100th Birthday of Antonio Candido

                 Last Tuesday, 24th of July, the Brazilian writer Antonio Candido would complete 100 years old, so this post is a tribute to him. He wrote many times about the importance between literature and human rights. This post is a summary of two articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Candido. The second was published  at    https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/books/9783110549577/9783110549577-015/9783110549577-015.pdf. The third was published at 

                Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza (1918-2017) was a Brazilian writer, professor, sociologist, and literary critic. As a critic of Brazilian literature, he is regarded as having been one of the foremost scholars on the subject by Brazilian universities. He was the winner of the Camoês Prize in 1998 and the Alfonso Reyes International Prize in 2005. Candido was professor-emeritus at the USP and doctor honoris causa by the UNICAMP. Candido's childhood was spent in the countryside in the states of M.G. and S.P. During this period, he did not attend school, being taught at home by his mother. In 1937, he and his family settled down in São Paulo, where he received formal education. In 1939, he began Law at the USP, a course he would eventually abandon in order to study philosophy at the same university. His first critical works were published in 1941, in the magazine Clima. In the following year he began teaching at the USP. He also taught Brazilian literature at the University of Paris. Candido married Gilda in 1943, a Brazilian essayist and fellow professor at the USP, with whom he had three daughters.

                 Antonio Candido, a central figure in post-second World War Brazilian  literary criticism, wrote an essay in 1988 entitled, "The Right to Literature". He claims there that our age is marked by hypocrisy in relation to the ideal of justice. Never before have human rights been so widely proclaimed. Never, in fact, has civilisation been so advanced and so pervasive. And yet, social injustices remain, inequalities are aggravated and barbarism is rife. But it is because of this situation, that human rights are being pursued more intensively than ever before. Being a dialectical thinker, Candido sees in other words not merely incoherence, but a relationship between contradictory phenomena. Contrary to earlier eras, it is no longer possible for leaders to valorise barbaric deeds. Instead, they must be denied or camouflaged, since there has developed at least a minimal consensus concerning the right to human rights. Literature enters Candido's argument in two ways. First as an anthropologically phenomenon. The verbal organisation of the imagination has what hecalls a "humanising role in society." This is why, he says, there is a substantive right to literature that should count among the human rights. But, importantly, Candido also connects literature and human rights historically by reminding his readers how literature itself has contributed to shaping the public conception of human rights. As examples, he mentions how "the poor" enter literature through the work of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, but also how a Brazilian poet such as Castro Alves brought the horrendous practice of slavery to the readership's awareness. Not unlike Erich Auerbach, who in his Mimesis saw in the long history of realism as being connected to a gradual process of democratisation, Candido grants literature a privileged role in the historical and global emergence of egalitarian ideals. For those  who know Candido, this mode of reasoning will seem familiar.In his work, he consistently maintained a faith in enlightnment universalism. A faith in universal reason forms both the precondition and ultimate horizon of his thinking. Always closely connected to the USP, Candido entered the public arena in the early 1940s and would reconfigure Brazilian literary studies with his magisterial Formação da Literatura Brasileira and subsequent work in the 1960s and 1970s. The novelty of this book was, among other things, its combined approach to literatura as both a social institution and an aesthetic phenomenon. 

               The analysis of the law in the literature also assumes significance due to the fact that a literary work is a witness of the social and legal reality, in which the various portraits of a society are exposed. Literature can denounce behaviors and contribute to social and juridical changes, allowing a focus of times and institutions that capture the legal world as a cultural product. Antonio Candido in his essay, "Literature and Social Life" states that social factors, such as values and ideologies influences the literary life and, because of that, aliterary work to be fully understood should not be separated from its social and historial context. Bakhtin states that "[...] the conception of the individual and the notion that they have of themselves acquires shape and existence in the signs created by an organized group, of which they have in the course of their social relations." Thus, the family relationship must be more than grounded in the affective component and not merely at the biological, considering that the interaction between individuals is responsible for the formation of identities. Over the years, human rights and family law had their concepts extended. New values were added to the society and their reflections in the legal system are shown in the reread of institutes with a different interpretation. 

