Education has limitations: inequality and poverty in Brazil

Date: 

Wednesday, September 25, 2019, 6:00pm

Location: 

L-382 (Khan Room), Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street

Speaker: Marcelo Medeiros, PLAS Fellow, Princeton University 
Moderator: Fernando Bizzarro, PhD student, Government Department, Harvard University; Graduate Student Associate, DRCLAS

Graffiti wall in Brazil

There are important limitations to what educational policies can do: only a significant scale-up of university education would lead to much lower levels of inequality and poverty, and even this would take many decades to happen. The growth required to have made that possible would have been impressive. Education is not a panacea to poverty and inequality.

Marcelo Medeiros received the Fred L. Soper Award, from the World Health Organization for the best study in public health of 2012, the Prize of the National Treasure for Public Sector Economics 2012 (3rd place), the Brazilian Social Sciences Association prize for the best PhD Thesis in 2003, a Senate Medal for development research in 2000 and a prize for the best undergraduate student research from the 1993 Brazilian meeting of Economics Students. 

Fernando Bizzarro is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard and a Graduate Student Associate to the DRCLAS. A political scientist from Brazil, he researches the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy and political parties in Latin America.