Pedro Costa
Founder, editor and writerIB Diploma Programme student in São Paulo. Writes on institutions and comparative politics.
Who we are
School and university students working on institutional reform in Brazil, on the rules and agencies that will still be running the country when we are the ones living under them.
Why this exists
An IPEA report or a Treasury technical note can decide how millions of people live, and gets read by a few hundred. Between what circulates in a school and what circulates in a university there is a wide gap, and that gap is where Jovem Brasil works.
We started from a plain question: can students our age write about institutional reform well enough that an undergraduate in the field takes the paper seriously? The answer depends entirely on review. Nothing leaves here without passing someone who has studied the subject for longer than its author has.
Review is not a formality here. A reviewer sends back the claims a source doesn't actually support, the figures lifted from a press release instead of the original series, the conclusion that runs ahead of the evidence behind it. Drafts go through as many rounds as they need, and a paper that can't be made to hold up doesn't get published at all.
How we work
Papers of 1,500 to 2,500 words, with a source behind every claim that needs one, and the working data named so anyone can check it.
We take no party line and we are not going to take one. Nothing goes out under this name to argue for a party, a candidate or a government, whatever any of us happens to think in private. The only test a proposal has to pass is whether it would leave the country working better for the people living in it, and where a good idea came from is someone else's argument to have.
A subject makes it onto the list if the problem is concrete, if public data exists, and if there is something useful to say about what to do next. Where the evidence is thin or points both ways, the paper reports that rather than overstating what it found.
Publishing is free, reading is free, and any teacher who wants to hand the PDF out in class can.
The team
Max Cunningham
Founding member and writerIB Diploma Programme student in São Paulo. Writes on banking regulation and credit market frictions.
Frederico Makins
WriterIB Diploma Programme student in São Paulo. Writes on monetary policy.
Theo Sapoznik
Founding member and writerIB Diploma Programme student in São Paulo. Writes on the history of privatisation in Brazil.
Leo Gaz
WriterIB Diploma Programme student in São Paulo. Writes on the tourism sector and on investment as a way of changing a state's identity.
João Guimarães
Founding member and writerIB Diploma Programme student in São Paulo. Writes on retail banking.
Join us
We are looking for writers in secondary school and reviewers at university. Write and tell us what you study and which subject interests you.