This essay examines how structural failures—cognitive, institutional, and political—prevent Brazil from transforming abundant diagnoses into concrete solutions. Drawing on authors such as Luis F. Aguilar, Rafael Bañón, Antonio Damasio, Tali Sharot, Hugo Mercier, and Dan Sperber, the text discusses the inability of Brazilian elites to formulate effective public policies, Latin American stagnation, and the contrast with successful experiences in Southeast Asia and the Nordic countries. The article proposes a call for cognitive responsibility as a condition for national development.
One of the main obstacles to transforming diagnoses into concrete results is the lack of monitoring of public policies and, above all, the inadequacy of impact assessments. Impact assessment is an essential tool for understanding to what extent a state intervention transforms social reality. It goes beyond simply tracking implementation—which merely verifies whether targets have been met—to allow for course corrections. It is an impact assessment that reveals whether the observed changes are effectively attributable to the implemented policy and whether its relevance contributes to human, economic, social, and environmental development, at the heart of the challenges a modern society must face.
Authors such as Luis F. Aguilar—in La Hechura de las Políticas and La Política como Respuesta al Desencantamiento del Mundo—and Rafael Bañón Martínez—in La Nueva Gestión Pública and La Modernización de la Política y la Innovación Participativa—emphasize the same point: only policies capable of producing concrete and socially significant effects can be considered successful. For this reason, impact assessment is an integral part of the public policy cycle itself, providing feedback to the decision-making process, improving institutional design, and strengthening democratic legitimacy by allowing the state to learn from its successes and mistakes.
In this context, indicators such as GDP per capita can be used to gauge the effectiveness of a set of policies, provided they are correlated with other social and economic metrics—quality of life, quality of basic education, environmental sustainability, urban functioning, and the well-being of the poorest—in order to more fully capture the real impact of government actions on human development. This is what is implied in many of the comparative studies between economies in Latin America, Southeast Asia, or the Nordic countries—regions that, often, had lower incomes than Latin American countries but subsequently surpassed us consistently.
This article, therefore, seeks to offer a reflection that allows us to better evaluate our assumptions—whether they come from jurists, journalists, politicians, influencers, intellectuals, or ordinary citizens.
There is a clear asymmetry between achieving real impacts—which requires techniques, methods, and procedures established by best practices in political science and public administration—and the ideological bias that frequently dominates the Brazilian public debate. Added to this is a legal bias that often ignores the technical, economic, and financial feasibility and the appropriateness of public policy, intervening in a manner that, ultimately, could be labeled as capricious—a whim that is unjustifiable from any perspective of political science and public administration. This pattern, unfortunately, seems to characterize much of the Latin American experience, in contrast to what occurred in Southeast Asia and the Nordic countries in the post-World War II era.
The complexity of the issues themselves may not be the solution to our paralysis but rather how we approach them. Brazilian public debate is frequently hijacked by logical fallacies that distort reality and prevent the building of minimal consensus. Two of these fallacies are particularly pernicious: the false dilemma and the post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”—an expression that, in everyday use, reveals a kind of a simplification we often accept without proper scrutiny to justify our politicians and condemn their opponents).
The false dilemma traps us in binary and simplistic choices, where the complexity of issues is reduced to “all or nothing,” “right or wrong,” “us versus them.” The discussion on pension reform, for example, is often framed as “saving the country” or “dooming it to bankruptcy,” ignoring real solutions and possible nuances. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, on the other hand, leads to the automatic conclusion that if one event occurred after another, it must necessarily have been caused by it—such as attributing responsibility for an economic indicator to a specific government simply because it worsened or improved during its term, ignoring structural, historical, or external factors.
These cognitive distortions impoverish public debate, hinder consensus-building, and reinforce the cognitive labyrinth that imprisons the country and its intellectual, political, and administrative elites.
Brazilian elites, fragmented by cognitive polarization and ideological disputes, stand in stark contrast to the elites of the Asian Tigers, which were structured in a more meritocratic and development-oriented manner. While Brazil has been dominated by an elite marked by clientelism, poor coordination, and internal disputes—as analyzed by Schneider (1991)—countries such as South Korea and Taiwan have formed autonomous technical bureaucracies, composed of highly qualified personnel (many graduates of MIT, Harvard, and other leading institutions), capable of coordinating long-term industrial policies.
Elites’ composition is fragmented, clientelist, and ideological, focusing on upcoming elections. Technical, meritocratic; high-performing professional bureaucracies focused on general welfare.
Education: Low social mobility; poor performance on PISA; among the worst in the contemporary world. Rigorous exams; high academic standards; a global benchmark.
