Léo Ramos Chaves / Revista Pesquisa FAPESPHoffmann has been a professor at ESALQ for 58 years. Upon retiring in the 1990s, he was also a member of the teaching staff at the Institute of Economics of the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), between 1996 and 2012, where he primarily taught statistics. Besides income inequality, he studies agrarian issues and food insecurity, among other topics. He has already supervised 62 master’s dissertations and 30 PhD theses, and published around 250 articles, both alone and in partnership. He has written books, such as Estatística para economistas (Statistics for economists; Editora Pioneira, 1980) and Distribuição de renda: Medidas de desigualdade e pobreza (Income distribution: Measurements of inequality and poverty; EDUSP, 1998), the updated version of which was published in 2019 by the same publishing company, and coauthored by two former students, economists Diego Camargo Botassio and Josimar Gonçalves de Jesus.
Field of expertise
Income distribution in Brazil
Institution
Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture at the University of São Paulo (ESALQ-USP)
Education Background
Undergraduate in agronomic engineering (1965), master’s degree in rural social sciences (1967), and a PhD in agrarian economics (1969) from ESALQ-USP
Married for the second time to Marina Vieira da Silva, a retired professor from ESALQ, Hoffman has two children and four grandchildren. He received Pesquisa FAPESP in his classroom at ESALQ, in Piracicaba, São Paulo State, for this interview.
You were born in the city of São Paulo, but lived on a farm in the countryside of the state of São Paulo for the first years. Why?
At the time when I was born, my parents, Hellmut and Annemarie, and my two older siblings, Helga and Ulrich, lived on a farm in Nova Europa, a town close to Araraquara. My parents were German and met in Santos, on the coast of the state of São Paulo, in 1937. They soon got married and bought a property in Santos. In August 1942, during World War II, the Getúlio Vargas [1882–1954] government aligned against the Axis powers [Germany, Italy, and Japan] and declared a state of war nationwide. As a result, citizens from the Axis nations were obliged to move away from coastal zones. My father ended up being fired from the bank where he worked as a clerk and had less than 24 hours to leave Santos with his wife and children. They moved to his family farm in Nova Europa, which was managed by my aunt Luise, and my father began to work the land. Just before I was born, in December that year, my mother thought it would be better to give birth in São Paulo, where there was better infrastructure and where her parents lived.
You grew up on that farm?
I lived there until I was 3 years old. In 1945, when the war ended, my father got a job as a clerk in the management of a toy factory and moved to São Paulo. My mother moved back with the children to our house in Santos and my father visited us on weekends. Aged 10, my four siblings, my mother, and I moved to São Paulo to live with my father. I studied my entire life in public schools: I attended junior high and high school at the São Paulo State School, in the city center. We lived in a simple house in the Vila Mariana neighborhood because my father wanted to save money to buy a farm in the countryside. When migrating from Germany to Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century, my grandfather became a farmer and my father had an emotional connection with the countryside. On weekends, he would take the train to visit different places trying to find a plot of land for sale, and I was one of his companions. He eventually found a piece of land between Itapevi and São Roque. During my childhood and adolescence, it was common to spend the school holidays at the beginning of the year on my aunt Luise’s farm.
Did that influence your choice of taking a degree in agronomic engineering?
Yes, I think so. Until I was 18, I had bucolic illusions. I romanticized country life, which, as you know, can be good, but it can also be hard. I began the course in 1961. I didn’t like the hazing, obviously, but those who totally refuse it became “outcasts” and were unable to enter the academic center. I really wanted to take part in the academic center, which was outside the ESALQ campus, and had an independent life.
Did your involvement in politics begin in Piracicaba?
In my adolescence, when I was at school in São Paulo, I remember taking part in education campaigns; I also read Marx [1818–1883]. My sister, Helga, who is four years older than me, has always been a role model for me. She was involved in the student movement, and in 1956, she became the first woman elected president of the National Union of Secondary Students [UNES].
Were you able to enter the academic center at ESALQ?
Yes. Within the student movement, I was closer to the PCB [Brazilian Communist Party], but the State Student Union [UEE] was practically dominated by the AP [Ação Popular, a left-wing organization meaning popular action]. I used to get the AP material in São Paulo and give it out in Piracicaba. In 1963, I was chosen by the UNE [National Union of Students] to go to a national meeting of agronomy students in Rio de Janeiro, where I met two Cubans. They came with me to Piracicaba and gave a lecture in the academic center about the socialist revolution on the island. ESALQ had a very conservative environment, and I was gaining a reputation for being subversive.
Is that why you were arrested?
