Menu
Sign In Search Podcasts Libraries Charts People & Topics Add Podcast API Blog Pricing
Podcast Image

The David McWilliams Podcast

Why Did Brazil Never Make It?

24 Jun 2026

Transcription

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Chapter 1: What is Brazil's historical economic context?

0.773 - 17.247 Olen Shannon Maldonado

Astu toiseen maailmaan Storytelin kanssa. Kiehtovaa fantasiaa, kutkuttavaa romantiikkaa vai henkeä salpaavia trillereitä. Kokeile 90 päivää ilmaiseksi ja päästä mielikuvituksesi valloilleen. Kesä on parempi tarinan kanssa.

0

20.382 - 32.337 Max Rushden

The World Cup is back and because we have no off switch, Football Weekly is going daily. If you want a podcast with more footballing heritage than a Brazil number 10, more talent than a French starting 11 and more predictable than an England penalty shootout, look no further.

0

32.377 - 48.297 Max Rushden

We'll have 33 daily episodes covering not just the goals and the glory, but the politics and the problems of this year's tournament. Can England end 60 years of hurt? Join me, Max Rushton, our expert panel and Barry every day of the tournament. World Cup daily. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episodes on YouTube.

0

52.141 - 73.157 David McWilliams

To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. How are you doing there? I hope you are enjoying the World Cup. This podcast is going to be part of our World Cup series.

0

73.718 - 94.23 David McWilliams

The series that we are bringing you dispatches from the World Cup, largely based on countries that we find interesting, economies that we find interesting, political, geopolitical, geostrategic backdrops, and of course, economic history that we find interesting. And today we are going to do

94.21 - 119.659 David McWilliams

For many people, the big one in football, the country that is most romanticized, the country that has a grip on people's imaginations, the country that has delivered generation after generation of extraordinary talented players, the country where the expression, the beautiful game comes from. And that, of course, is football. John is on the cuckoo banner as we speak. Brazil!

120.32 - 132.688 David McWilliams

That country is, of course, Brazil. We are going to look at Brazil. This podcast will have been recorded before the Brazilian-Scottish game, so we don't know the result of that. Obviously, we would have loved the Scots to...

132.668 - 139.558 John Davis

do a job in Brazil, but... I saw Brazil's first game and they are not up to par at all.

140.179 - 159.148 David McWilliams

No, and without German, Vini Jr., they look like a pretty average team. And I think a lot of Brazilians, particularly the Brazilians who are living and working here, if you talk to them in bars or cafes, they'll say, like, this is not a great Brazilian team. You know, not a great Brazilian team doesn't mean they're going to lose, you know.

Chapter 2: How did slavery impact Brazil's economic development?

1404.389 - 1424.534 David McWilliams

So they learn to use the internet. They learn to use driving tractors. They learn to use machines, right? And by learning to use machines, you fuse those machines with that labor Bob's your uncle, you can afford to pay people the higher wages they expect and still generate the productivity which generates the profits at the end of the day.

0

1425.034 - 1428.339 John Davis

Is that kind of what's happened to America?

0

1429.22 - 1451.381 David McWilliams

So in America, what you have, actually, I think this might be what's happened, maybe even more interesting, to Britain, right? Okay, yeah. One of the big problems, I'm sorry, listener, we're digressing here a bit, but one of the big problems in the UK at the moment is trying to explain what they call this productivity slump in the United Kingdom. It's been falling for a long time.

0

1451.842 - 1465.459 David McWilliams

There's lots and lots of reasons for it. There's lots of suggestions for it. People worry about the education level of the workforce, et cetera. But one of the major factors since Brexit, you have to look at this Brazilian example and say, well, look,

0

1466.232 - 1489.344 David McWilliams

If there is a very large increase in immigration, so in the United Kingdom, I think the United Kingdom is taking in the population of Birmingham every year. Birmingham is the second largest city in the United Kingdom. So that's over a million people. So imagine what that does. What that does is it makes those million people available to the workforce.

1489.364 - 1513.779 David McWilliams

Those million people are prepared to work for lower wages, even though they're in the UK. And the reason is they're coming from even lower wages places. So they will live, as is happening again here in Ireland, they live like five to a room whatever, and they are having an effect of reducing the real wage, right? So that's why British wages are very stagnant at the moment.

1513.799 - 1540.276 David McWilliams

But the attendant impact of that is that employers don't necessarily have to invest in technology to increase productivity because wages are low. So they can still be profitable employing these new people as long as wages remain low. This might explain why British productivity is falling. It's falling because it doesn't have to rise.

1540.937 - 1562.066 David McWilliams

And it's falling because employers don't have to increase, for example, the amount of machines, the quality of the labor, the efficiency of the labor. Why? Because it's getting a lot of this cheap labor which, I mean, Brexit was supposed to have an impact, I think, having low immigration, but it ended up having higher immigration. And again, look at Ireland.

1562.106 - 1589.08 David McWilliams

All these things are not unique to any one country. And I think the Brazilian story is a little bit interesting. I wouldn't make a huge leap of it, but it's an interesting historical fact that Brazil remained technologically... a low-grade economy for generations because it had for generations these very self-sustaining low wages which were coming from slavery.

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Please log in to write the first comment.