Role of the elites Decision-making paralysis occurs when individuals focus either on short-term gains or on questionable interests. Long-term industrial and technological planning.
Results Stagnation (GDP per capita ~$10,000). “Economic miracle”: Korea from $100 to $35,000.
Studies such as Brites (2019), Helal & Rocha (2013), and Schneider (1991) underscore that Asian state coordination—based on technical bureaucracies and cohesive elites—contrasts with Brazilian fragmentation, hindering the development of consistent development policies.
According to preliminary results from the 2022 Demographic Census, released by the IBGE, 35.3% of Brazilian workers earn up to 1 minimum wage, and 68% earn up to 2 minimum wages.
According to Data Favela 2023, Brazilian favelas are home to 17.9 million people, spread across more than 13,000 communities, generating more than R$ 200 billion per year. Despite this economic strength, income remains extremely low and unequal, as shown by studies from UFF and Data Favela itself, reinforcing the thesis that Latin America is experiencing a cycle of stagnation or social regression.
Previous studies I conducted showed that what is growing the most in Latin America—and in Brazil in particular—are the favelas. For me, the slumification of Brazil is the greatest proof of the inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and lack of effectiveness of our political and party system, as well as of the poor management of public affairs and the hijacking of the state by interest groups. It is this process that this article aims to highlight.
Our low academic performance in science, mathematics, and reading reveals a troubling phenomenon: a significant portion of the Brazilian elite suffers from a form of functional illiteracy that manifests itself in their speeches, opinions, and public interventions—whether on social media, in the press, or in statements by intellectuals and opinion leaders. This pattern is not merely an impression; it is corroborated by contemporary science, which shows how deficits in comprehension, logical reasoning, and the interpretation of evidence can coexist with high levels of formal education. The result is an elite that, despite its academic credentials, reproduces deep-seated intellectual biases, incapable of formulating precise diagnoses or proposing consistent solutions to national challenges.
Neuroscience offers a crucial perspective for understanding why, even among intellectual and political elites, reason does not always prevail. Antonio Damasio demonstrates that the human brain is not a purely logical machine; emotions and cognitive biases profoundly shape decision-making. Tali Sharot, in studying confirmation bias, shows that we tend to seek out and interpret information that reinforces our prior beliefs, ignoring contrary evidence.
In the context of elites, this means that highly educated individuals may unconsciously prioritize maintaining their group identity and narratives over the pursuit of objective truth. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, in their argumentative theory of reason, go further: they suggest that the primary function of reason is social—to argue, persuade, and defend positions—and not necessarily to discover the truth. Thus, reason becomes an instrument of tribal validation, not of collective construction.
This cognitive mechanism helps explain why Brazilian public debate turns into a cognitive labyrinth: the search for truth gives way to the defense of group identities and narratives.
Intellectual tribalism, fueled by logical fallacies and cognitive biases, comes at a very high cost to Brazil’s development. It prevents the formulation and implementation of long-term public policies, which are essential for areas such as education, basic sanitation, and support for Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs).
In education, every change in government redefines priorities and methodologies, often ignoring previous advances. What should be state policy becomes government policy, subject to ideological whims. Without impact assessment, there is no institutional learning—only the constant reinvention of the wheel.
Basic sanitation, a pillar of public health, suffers from interruptions and discontinuities that waste resources and keep millions of Brazilians in unsanitary conditions. The lack of even minimal consensus on the continuity of these projects reflects the elites’ inability to transcend short-term disputes.
For micro and small enterprises (MSEs), regulatory instability—taxation, credit, bureaucracy—creates an environment of chronic uncertainty. Without consistent national strategic planning, these companies, which are the backbone of the economy, cannot invest, grow, or generate jobs in a sustainable manner.
Given this scenario, the responsibility of opinion-forming elites transcends the mere expression of judgments. It becomes an ethical duty and a strategy for national survival. It is imperative to develop “intellectual self-control”: the capacity for self-criticism, recognition of one’s own biases, and vigilance against fallacies that distort the debate.
This implies a deliberate effort to:
Question one’s own certainties, seeking information that challenges worldviews.
Value complexity, resisting binary dilemmas.
Prioritize evidence, basing arguments on verifiable data.
Promote constructive dialogue, debating to learn, not to win.
Brazil’s future depends on the ability of its elites to transcend the cognitive labyrinth that imprisons them. Only with intellectual rigor, cognitive humility, and a genuine commitment to solutions will it be possible to transform the abundance of diagnoses into real development. It is time for reason to reassume its central role in shaping our destiny.
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