In April 1964, days before the coup, I was called during class to the office of then dean of ESALQ Hugo de Almeida Leme [1917–1992], who was with the chief of police and an assistant. I was 22 years old and they took me to the jail in Piracicaba with the clothes I was wearing. I remember that my main concern was to destroy an address book that I carried in my pocket in order to avoid identifying my fellow activists. I tore it with my fingers, chewed part of it, and threw the rest into the hole in the cell, which was used as a toilet. Then, professor Hugo became the Minister of Agriculture [1964–1965] for the military government. In the 1980s, he was appointed as a professor emeritus at ESALQ. I was at the congregation meeting and asked to speak. I said that I didn’t think his attitude in the past was dignified, of handing a student over to the police without an arrest warrant. In comparison, the dean Zeferino Vaz [1908–1981] ensured this didn’t happen at UNICAMP during the military regime. The topic was removed from the agenda and, in another meeting, without my presence, professor Hugo was granted the title of professor emeritus.
ESALQ was somewhat conservative in the 1960s, and I gained a reputation for being subversive because of my political beliefs
How long did you stay in prison?
Around 50 days. It was a normal cell, with three bunk beds, that I shared with five other prisoners, including Capixaba, a thief who robbed a bank and was arrested trying to catch a bus at the bus station in Piracicaba. I was interrogated, but not tortured. I think that I was one of the first to be arrested for political reasons in the city during the dictatorship. And I believe I was the only student. Later on, when I was still in prison, several local union leaders were “taken down.”
How did you begin studying economics?
I had missed almost two months of classes and I needed to take a recovery exam at the end of 1964. I was in the fourth and penultimate year of my agronomy degree. The next year was specialization: plant pathology, agriculture, or economics. I have destiny to thank. One of the recovery subjects was rural economics, taught by the full professor Érico da Rocha Nobre. When discussing a book by Paul Sweezy [1910–2004], a Marxist US economist, he got mixed up at one point and I was able to help him. He was a gentleman and accepted my interference. He also noticed that I had potential for economics. My interest in economics was old, it came from studies motivated by politics or simply from a desire to understand history. Being self-taught, I learned lots of Marxist economics before studying neoclassic economics in the last year of the agronomy program.
When did you become a professor?
I graduated in agronomy in the class of 1965, although I have never worked in this field from a technical standpoint, providing consultancy to rural producers, for example. My academic career started early. The following year, professor Érico invited me to be his assistant in his department at ESALQ. I was not inexperienced as a teacher. My grandmother taught private classes and used to send some students to my mother, who was also a private teacher, especially in English. When someone had difficulty with exact sciences, she would call me to teach them. I was an adolescent. Soon after moving to Piracicaba, I was a professor on the pre-university course of the ESALQ academic center. In 1964, a roommate began a preparatory course in the city and called me to be a physics teacher. This roommate substituted me while I was in prison. When I left jail, he had a petition from the students asking for me to not teach any more classes. I never managed to find out if the main reason they signed the petition was not wanting a “subversive” teacher, or whether they thought the substitute was a better physics teacher than me. So, in 1964, I was not only arrested but lost my job as well. But I continued to teach private classes and, the following year, I became a physics teacher in a public high school.
Did you become an assistant professor in the same year you started your master’s in rural social sciences?
It was in the first class of the master’s in economics at ESALQ. My dissertation about land ownership distribution was a continuation of an article that I presented at a congress for agronomy students in Fortaleza, Ceará State, around 1962. The work showed that land ownership is concentrated in the country, which was nothing new, but it innovated in the way that the calculation was carried out. I took the data from the 1960 IBGE [Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics] Agricultural Census, but since I didn’t have a computer to do the analysis, I drew a Lorenz Curve [a graphical representation of the degree of inequality] on graph paper using data on the accumulated proportion of agricultural establishments in the country. I used a topography device to measure the areas within the curve and to calculate the Gini Index [one of the measures of inequality]. Frederico Pimentel Gomes, a university mathematics professor, agreed to be my advisor and I defended the dissertation in 1967.
What did you research for your PhD?
It is a study that is related to agronomy and economics: I studied the seasonal variation in the prices of agricultural products. Products with similar seasonal variation come from the same botanical family, and have the same susceptibilities to disease and temperature variations, for example. I highlighted this in the study. In the PhD, I already had access to a computer from the Department of Statistics at ESALQ that I was able to use early in the morning. There was practically no software in Brazil at the time. I had to do the programming myself, something I learned in a short course at ESALQ.
After jail, I had to take remedial classes because I had missed almost two months, and it was then that I went back to economics at university
You began your PhD research at the University of Ohio. How was your experience in the United States?
