Does Brazil Need to Produce More or Live Better? 2026 Elections President

Employment, wages, food prices, taxes, inflation, credit, and the cost of living make the economy one of the central issues of the 2026 Elections.

When someone searches for the government plan of a presidential candidate, they are rarely thinking only about GDP, fiscal deficits, or public debt.

The question is usually much more concrete.

Will my salary buy more?

Will I be able to find a job?

Will food become more affordable?

Will my business be able to stay open?

Will my children have better opportunities?

All of these questions are fundamental.

But we want to add another question that will become increasingly difficult to avoid on a planet facing climate change, biodiversity loss, and growing resource extraction.

Does Brazil need to keep producing more and more, or does it need to learn how to produce better what truly expands the possibilities of life?

This is the question behind the concept we call Production of Excess.

This article does not determine which presidential candidate has the best economic proposal and does not recommend a vote. First, we present a brief summary of what each government plan proposes. Then we add the BrainLatam perspective based on Body-Territory, Decolonial Neuroscience, and Production of Excess.

What do the presidential candidates propose for the economy in the 2026 Elections?

The presidential candidates present very different models for Brazil. There are proposals for greater State participation, privatization, tax reduction, higher wages, nationalization, fiscal reforms, and even a break with capitalism. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, presidential candidate for PT

Lula proposes maintaining the State as an inducer of development, strengthening public services and income programs, and combining economic planning with sustainability and a low-carbon ecological transition. His economic program also maintains the current fiscal framework and provides for public investment in infrastructure and industry. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: if development is to be low-carbon, beyond GDP growth we could also measure how much water, soil, biodiversity, and territorial capacity remain available for future generations.

Flavio Bolsonaro, presidential candidate for PL

Flavio Bolsonaro proposes containing public spending, reducing bureaucracy, lowering taxes, reducing the size of the State, and resuming concessions and privatizations. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: economic efficiency does not need to be calculated only in monetary terms. An activity may reduce financial costs today while transferring environmental, climate, or social costs into the future.

Romeu Zema, presidential candidate for Novo

Romeu Zema proposes a broad reduction in State participation, privatization of state-owned companies, spending cuts, lower taxes, and greater labor flexibility. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: the market can assign prices to many goods. Body-Territory asks what happens to things whose value often becomes evident only when they begin to disappear, such as clean water, fertile soil, or climate stability.

Ronaldo Caiado, presidential candidate for PSD

Ronaldo Caiado prioritizes fiscal stabilization, containing mandatory spending, modernizing agribusiness, and transitioning social programs toward greater financial autonomy for beneficiaries. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: agricultural productivity could include not only how much is produced per hectare, but also how much of that territory remains capable of producing twenty or fifty years from now.

Renan Santos, presidential candidate for Missao

Renan Santos proposes strong fiscal adjustment, federal reorganization, a reduction in the number of municipalities considered fiscally unviable, and the replacement of Bolsa Familia with work programs. He also presents the exploitation of rare earth minerals and technological expansion as part of his strategy. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: an administrative unit is not only revenue and expenditure. Municipalities also contain relationships, memories, services, mobility networks, and belonging. Fiscal efficiency and territorial continuity need to be considered together.

Augusto Cury, presidential candidate for Avante

Augusto Cury proposes a zero deficit, expansion of micro-entrepreneurship, sustainable agribusiness growth, and the exploitation of strategic minerals. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: the word sustainable requires indicators. When does expansion stop being sustainable? We can only know if we monitor production and the territory's capacity for regeneration at the same time.

Clariana Barao, presidential candidate for DC

Clariana Barao presents support for small businesses, infrastructure improvements, and fiscal responsibility as economic pillars. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: beyond knowing how much a business produces, we could measure how much of the wealth generated continues circulating within the community where that production takes place.

Edmilson Costa, presidential candidate for PCB

Edmilson Costa proposes a break with capitalism, nationalization of the financial system, expropriation of large agribusiness, suspension of public debt payments, and repeal of the fiscal framework. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: changing who controls production addresses a distributive question. Body-Territory adds another: how much can any productive system, whether public, private, or community-based, extract without compromising the continuity of the territory?

Hertz Dias, presidential candidate for PSTU

Hertz Dias proposes nationalization of banks, agribusiness, and major companies under workers' control, suspension of public debt payments, an increase in the minimum wage, and an end to the 6x1 work schedule. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: distribution is not only about money. It also involves time, exposure to pollution, access to water, mobility, rest, and the ability to remain in one's own territory.

Rui Costa Pimenta, presidential candidate for PCO

Rui Costa Pimenta proposes nationalization of the financial system, nonpayment of public debt, reversal of privatizations, a wealth tax, and a significant increase in the minimum wage. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: ownership and ecological limits are different problems. A mine continues removing matter from a territory whether it belongs to the State, investors, or workers.