                

Jobs and Growth: Brazil's Productivity Agenda

                This book came in a good hour. It says about the many problems Brazil has to overcome to reach a better and sustainable development. I think all candidates and even the general public should read it, in order to know what must be done to Brazil tackling its persistent problems. As an example I would like to highlight the fact that for the last two decades Brazil's interest rates has remained among the highest of the world, undermining investment and comsumption. The book talks about the many reforms Brazil need to implement and it reinforces the need to keep or implement without delay, the reforms that has already been done, such as the high school reform. Of course that many people can not agree with everything in this book, like myself, but the debate is part of the democracy, what can not be done is nothing, including one sector that Brazil urgently need more productivity is its politics. Our politicians, their direct staff, their municipal and state secretaries, etc need to work more efficiently to make smarter and effective use of tax money.  For this reason, please pay attention in who you will vote this year, vote in candidates that has shown good will, courage, tireless activism and knowledge to work for our people and country.  This post is a summary of the book with the title above, published in 2018 at   https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/29808/9781464813207.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

                Brazil enters the election year with an economy that is gradually recovering from the deepest recession. However, for many, the recovery has not yet translated into new and better jobs, or rising incomes. This book is motivated by the need to understand the possible drivers of future income and employment growth. Brazil needs to improve its performance in terms of productivity to generate lasting gains in incomes and provide better jobs for its citizens. This is all more important, because Brazil is aging rapidly and the boost the country has enjoyed thanks to its growing labor force will disappear in just a few years' time. productivity is a measure of how efficiently a firm, an industry, or a country uses its existing assets. Brazil has abundant natural resources, an increasingly more educated labor force, and some world-class companies in sectors ranging from agribusiness and aeronautics to textiles and oil drilling. In aggregate, however, the country uses its assets poorly. As documented in the book, if Brazil were to use its assets as productively as the U.S., Brazil's income per capita would increase by 2.7 times. Making all Brazilian industries work as efficiently as their counterparts in the U.S. would boost productivity more than four times. This book analyses some of the factors that may be behind such low productivity. Among the most important: 1) a lack of competition both internally and externally. 2) government policies that have concentrated on subsidizing existing firms, and distorting capital and labor markets, rather than fostering competition and innovation; and 3) fragmented government institutions for business support that have allowed policies to persist without much regard for whether or not they had shown to be effective. Brazilians have a legitimate aspiration to raise their standards of living to the level of high income countries. However, their country has been stuck in middle-income status for several decades. Brazil has experienced many of the structural changes associated with rapid growth and convergence to high income economies, including the transformation of its agriculture, the continued urbanization of the country, investments in education with some improvements in the human capital, and the demographic bonus, as Brazil's baby boomers of the 1970s and 1980s entered the labor force. The lack of convergence in living standards is associated with a poor record in productivity growth. An average worker in Brazil today is only around 17% more productivity than 20 years ago, compared to a 34% increase for an average worker in high income countries. Productivity growth is a critical driver of development in all countries. High commodity prices and loose fiscal policies fueled a consumption based growth model during the 2000s, but during the past five years, however, these factors have gone into reverse plunging Brazil into the deepest recession in over a century. Neither commodity prices nor government spending can be sustainable sources of growth over the long-term. Finally, investment-led growth will remain constrained by low domestic savings. Brazil's low productivity may be the source of past disappointments, but it also pffers a big promise for the country's future. At the heart of Brazil's low and stagnant productivity is an economic system that discourages competition and innovation and induces misallocation of resources and inefficiency. Brazilian companies operate in an environment of high costs. These high costs result from inefficient financial markets and high interest rates, an extraordinarily complex and burdensome tax system, the inadequate state of the country's infrastructure, an extensive set of administrative rules, and the peculiar challenges of operating with a myriad of different and changing regulations. Addressing these costs through cross-cutting financial, tax and administrative reforms and boosting infrastructure investments has proved difficult. Instead, government has compensated for these high costs through a variety of interventions in the functioning of markets that have arguably further reduced competition. These have done little to spur productivity, instead, they have distorted the playing field, discouraging new entrants, and creating incentives for incumbent firms to lobby for state support. As a result, Brazil's resources are poorly allocated, empoyment and income growth are weakened, and consumers pay high prices. Brazil suffers from higher transport and logistics costs than most comparator countries, severely limiting domestic and international integration. Brazil's infrastructure quality is poor, including railroad, airport and especially roads and ports. High costs of information and communication technologies also affect connectivity and may reduce the rate at which new tech are adopted. Improving the quality of transport, logistic and ICT infrastructure requires an improved