It didn’t go very well. At the time, ESALQ had a partnership with the University of Ohio and some professors came to work on the graduate program of the agronomy course. They offered me a grant to do my PhD at that university right after finishing my master’s degree. However, I was married and had a small child. My wife at the time, Sônia Vieira, was a professor of statistics at the School of Medicine of UNESP [São Paulo State University], in Botucatu. To go with me, she would have needed to quit her job and become a housewife in the USA. Obviously, she didn’t accept and I totally understood. Sônia stayed in Brazil with our daughter, trying to get a grant. At the time, institutions didn’t have the concern that I see today with regards securing grants for both partners. I went alone but ended up coming back around five months later, in 1968. Besides missing my family, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the classes. I didn’t think it was worth the sacrifice of being far from Brazil, so I resumed my research in Piracicaba. Professor Érico had threatened to fire me if I didn’t finish the PhD in Ohio, but ended up accepting it, on the condition that I did the PhD immediately at ESALQ.
Did your associate professorship thesis, “Contribuição à análise da distribuição da renda e da posse da terra no Brasil” (Contribution to the analysis of income distribution and land ownership in Brazil) (1971), continue on from your master’s research?
Yes. During the research, I used stratified income data from the 1960 demographic census and applied the Gini index, finding very high levels of income inequality in the country. I only had the tabulated data from the IBGE. In the work, I developed a mathematical procedure to do the Lorenz Curve with those points and estimate the correct area, taking the curvature into consideration. At the same time, my master’s advisor, João Carlos Duarte [agronomist and social scientist who died in 1989], applied the same procedure to the data from the 1970 Census, which had just been published. He found even higher levels of income inequality.
What did you do?
We published an article together in Revista de Administração de Empresas [Business management magazine], of the Getulio Vargas Foundation [FGV], in 1972, in which we analyzed the distribution of income among employed people in 1960 and 1970. Today, you have easy access to data from the National Household Sample Survey [PNAD] and the Household Budget Survey [POF], for example. It’s possible to download it on your computer at home. But we didn’t have that at the time. We already had microdata, but they could only be analyzed on large mainframe computers, there were no personal computers in the country. João Carlos and I had to do some very complicated statistical gymnastics with the published stratified income data in order to get good Gini Index estimates.
US economist Albert Fishlow, of the University of California, in Berkely, reached the same conclusion. He had been to Brazil in the 1960s and also published an article in 1972 in the journal American Economic Review. The work had international repercussions and was mentioned by Robert McNamara [1916–2009], then president of the World Bank. Was the book Income Distribution and Economic Development in Brazil [Expressão e Cultura, 1973], by economist Carlos Langoni [1944–2021], a response from the military government to this issue?
Delfim Netto [economist and finance minister between 1968 and 1974] commissioned Langoni, a professor at USP at the time, to produce a study to challenge the data suggesting increased inequality during the military regime. At the time, the country was experiencing the height of the so-called “economic miracle.” I acknowledge a certain academic seriousness in Langoni, who had a PhD from the University of Chicago. In the first chapter, he mentions our article, my associate professorship thesis, João Carlos’s dissertation, and the article by Fishlow. The book provides a sophisticated analysis in econometric terms. Langoni analyzed the data from the IBGE and acknowledged that, in relation to the increase in inequality, the results he was achieving did not discredit our conclusions. In my opinion, the big mistake of his book is not having taken the political context of the time into account, the economic choices of the military regime, that caused income inequality.
Everyone involved in this debate known as the “Controversy of the 70s” agreed that inequality increased between 1960 and 1970. Was the disagreement about the factors that contributed to this happening?
Yes. I thought that a fundamental factor in this analysis was the coup in 1964 and the economic policy adopted by the regime. The dictatorship repressed unions preventing them from demanding salary increases. I have never forgotten the fact that, even in the not very politicized Piracicaba, in April 1964, the presidents and several members of the board of the local unions were arrested. This certainly occurred in thousands of municipalities across the country. From my point of view, the repression of the unions at the time of the dictatorship was part of the explanation for that increased inequality in Brazil.
And what was Langoni’s view?
For him, the Brazilian economy had become more sophisticated with the growth between the 1960s and 1970s and the demand for a skilled workforce had increased. However, the offer of this type of workforce did not grow at the same pace because the country had a large education deficit. Therefore, the salaries for skilled labor increased significantly compared to unskilled labor, increasing income inequality in the country. In summary, it would be a consequence of economic development, the workings of the market, and the historical lack of investment in education. He says nothing about the 1964 coup or about the regime’s economic policies, as if political phenomena had no impact on reality. I find this interpretation of results scandalous.
The repression of the unions during the dictatorship helped to explain the large increase in inequality in the country between 1960 and 1970
Did he work with the microdata that you did not have access to?
Yes, a privilege at that time. The data published by the IBGE were generic: for example, there are so many people in the income range from so much to so much. Langoni worked with individualized data provided by the government and he had the logistical support from the government to carry out the statistical analyses on a computer. In fact, in the book, he even thanks two systems analysts from SERPRO [Federal Data Processing Service], an agency linked to the Ministry of Finance, for their assistance.
