represents the effective end of the American Dream. Or can this widely appealing idea take hold and find expression elsewhere? Of course, for such a migration to occur, it must not only entail the prospect of upward mobility, it must also take place in a venue that could reasonably be construed as “American.” A case could easily be made that the rapid economic growth in China entails the prospect of upward mobility. But it would be an abuse of language to describe the Chinese economy as “American.” The same could be said of India and Russia. But the fourth of the rapidly growing BRIC economies, Brazil has an important characteristic that the other BRICs lack. Brazil alone is a rapidly growing New World economy that is every bit as “American” as the United States. Indeed as a matter of pedigree, Brazil can lay a better claim to the word “America” than does the United States.

Those of us who live in the United States tend to forget the obscure, mythic origins of the concept of “America” and treat it more as a specific geographic reference to the territory of the United States than it initially was and may be in the future. Long after Waldseemüller's world map of 1507 had appended the name “America” to Brazil, the territory now known as North America was identified on maps as “Indies.” Or in Waldseemüller's map, North America was
Terra Ulteria Incognita
. The earliest designation of “the Indies” as “North America,” came in 1538 more than three decades after Brazil was the original America.

Perspective on this momentous development begins with an examination of the somewhat elastic meaning of “America,” which has signified so much for so many people the world over.

Note that the origin of both “America” and “Brazil” are shrouded in ambiguity. It is far from conclusively proven that America took its name from the Christian name of Albercius, also known as “Amerigo” Vespucci, a ship chandler who did not sail to America until seven years after Columbus. Jules Marcou of the Academy of Sciences in Paris pointed out back in 1875 that Amerigo was not the name by which Vespucci would have been known to the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. He refers to a map first published by Waldseemüller in 1507 in which “America” is the name given to a country in the New World. We know that country today as Brazil.

Waldseemüller deepened rather than resolved the mystery of why he attached the name “America” to Brazil in his 1507 world map when he wrote,

But now these parts [Europe, Asia, and Africa, the three continents of the Ptolemaic geography] have been extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Americus Vespuccius [a Latin form of Vespucci's name]: I do not see what right any one would have to object to calling this part after Americus, who discovered it and who is a man of intelligence, [and so to name it] Amerige, that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women.
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His comment encompasses a triple puzzle. Firstly, Vespucci was in no sense the discoverer of Brazil or the continents of the New World. As an explorer, he did discover the Rio de la Plata. But his biggest contribution was to realize that Columbus, contrary to his lifelong belief, had not found a westerly route to Asia, but rather a “fourth part,” a New World previously unknown to Ptolemaic geography.

Secondly, it is extraordinary that Waldseemüller would have chosen to name a continent after the first name of a commoner. Cartographers of the time normally would have employed the last name of an explorer to naming a land or region, while using the first name of a king or queen to designate a territory in his or her honor.

Thirdly, even assuming that Waldseemüller deemed Vespucci worthy of the honor of having the New World christened with his first name, the question arises why the new continent was not known as “Albercia?” Waldseemüller would initially have known Vespucci's first name as Albericus or Alberico. Vespucci published his 1504 work
Mundus Novus
(New World) under the Latinized name, Albercius Vesputius. To get “America” out of that seemed like a stretch to Marcou. I agree.

The fact that Martin Waldseemüller reconstrued the Latinized version of Vespucci's first name may not indicate, as is usually assumed, that Waldseemüller was indulging his prerogative as a cartographer to christen the continents of the New World in honor of Vespucci. To the contrary, he may merely have been offering an explanation for the otherwise mysterious designation of the New World as “America.” On the other hand, he explicitly states, “for instance, in the west, America, named after its discoverer. . . . ” And Waldseemüller also “prominently placed stylized portraits of Claudius Ptolemy and Amerigo Vespucci” on his map,” underscoring the fact that he thought America had been named for Vespucci, whether or not Waldseemüller himself had bestowed this honor.