investment framework. A key reason for persistent resource misallocation and limited competition arguably is the high regulatory and administrative barriers against doing business. In addition to the inadequate state of the country's infrastructure, include regulatory obstacles, high tax rates and an extraordinary complex tax system, high interest rates and a weak insolvency regime, and a cumbersome processes to operate a business, including time and cost to register property, obtain construction permits and bid under government contracts. Agriculture stands out as the only sector with high rates of productivity growth in Brazil. Indeed, unlike in manufacturing and in services, where Brazil lags the rest of middle and high-income countries, in agriculture Brazil is a leading innovator. Moving forward, the agriculture sector will need to adjust to sustain past success and reconcile Brazil's role as a global source of food with the need to protect its natural patrimony. Brazil has traditionally been a country with low savings rates and consequently low rates of investment. National savings have been consistently below 20% of GDP. Macroeconomic imbalances and a legacy of high public debts are reflected in high interest rates. Compounded by microeconomic and institutional inefficiencies, interest rates spreads remain exceptionally high. The banking sector maintained healthy incomes even during the recent crisis, reflecting both cautious lending and the ability to charge high margins. Despite a substantial expansion in access to education and hence in Brazil's human capital, the quality of the education and professional training system remains relatively low thereby reducing Brazil's productivity. Brazil has invested considerably in education but at the aggregate level is getting very little return. This is in part because labot is misallocated and hence human capital is not put to its best use. But it is also because the quality of education investment has been low: despite increases in investment per student, the quality of Brazil's education outcomes remains disappointingly low. An overloaded focus on memorization of academic subjects, reduced school hours, and a perceived lack of relevance of the Ensino Medio  curriculum are some of the main shortcoming of the current basic education system. Moreover the current system may also contribute to persistent economic inequality: public school students find it difficult to progress to tertiary education, as they must compete with better prepared private school students. Reform to secondary education were recently introduced that target improvements in educational outcomes. in 2017, the Federal Government passed a reform of the secondary education system including the introduction of a competence-based curriculum and the extension of the full-time school model. The new ensino medio curriculum is a long overdue and promising reform to reduce dropouts while supporting learning among adolescents. Drawing from the experiences in Mexico and other OECD countries such as Portugal and Poland to add flexibility to a new competence-based curriculum can be an important step to increase student motivation and engagement. Technical and vocational education has also been inadequate, though recent initiatives seeking business input are promising. Technical education in the high school could play an increasingly important role in building the human capital that Brazil needs to raise its productivity. Labor market policies, both passive and active, are not sufficiently supportive of produtivity growth. Brazil spends about 1.1% of GDP (in 2015) on federal labor programs, but their effects on labor allocation are largely counterproductive. Compared to neighbors, peers and members of the OECD, Brazil is characterized by relatively high spending on passive labor market policies (83% of the total) and only limited investment in active policies, especially labor market internediation and job-search support. Accelerating productivity gains to allow inclusive economic growth requires significant changes in policies and institutions. This book has shown that there is little prospect of sustained income gains in Brazil without enhancing competition and tackling the vast policy-induced barriers to productivity growth. This requires a significant change in public policies across a range of areas, reorienting state intervention and creating greater space for Brazilians firms to compete in domestic and international markets. There are several short-term opportunities to reduce trade and thus facilitate the greater integration of Brazil into the global economy. As outlined in chapter 3, Brazil imposes several nontariff related costs on exporters because of cumbersome and poorly coordinated border control procedures. Brazil's trade policy reform needs to be coordinated within Mercosul, but even current rules provide some flexibility for unilateral reduction of tariffs. Brazil should take advantage of the shifting global trade policy landscape and consolidate  and increase ongoing efforts for new trade agreements such as those between Mercosul and the E.U., Canada and India. In preparation for gaining greater market access, Brazil should strengthen its domestic quality assurance system (e.g. INPI & IINMETRO). The recent meat scandal and resulting temporary export bans for Brazilian meat highlight the importance of such measure to secure market access including in areas where Brazil already demonstrates a strong competitive advantage. Over the medium-term, Brazil may wish to consider some institutional innovations that helped other countries provide a focal point for a coherent productivity agenda. Among the experiences Brazil could consider are the establishment of a productivity commission, the creation of an institutionalized public-private sector dialogue mechanism to overcome coordination failures, or the creation of a policy lab that encourages experimentation in business support policies. The various institutional reform options reviewed here can help overcome coordination problems but they are no substitute for political leadership. What this report has tried to do is to show why Brazil's productivity agenda is both urgent and promising. It belongs to Brazil's political leaders to put this challenging reform agenda into practice. Brazil's future shared prosperity may well depend on it.                                                                                        