Do you think that his explanation is incompatible with the one you advocate? Is there no contribution from the low educational level of the workforce to the evolution of the inequality observed at that time?
Of course, there is. The level of education is an important element for explaining people’s level of income. As I said, the problem with Langoni’s study, in my understanding, is not mentioning the effect of the political context, specifically the dictatorship.
In the book Uma história da desigualdade: A concentração de renda entre os ricos no Brasil (1926–2013), (A history of inequality: The concentration of income among the rich in Brazil, 1926–2013), published in 2018, sociologist Pedro Ferreira de Souza says that the “Controversy of the 70s” generated a lot of heat but little clarity. In other words, no consensus was reached about the factors that explain the increase in Brazilian inequality during the period.
I think that the scandal helped bring clarity. We are talking about an academic discussion that gained political importance at a time when even a conservative newspaper such as O Estado de S. Paulo was censured. I remember being invited in 1973 to take part in a seminar at FGV, in São Paulo, to debate this issue. At the table was, for example, [the current deputy of the state of São Paulo] Eduardo Suplicy. I gave an interview to an important newspaper at the time, together with Paul Singer [Hoffmann, Singer, and other economists wrote articles with criticism of Langoni’s arguments published in the book A controvérsia sobre a distribuição de renda e desenvolvimento (The controversy about the distribution of wealth and development), from 1975]. These events had a strong impact on me because I was a university professor at the beginning of my career. The issue had great repercussion and that was how I became known as an economist.
Did you ever debate the subject personally with Langoni?
We never met face to face. But I met Fishlow at a CEBRAP [Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning] seminar. I demonstrated interest in a new stint abroad, after the frustrated PhD experience, and Fishlow took me under his wing. As head of the Economics Department, he invited me for a period as a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the first semester of 1974. I returned there in the first semester of 1977. Besides that, I was a visiting researcher at the University of Yale in 1983 and 1989. The recommendation by Fishlow was also important for that.
Why did income inequality remain so high after the redemocratization in Brazil?
It ended up falling, but these phenomena are not immediate. The redemocratization in the mid-1980s later culminated in the Fernando Henrique Cardoso [1995–2002] government. There was economic stability and the creation of the Bolsa Escola [a social program offering financial incentives to families for keeping children in school], later expanded to the Bolsa Família [a social program providing financial assistance to low-income families] under the following government, of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. My studies show that these income transfer programs contributed towards reducing the inequality and poverty in the country from 1995 to 2014. Other policies, such as the increase in the real value of the minimum wage since 2001 and the rise in educational level, were also important. Controlling inflation through the Real Plan had immediate effects on inequality, since the elevated inflation particularly harmed the poorest. But the achievement of a reasonably stable national currency is of much greater importance, as it is a fundamental condition for the rationalization of public accounts and even for the proper functioning of the economy in general.
Improving education per se does not automatically produce economic development and a reduction in inequality
In the book Os ricos e os pobres: O Brasil e a desigualdade (The rich and the poor: Brazil and inequality), published in 2023, sociologist Marcelo Medeiros states that a tax reform that progressively taxes the wealthiest would contribute more to reducing inequality in Brazil than investment in education. According to him, if the country invests in education to correct the problem, it would spend a fortune on a process that will take decades and achieve few results. What do you think about that?
I think investment in education is essential and it would be a very important step for our society if Brazil was able to improve the quality of its basic education. Although I do agree with Marcelo that improving education per se does not automatically produce economic development and a reduction in inequality. In the case of the Asian Tigers, for example, there was investment in education, but the economic structure also improved. In relation to taxation of the rich, French economist Thomas Piketty discusses this, although he recognizes that it is a complicated issue, because with the mobility that capital has today, if you increase taxation on the wealthy too much, the capital will move to other places. In my opinion, there needs to be a global income tax system, but maybe that is an overly Utopian idea.
What would be the solution for reducing income inequality in the country?
There is no magic solution. Economist Ricardo Paes de Barros has even stated that the main policies for reducing inequality have to be adjusted over time. The Bolsa Família program played an important role and needs to be improved. The distributive aspects of all economic decisions and policies, such as tax reform, should be considered. I feel it is important to reduce the retirement of high-level public workers, something defended by English economist and journalist Brian Nicholson in the book A Previdência injusta: Como o fim dos privilégios pode mudar o Brasil (Unfair welfare: How the end of privileges could change Brazil), published in 2008. The question is finding someone willing to stir up this hornet’s nest. According to my quantitative analyses, it is much easier, in the short term, to reduce the inequality of income distribution in Brazil by changing the Social Security system than through, for example, agrarian reform. But it is clear that the history of Brazil would have been different if, after the Abolition, the former slaves had received a piece of land. New settlements and the reformulation of the Rural Land Tax should also be part of the ongoing effort to reduce the extremely high inequality of income distribution in Brazil.
