Under favorable external circumstances, the pragmatic political and economic strategy of Brazil’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) helped to secure short-term political stability, boosted growth, and supported an unprecedented distribution of income. However, it also meant that the PT had to accommodate to rather than transform the constraints on growth in Brazil and that stability would involve unwieldy political alliances preventing deeper reforms. When it was confronted with deteriorating global economic conditions and increasingly ineffectual economic policies, the PT’s strategy immobilized the party, facilitated the dissolution of its base of support, and expedited its ouster from power. The Brazilian experience suggests that political pragmatism can, within limits, support progressive economic change but that the outcomes depend heavily on external circumstances and the stability of the political coalitions supporting the administration. Em circunstâncias externas favoráveis, a pragmática estratégia política e econômica do Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) ajudou a assegurar a estabilidade política no curto prazo, impulsionou o crescimento e apoiou uma distribuição de renda sem precedentes. No entanto, isso também significou que o PT teve que se acomodar a, em vez de transformar, as restrições ao crescimento no Brasil, e que a estabilidade envolveria alianças políticas comprometedoras, impedindo reformas mais profundas. Quando foi confrontada com a deterioração das condições econômicas globais e apresentando políticas econômicas cada vez mais ineficazes, a estratégia do PT imobilizou o partido, facilitou a dissolução de sua base de apoio e acelerou sua saída do poder. A experiência brasileira sugere que o pragmatismo político pode, dentro de certos limites, apoiar a mudança econômica progressista, mas que os resultados dependem muito das circunstâncias externas e da estabilidade das coalizões políticas que apóiam a administração.

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This article explores the patterns of class inequality and capital accumulation in Brazil, showing the drivers and limits of the decline in inequality that occurred during the Workers’ Party governments. It proposes that minimum wage hikes and greater social security changed the demand pattern and kick-started a cumulative causation process. Growth and redistribution thus reinforced each other for a period, and then spelled their own limits. As growth accelerated in the 2000s, a Gini decomposition indicates that class inequality decreased, but confined to changes between workers—capitalist income and social stratification were preserved. This also endogenously led to a regressive structural change, as low-productivity, labour-intensive services grew and international trade patterns worsened. This created a medium-term dependence on commodity prices for balance-of-trade solvency, and heightened cost-push inflation, which could not be overcome under the limited policy framework in place. The constrained basis for reducing inequality and the regressive structural change underscore that developmental strategies requires broad, multi-dimensional inequality-reducing measures and an encompassing catching-up project.

Hereditary hemochromatosis (HH) is an autosomal recessive disorder characterized by excessive iron absorption resulting in pathologically increased body iron stores. It is typically associated with common HFE gene mutation (p.Cys282Tyr and p.His63Asp). However, in Southern European populations up to one third of HH patients do not carry the risk genotypes. This study aimed to explore the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology to analyse a panel of iron metabolism-related genes (HFE, TFR2, HJV, HAMP, SLC40A1, and FTL) in 87 non-classic HH Portuguese patients. A total of 1241 genetic alterations were detected corresponding to 53 different variants, 13 of which were not described in the available public databases. Among them, five were predicted to be potentially pathogenic: three novel mutations in TFR2 [two missense (p.Leu750Pro and p.Ala777Val) and one intronic splicing mutation (c.967-1G NC)], one missense mutation in HFE (p.Tyr230Cys), and one mutation in the 5′-UTR of HAMP gene (c. -25GN A). The results reported here illustrate the usefulness of NGS for targeted iron metabolism-related gene panels, as a likely cost-effective approach for molecular genetics diagnosis of non-classic HH patients. Simultaneously, it has contributed to the knowledge of the pathophysiology of those rare iron metabolism-related disorders.

There are new reasons for revisiting Marx's elaboration on the rate of profit because contemporary debates provide findings from the MEGA Project, long-term data on the rate of profit, and tools for dealing with complexity and non-equilibrium systems. This article proposes that the interplay between the tendency and the countertendencies of the rate of profit to fall can be translated into a simple system of equations, one based on each chapter of Section III of Capital-as if Marx sought to mathematically formalise his insights. This article reviews previous debates, presents data and runs a simulation model, showing that the rate of profit behaves as fractals. ARTICLE HISTORYrate of profit to fall and its countertendencies. This insight from his writings of 1863-5 can now be tested against evidence on the behaviour of the rate of profit in the last 150 years.The contribution of this article is the suggestion that the interplay between the tendency and the countertendencies (Callinicos 2014, p. 270) can be translated into a very simple system of equations. This system of equations is an attempt to model the long-term behaviour of the rate of profit. More specifically, each chapter of Section III of Das Kapital may be transformed into one equation, as if Marx was preparing to mathematically formalise his insights. This system of equations will push us to a non-linear world. Accordingly, this article applies tools of non-linear mathematics and complexity to, through simulations, try to replicate and evaluate these long-term dynamics.A short literature review on the debates related to the profit rate is the subject of the second section of this article. This review indicates the specific contribution of Marx vis-à-vis classical economists, summarises the three rounds of debate regarding the rate of profit in the history of economic thought, and shows how this subject permeates modern economics.This second section hints at elements of complexity in the behaviour of the profit rate. The third section then summarises a short history of complexity and non-linear mathematics. This gives the reader some familiarity with the necessary tools to describe the long-term behaviour of the profit rate. A fourth section discusses the role of countertendencies in the history of capitalism and empirically evaluates the long-term behaviour of the profit rate, based on data for the last 150 years of the United States (US). It also conducts a preliminary analysis of the non-linear properties of this behaviour. The fifth section combines the two strands of analysis reviewed in sections Two and Three, suggesting a translation of Marx's insights on the interplay between the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and its counter-tendencies into a system of equations. This system of equations feeds a simulation model that is implemented to test the ability of those equations to replicate the long-term dynamics of the rate of profit in a capitalist economy. A final section presents the implications of this analysis and evaluates the results...