Ethics, Human Rights and Globalization

                   If you want to know if  persons are ethical persons, you should ask them if they defend the human rights, because there is nothing more ethical than human rights. The principles of law and justice are based on human rights.  This post is a summary of four articles. The first article with the title above was published at   https://www.weltethos.org/1-pdf/20-aktivitaeten/eng/we-reden-eng/speech_Robinson_eng.pdf. The second was published at http://nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/Bioinformation-Chapter-3-Ethical-values-and-human-rights.pdf. The third was published at  https://www.ethicalrights.com/faqs/80-about-ethics.html. The fourth was published at  http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/9781557534804

           Linking human rights with ethics and globalization represents a connection whose time has come. And yet, the task is daunting. Every day brings further evidence of the unacceptable divide in our world. We are at the edge of a big idea, the shaping of ethical globalization. But how? What are the components, the linkages, and the energies that need to be harnessed? In preparing for this writing, I was reflecting on the fact that nearly ten years have passed since the adoption of two important declarations, one by the world's governments, the other by the world's religious leaders. The two texts are The Declaration and Programme of Action from the World Conference on Human Rights, adopted in Vienna in June 1993, and the Declaration of the Religions for a Global Ethics adopted in Chicago in 2001. What is the relationship between ethics and rights and how do they both link to values, morality and to law? It is not only an interesting intellectual exercise to analyze these concepts, it is directly relevant to the world of action and to policy choices we face as citizens of different countries. Every country has human rights problems and should be open to constructive scrutiny and criticism. We have also clarified the true agenda of human rights, as confirmed at the Vienna Conference. It comprises the equally strong protection of civil and political rights on the one hand and economic, social and cultural on the other, together with a commitment to reach consensus on the right to development. At this most basic level, ethics, human rights and developing global interactions of the whole human race are also interwined. Ethics must be connected to morality. Ethics without morality is empty. At a more abstract level than morality and ethics, we could place values. Values are the building blocks of both morality and of ethics. Thus a achievement of the Millennium Summit of the General Assembly in 2000, was to agree on a number of values essential to international relations in the 21th century. These are: freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature and shared responsibility. Moving now to human rights: in our hierarchy, they seem to occupy an intermediate stage between values and moral foundations and the immediate personal decisions, which concern ethics. In this they are akin to law, and yet not to be identified simply with law. Law is an indispensable part of the picture. It is a necessary complement to both morality and ethics. To sum up: we can say that values, morality, ethics, law and human rights are all linked in a complex normative cluster. Building an ethical and sustainable form of globalization is not exclusively a human rights matter, but it must include the recognition of shared responsibility for the universal protection of human rights. Governments should bear in mind their concurrent obligations to promote and protect human rights, mindful of the commitment made in Vienna in 1993, that "human rights are the first responsibility of governments." A key characteristic of economic globalization is that the actors involved are not only states but private power in the form of multinational corporations. Thus a new challenge is to ensure that such actors in the globalized economy are accountable for the impact of their policies on human rights. Rereading the Millennium Declaration, I am struck by the fact that we have no need for new pledges and commitments. They are all there in solemn language. We need something more prosaic: implementation! One of the attributes of the human rights system is that it is refining its capacity to measure progress through monitoring steps taken by states to implement their commitments. Here, too, the rigour of a legal regime can help to underpin the values of ethical globalization. The next phase must be less aspirational, less theoretical and abstract, and more about keeping solemn promises made.

