The rich, the poor and Marcelo Medeiros – 10/30/2023 – Michael França

In Brazil and in several countries around the world, there is a slow but progressive awakening of discontent with the rigid social and political structure. Inequalities and exclusionary processes, long dormant, are coming to the surface. Several scholars have contributed to endorsing such debates and helping to provide reflections on social choices. Marcelo Medeiros is one of those names.

The sociologist and economist, researcher at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) and visiting professor at Columbia University, is the author of a series of studies that seek to understand the complexities of distributive conflicts generated by inequalities and their reproduction mechanisms.

Medeiros is part of a generation of researchers who are not only concerned with the base of the social pyramid but also seek to question and understand in greater depth the top of the income distribution. He’s the research type who doesn’t tend to be intimidated. He tends to get straight to the point when it comes to the interventions he deems relevant to addressing society’s inequalities.

In his recent book entitled “The Rich and the Poor: Brazil and inequality”, Medeiros exemplifies, in several ways, how poverty is detrimental to individual and collective development, while, at the same time, outlining the situation of high concentration income among the rich.

In the work, he highlights that the great mass of Brazilians are more like the poor than the rich. There is a lot of heterogeneity among those who are considered rich in the country. They appropriate a portion of the income greater than that appropriated by the entire poorest half of the population combined. Without them, we would have a poor society, but with little inequality.

Interestingly, for every two people with a doctorate degree in the country, there is one homeless person. For every doctor, there are almost four prisoners. Our socioeconomic structure makes inequalities almost predetermined in their persistence. A large part of the population faces daily dilemmas in order to access basic survival requirements.

Changing this, according to the author, “will take work, it will cost dearly, it will take time and it will consume a lot of political capital, because it requires directly facing the distributive conflicts that exist in society”.

If we choose to transform the current situation in the country in a structural way, there will be a natural counter-reaction from those who lose out from the changes. Societies do not tend to respond readily to rational arguments or to any advance in awareness of basic notions of justice.

Despite this, it is difficult to imagine that the current social contract will be maintained with the slow, but progressive, awakening of those who were asleep to the distributive conflicts inherent to our reality.

The text is a tribute to the song “Menino das Laranjas”, composed by Theo de Barros, performed by Mariana Aydar.

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