Can Brazil create abundance?

I remember an early attempt to introduce the “abundance liberalism” agenda to Brazil. In 2022, while at the National School of Public Administration (ENAP), then-ENAP president Diogo Costa and I hosted American journalist Derek Thompson. His message, still nascent at the time but surprisingly resonant for a roomful of civil servants, was simple: build state capacity. Remove bottlenecks to the supply of goods and services. Make democracies deliver again — faster, and at scale.

It wasn’t exactly met with applause.

In Washington, this call from moderate liberals has sparked both excitement and backlash — from the left and the right. Critics dismiss the agenda as corporatism in disguise or techno-utopianism, naïvely blind to entrenched power, inequality and the interests of the ultra-wealthy.

In Brazil, the conversation never quite took off. Yet the book’s themes feel painfully familiar.

Take basic sanitation. According to the latest data from the Trata Brasil Institute, nearly half the country’s population still lacks access to sewage collection or treatment. From 2006 to 2022, the share of Brazilians receiving treated water increased by just 4.6 percentage points. Sewage collection expanded at a sluggish pace of about one percentage point per year. And the share of sewage that’s actually treated rose by only 14 points over 16 years.

The human cost is staggering. In 2024 alone, poor sanitation led to more than 344,000 hospitalizations from preventable diseases such as diarrhea, intestinal parasites and mosquito-borne viruses like dengue and chikungunya.

Or consider the Transnordestina Railway. Launched in 2006 with a budget of BRL 4.5 billion (USD 2 billion at the time) and a 2010 completion date, the project has become a monument to dysfunction. 

Delays, ballooning costs and legal disputes derailed progress. Public funding was suspended over irregularities. A partial restructuring and renewed federal investment in 2024 have done little to erase its reputation as a case study in how not to build in Brazil. Completion is now projected for 2027.

It’s our version of California’s high-speed rail fiasco, another project dissected in Thompson’s book. Approved by voters in 2008, now delayed well into the 2030s, and with costs tripled. Not because the US lacks trains or technology, but because political friction — permitting battles, lawsuits, endless stakeholder vetoes — makes building almost impossible.

Meanwhile, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail in the same time span.

In Washington, the book launch for Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance” drew a line around the block — think tanks, policy wonks, climate optimists, all eager to hear a new story for the center-left: build big, build now, build with purpose. But even there, the agenda runs into resistance. The Democratic Party’s climate-conscious, process-oriented, university-educated base often bristles at the trade-offs that rapid building requires: speed, scale, compromise.

Brazil faces a similar paradox.

In Brasília, the institutional left — public sector unions, environmental NGOs, social movements — is indispensable. But it can also become a brake on delivery. Permitting reform becomes a flashpoint for environmental justice. Projects like rural broadband or electric vehicle chargers drown in regulatory red tape.

The result is gridlock cloaked in good intentions. A dream of equity stalled by procedure. A justice agenda paralyzed by its own mechanisms. Underneath it all lies something more complex to confront: culture.

Culture, after all, is how societies solve problems. It shapes what we normalize, what we resist, and how we define ambition. In Brazil, we’ve grown used to blaming “the system,” the elites, the rules. But what if the problem is us — the technocrats, the policymakers, the “defenders of democracy” who now flinch at what building actually entails?

It’s easier to critique when the villain is the market. It’s more uncomfortable when the culprit is inertia, or ourselves.

Still, a movement is brewing. 

In the US, thinkers like Noah Smith, Brian Deese and Marc Dunkelman are rethinking liberal governance — not around redistribution or restraint, but around production. They’re asking: Why does it take so long, cost so much and fail so often to do things we already know how to do?

That’s a conversation Brazil urgently needs, especially heading into the 2026 elections.

The abundance agenda won’t succeed unless we’re willing to face uncomfortable trade-offs. Progress requires building, and building brings friction — which demands clarity about what truly matters.

In Brazil, policy still revolves around income — raising the minimum wage, expanding cash transfers, creating new benefits. These are vital tools. Brazil’s social safety net has lifted millions. But what if income isn’t the only constraint? What if the problem is also about access? 

Why is life in Brazil so expensive? Why is sending your child to daycare so tricky?

What if we’ve been asking the wrong question all along: not how to redistribute income, but why essential goods and services cost so much in the first place?

Abundance doesn’t reject redistribution. It complements it by increasing the supply of what matters: education, health care, clean energy. If those are widely available, prices drop, and incomes stretch further. It’s a justice agenda rooted not just in budgeting, but in building.

And if the left doesn’t define abundance on its own terms, the right will. In the US, the new right is already co-opting the language of speed and efficiency — without the public purpose. That’s a risk we can’t ignore.

Abundance means streamlining approvals, not gutting oversight. It means encouraging innovation in public service, not dismantling it. It means making delivery as central to justice as distribution. Above all, abundance is a bet that democracy can still deliver. 

But to win that bet, we have to build like we believe it.