               The protection of the public from criminal activities is a primary obligation of the state. However, this obligation must be exercised with due respect for a number of fundamental ethical values and in the light of modern legislation on human rights. The values with which we are primarily concerned are liberty, autonomy, privacy, informed consent and equality. It is generally recognised that every one of us has a protected zone of privacy into which neither the state nor other persons should intrude without our permission. This can be seen as derived from a more basic right to autonomy, or as a precondition for the exercise of autonomy, or as an independent moral principle. There are ywo conceptions that are useful for our discussion: spatial privacy and informational privacy. Spatial privacy is "a state of non- access to the individual's physical or psychological self". This invaded by the non-consensual taking of biological samples, and by unwanted surveillance of the individual, for example. Informational privacy refers to personal information about an individual that is ordinary "in a state of non-access to others". This encompasses all kinds of information about ourselves that we would regard as intimate, and which we would therefore want to withhold, use and circulation we would wish to control. Another aspect of privacy is anonymity: "the right of the individual to escape from the intense surveillance situations of small comunities". Anonymity gives individuals the opportunity to live down their past and to enter into new relationships. 

                Ethics is a branch of philosophy that is generally a discussion about what one should to do in a particular situation. An important aspect of ethics is that it requires taking the position of an impartial observer. Selfish motives might drive one, what you want done for your own reasons.  Ethics is also about how people should live a good life. An ethical approach might not give 'right' answers, but it does provide some principles and guidelines. There are many rights that humans should enjoy, such as freedom of thought, liberty, as well as freedom of religion, and rights to health care and education. Ethical thinking and human rights, a good recipe for a better world.

               Human Rigths Ethics makes an important contribution to contemporary philosophical and political debates concerning the advancement of global justice and human rights. Butler's book also lays claim to a significant place in both normative ethics and human rights studies in as much as it seeks to vindicate a universalistic, rational approach to human rights ethics. Butler's innovative approach is not based on murky claims to "natural rights" that supposedly hold wherever human beings exist; nor does it succumb to the traditional problems of justification associated with utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other procedural approaches to human rights studies. Instead, Butler proposes "a dialectical justification of human rights by vindicate a totally rational account of human rights," but one that depends concretely and historically on a dialectically constructed "right to freedom of thought in its universal modes."

110th Birthday of Guimarães Rosa

               About ten days ago, precisely on 27th of june, the Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa would complete 110 years old, so this post is a tribute to him. This post is a summary of three articles and an interview. The first summary was published at  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joao-Guimaraes-Rosa. The second was published at   http://thebiography.us/en/rosa-jo-o-guimar-es. The third was published at  http://www.projetograndesertao.com.br/the-book/. The fourth was published at https://www.capitolinabooks.com/single-post/2017/09/06/Entrekin-and-Rosa

              João Gumarães Rosa, was born in 1908 in Cordisburgo in the Minas Gerais state , and died in 1967 in Rio de Janeiro city. Novelist and short-story writer whose innovative prose style, derived from the oral tradition of the hinterland of Brazil, revitalized Brazilian fiction in the mid-20th century. His portrayal of the conflicts of the Brazilian backlanders in his native state of Minas Gerais reflects the problems of an isolated rural society in adjusting to a modern world. Guimarães Rosa studied medicine at Belo Horizonte and became a physician. His urge to travel, however, soon led him into the Brazilian foreign service, and he became a diplomat in several world capitals, attaining ambassadorial rank in 1963. With the publication of Sagarana (1946), a collection of short stories set in the sertão, Guimarães Rosa was hailed as a major force in Brazilian literature. His monumental epic novel, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, firmly established his international reputation.