The purpose of this note is to offer some original technical results in the theoretical measurement of inequality. Whilst most practitioners are content to work with one or other measure, with Gini for example to the fore, and discuss the empirical results that follow from the data, such pragmatism involves a certain degree of arbitrary ethical judgement over how more for one rather than another should be assessed. At a deeper level of principle, constructing measures of inequality proceeds by specifying conditions like homogeneity for which multiplying all incomes by a common factor should leave a measure unchanged. Such conditions are the starting point for this contribution, drawing upon a rich literature that already exists. More specifically, this note explicitly explores the relationships between additive separability and homotheticity of measures of welfare (closely related to derived measures of inequality), and homogeneity and decomposability in direct measures of inequality, drawing upon the previous literature along the way to make this possible. An interrogation is made of the resonances and dissonances between the classic contributions of Atkinson (1970) and Shorrocks (1980). In brief, in the presence of otherwise common assumptions, it is shown that additive separability and homotheticity of welfare are stronger combined conditions than decomposability and homogeneity of income inequality. The gap between the two, however, can be closed by adding an extra term around total income to the measure of welfare.

Brazil’s social structure and associated distributive policies during the PT governments did not depart from neoliberalism but rather implemented a poverty-reducing variant of it. Through minimum-wage hikes, conditional cash transfers, legislation driving financial innovation, and the subsidizing of privately provided for-profit services, state power was used to include individuals in ever-expanding formal circuits of commodity production and consumption. Deprivation in multiple dimensions was indeed reduced through these policies, but in the process social mobility came to mean exiting poverty, getting a formal low-skilled job, and accessing credit at lower interest rates to pay for state-subsidized private health and education. A estrutura social do Brasil e as políticas distributivas associadas a ela durante os governos do PT não se afastaram do neoliberalismo, mas sim implementaram uma variante de neoliberalismo redutora da pobreza. Por meio de aumentos do salário mínimo, transferências condicionais de renda, legislação que impulsionava a inovação financeira e o subsídio para serviços privados prestados com fins lucrativos, o poder do Estado foi usado para incluir indivíduos em crescentes circuitos formais de produção e consumo de mercadorias. A privação em múltiplas dimensões foi realmente reduzida por meio dessas políticas, mas neste processo a mobilidade social passou a significar sair da pobreza, conseguir um emprego formal pouco qualificado e obter crédito a taxas de juros mais baixas para pagar pela saúde e educação privadas subsidiadas pelo Estado.

Despite mounting urgency to mitigate climate change, new coal mines have recently been approved in various countries, including in Southeast Asia and Australia. Adani’s Carmichael coal mine project in the Galilee Basin, Queensland (Australia), was approved in June 2019 after 9 years of political contestation. Counteracting global efforts to decarbonise energy systems, this mine will substantially increase Australia’s per capita CO2 emissions, which are already among the highest in the world. Australia’s deepening carbon lock-in can be attributed to the essential economic role played by the coal industry, which gives it structural power to dominate political dynamics. Furthermore, tenacious networks among the traditional mass media, mining companies, and their shareholders have reinforced the politico-economic influence of the industry, allowing the mass media to provide a venue for the industry’s outside lobbying strategies as well as ample backing for its discursive legitimisation with pro-coal narratives. To investigate the enduring symbiosis between the coal industry, business interests, the Australian state, and mainstream media, we draw on natural language processing techniques and systematically study discourses about the coal mine in traditional and social media between 2017 and 2020. Our results indicate that while the mine’s approval was aided by the pro-coal narratives of Queensland’s main daily newspaper, the Courier-Mail, collective public sentiment on Twitter has diverged significantly from the newspaper’s stance. The rationale for the mine’s approval, notwithstanding increasing public contestation, lies in the enduring symbiosis between the traditional economic actors and the state; and yet, our results highlight a potential corner of the discursive battlefield favourable for hosting more diverse arguments.