Plenty of poor Brazilians, however, admire their rich, as Cuadros makes clear. Many in the middle classes direct their ire instead at the poor. “Some of us, like you and me, have to work,” he is once told by his dentist:

“But we have these people who do nothing and get to live the good life.” When I asked her if she puts her money into CDBs—high-interest certificates of deposit—she said yes. She was surprised when I pointed out that this too was a public subsidy, a much larger one, since the government pays huge sums for banks to hold its bonds. I should have mentioned that three-quarters of the adults on Bolsa Família also work for a living.

If Cuadros has an agenda, it might be described as emphasizing the contingency of economic outcomes, as well the obstacles to mobility and access, all of which make the idea of meritocracy little more than a means of justifying extremes of inequality.

These issues—and these sorts of conversations about merit, welfare, and the distribution of wealth—are of course no means unique to Brazil. And if Brazillionaires is superficially about Brazil, it also aims to be about more than that. Brazil, in important ways, is more representative of the world than any other country. It has been, in recent decades, among the most unequal countries in the world. If you combine all of the world’s people together and measure inequalities of wealth, you get an even higher level of inequality than exists in any single nation. Still, it is Brazil’s profile that comes the closest to matching the global situation: a small, wealthy, and dominant upper class, a modest middle class, and a poor majority that struggles for both income and effective rights.



Brazil is unusual among high-inequality countries in that its citizens are spread across the entire spectrum. (In the United States, by contrast, in purely monetary terms the poor are middle-income by world standards.) Brazil has people who are as poor as anyone anywhere, and yet it also has people who are as rich as anyone anywhere. Only one of Cuadros’s subjects expresses any remorse about this: Guilherme Leal, cofounder of a sustainable cosmetics company, told Cuadros it made him uncomfortable to be a billionaire in a poor country. “I think the happiest societies are the least unequal,” he continued,

where everyone can have a pretty decent, pretty reasonable quality of life. If I had to give up a significant piece of my wealth, thirty percent, forty percent, to higher taxes, but at the same time got to live in a country with less inequality, I would be happier.

Still, when his company was asked to pay hundreds of millions in unpaid taxes and fines, he said “Here in Brazil, if you don’t try to deal intelligently with the tax burden, you’ll go broke.” If Brazil’s inequality shocks the conscience, and leads to obvious injustices, then we must recognize that, as a global human community, we are all Brazil.



Cuadros doesn’t make that global comparison explicit, but he scatters breadcrumbs toward a third interpretation of his book. Even the subtitle of the U.S. edition: “Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country” conspicuously does not say that “Latin American Country,” but “American.” The point, surely, is that these problems are not only Brazil’s, but also are those of the United States. Environmentalists in the U.S. may cry in dismay as enormous swaths of the Amazon are cleared for soybeans and cattle—Brazilian environmentalists do too. But such activity does bring short-term gains to poor areas of the country—and, as Cuadros points out, the U.S. has made the same calculus with fracking in recent years.

Both countries are former slave societies that struggle to confront legacies of institutional racism, and the violence that accompanies the pathologizing of a racialized poor. Both are places where the wealthy have the means to ensure that their children wind up prosperous, and benefit most even from public goods like education. Institutional corruption has its particular culture in Brazil, where it can be both a quotidian frustration and completely outrageous. (The judge overseeing Eike Batista’s trial for market manipulation and insider trading impounded some of his personal property, and was later caught driving Eike’s Porsche Cayenne.) But what of our completely legal practice of lobbying, in which government experience can be parlayed into private wealth, and corporations and the rich individuals have major influence over legislative outcomes? The history of our own powerful billionaires is not simply one of the production of social value, but also of bubbles, monopolies, inside dealing, and state and private violence against labor. The United States is much richer, and its democracy is older, but it is not so very different.

Because of the Olympics, Brazil is now the center of world attention. That the games come at a moment of political turmoil and economic recession is surely disappointing to the country’s leaders and many of its residents. But the legions of foreign journalists parachuting in for short visits will undoubtedly be drawn to the exotic: the beauty of the landscape and the people, soccer, Carnaval, the favelas, and so on. Brazillionaires is a reminder that viewers in the United States would be well-served not to look at Brazil as an exotic place with exotic problems. To contemplate its condition is to behold an alarming portrait, only to realize that our gaze is not directed at a painting, but a mirror.