             Poet, Narrator, doctor and diplomat, Guimarães Rosa was a humanist, fruitful and versatile, skilled at balancing scientific concerns, their literary interests and their public services rendered to his native country, left a brilliant legacy form that stands out for its experimental boldness, the splendid novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956), a dazzling exercise of linguistic creation and innovation in which deliberate removal of borders between the lyrical and narrative speeches gives to a harmonious lexical ruled by the whims of melodic of the language. At the time he studied medicine in the University of Belo Horizonte, he became known as a writer by the publication of some stories that appeared within the pages of the magazine O Cruzeiro (of  Rio de Janeiro), were distinguished by the criticism with several awards. While it reached satisfaction within the scope of the lyrics, Guimarães Rosa was progressing in his diplomatic career, which led him to german soil holding the office of consul of Brazil in Hamburg in 1938. Other concerns, in fact, worried the Brazilian consul during the 1940s, in which, he provided assistance to many jews who were forced to leave Germany, fleeing nazi persecution. Despite his diplomatic passport, in 1942 he was arrested and imprisoned in the company of Brazilian artists and intellectuals who at the time were in German territory. In the mid-1950s Guimarães Rosa returned to the holders of the Brazilian cultural press thanks to the publication of a series of short stories, grouped in the set volume entitled Corpo de Baile, returned to surprise to critics and readers, the literary quality of his prose has come to achieve the levels of perfection attained by the writer with narrative, presented under the title of Grande Sertão: Veredas  (1956). In just four months, the interval of time between one and another publication, he has been consacrated as one of the most outstanding voices of contemporary Brazilian literature.

              Grande Sertão: Veredas (Portuguese for "Great Backlands: Paths"; English translation: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) is a novel published in 1956 by the Brazilian writer João G. R. The book is the complex story of Riobaldo, a former jagunço (mercenary or bandit) of the poor and steppe-like inland of the Rio San Francisco, in the north of the state of Minas Gerais in the dawn of the 20th century. Now an old man and rancher, Riobaldo tells his long story to an anonymous and silent listener coming from the city. The book is written in one long section, with no chapter breaks. The English title refers to a later episode in the book involving an attempt to make a deal with the devil. The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector in a letter to Fernando Sabino said, "I have never seen anything like it! It is the most beautiful thing of late. I do not know how far his inventive power goes, it excedes the imaginable limit. I am even dumbfounded. His language, so perfect also in intonation, is directly understood by our intimate language, and in that sense he more than invented, he discovered, or rather invented the truth. What more could one want? Now I understand your enthusiasm, Fernando. (...). The book is giving me a reconciliation with everything, explaining guesses, enhancing everything. I think the same as you: Genious." Mario Vargas Llosa, in a preface to the French translation of the novel wrote, "The true theme of  Grande Sertão: Veredas is the diabolical possession, said the critic Emir Monegal in a analysis, and thus statement is perfectly valid (...).It turns out that the reality most deeply reflected in the book is neither human conduct, nor nature, nor word, but the soul. Riobaldo's odyssey carries within itself, implicity, like a secret thread that guides and justifies it, a metaphysical interrogation about good and evil. The language, the structure of the novel must then be regarded as keys whose profound meaning leads to a mystique one. Neither the work of cloak-and-dagger, nor the tower of Babel, would in this perspective be a cathedral full of symbols."

            One of the most iconic and complex reads in Brazilian literature. Grandes Sertões: Veredas by

Guimarães Rosa is an undisputable classic. Perhaps for the Brazilian reader its glory lies in its rich and intricate vocabulary. Something that would challenge even the most experienced translator. But Alison Entrekin is well up for the challenge. She has taken this herculean project of translating the story of Riobaldo and Diadorim from its original Portuguese into English. Entrekin talks a bit about the process and what comes with it. Veredas is a 'metaphysical novel', according to Antonio Candido, the equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses. Previously published as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands is one of Brazil's greatest classics and deserves a place in the world literary canon. There are people who love the 1963 translation, which domesticated Guimarães's peculiar prose, for the story alone. It doesn't read badly at all, on the contrary! But it's like reading Grande Sertão: Veredas reset in the American West. I think one needs a certain maturity to get a handle on the philosophical and existencial aspects of the book.