Samara Martins, presidential candidate for Unidade Popular

Samara Martins proposes nationalization of banks and privatized companies, suspension of public debt payments, an increase in the minimum wage, an end to the 6x1 work schedule, and a reduction in the tax burden on workers. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: there is one resource that no monetary policy can ever produce again: life time. An economy could also be evaluated by how much time it leaves available for care, family, community, rest, and social participation.

Wilson Grassi, presidential candidate for Democrata

Wilson Grassi proposes deregulation, tax relief, and digitalization of the State. His main tax proposal is a Federal Single Tax on financial transactions, replacing taxes currently levied on payroll. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Our expansion: a tax system could also discuss different treatment for activities that degrade environmental capacities and activities that contribute to maintaining them.

Pablo Marcal, presidential candidate for PRTB

Pablo Marcal registered his presidential candidacy, but according to the survey published on August 18, no PRTB government plan had yet been registered on the official TSE platform. For that reason, we do not attribute to him an economic proposal that cannot yet be verified. (Folha de S.Paulo)

Different models, one almost absent question

The candidates' answers are profoundly different.

But almost all begin from the need to generate prosperity, employment, income, and productive capacity.

BrainLatam adds an earlier question.

Is there a point at which producing more stops meaning living better?

The United Nations Environment Programme's Global Resources Outlook 2024 reports that global natural resource extraction has tripled over the last five decades. Without a change in trajectory, extraction could increase by approximately 60 percent between 2020 and 2060. The report links this expansion to rising climate risks, biodiversity loss, pollution, and reductions in well-being. (UNEP)

This does not mean that all new production is undesirable.

Brazil still needs more sanitation, adequate housing, hospitals, transportation, food, science, clean energy, and infrastructure.

The question is different.

Does everything need to grow forever?

Production of Excess

We use Production of Excess as a BrainLatam conceptual proposal to examine an economy that becomes dependent on the continuous expansion of production, consumption, credit, extraction, and circulation simply to preserve its own dynamics.

It is not an established economic consensus, nor a conclusion already demonstrated by neuroscience.

It is a hypothesis for investigation.

A house requires sand, cement, metals, energy, and water.

A car requires minerals.

A smartphone depends on mining.

Food depends on soil, water, and climate.

A data center requires energy, equipment, and cooling systems.

Even what we call the digital economy has a material body.

Every form of production eventually meets a territory.

Latin America has already been questioning unlimited growth

This discussion does not need to be imported only from Europe or the United States.

Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa has developed important work after 2021 on ecosocial transition, extractivism, lithium, and the risk of an energy transition that simply replaces one form of territorial pressure with another. Her 2023 work discusses the dilemmas of ecosocial transition from a Latin American perspective, while her 2024 work addresses lithium and energy colonialism. (CONICET)

This perspective is especially important for Brazil.

Even a green economy can reproduce Production of Excess if its solution consists only of replacing oil with ever-growing volumes of minerals, energy, and infrastructure without discussing material limits.

Brazilian Indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak, in Future Ancestral, published in 2022, challenges the idea of humanity as something separate from nature. In a lecture at Unicamp in 2023, Krenak connected the environmental crisis to contemporary development models and highlighted the need to recover a deeper relationship among life, territory, and ancestry. (SciELO)

Quilombola thinker Antonio Bispo dos Santos, Nego Bispo, published A terra da, a terra quer in 2023. His reflections emerge from quilombola ways of life and relationships among community, land, and sharing, providing a Brazilian reference for thinking about economy without reducing territory to a resource available for extraction. (ODEERE)

Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar also revisited, in work published in 2022, the idea of pluriversal politics and radical interdependence. His approach questions the existence of a single universal model of development and places the reproduction of life and local worlds at the center of the discussion. (University of Oulu Repository)

These authors do not say the same thing.

And none of them is presented here as proof of the Body-Territory model.

What they demonstrate is that Latin America has its own intellectual production for discussing development, territory, life, and ecological limits.

Decolonial Neuroscience and economics

It may seem strange to bring economics and neuroscience together.

But economics is also about human decision-making.

We choose to consume.

To save.

To wait.

To take risks.

To accept an immediate reward or wait for a future one.

Researchers from the Institute of Neurosciences at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico published an EEG study in 2022 showing that reward and punishment conditions changed both behavior and patterns of cortical activity during a decision-making task. The authors found faster responses under reward and different electrophysiological patterns between the two conditions. (PubMed)

This does not demonstrate that a consumption-based economic system is wrong.

It shows something more limited and more careful.

Value and choice also pass through human perception.

In Brazil, researchers from UFABC, USP, and ITA published a 2022 study using fNIRS hyperscanning, simultaneously recording cortical activity from a teacher and a child during social interaction. The study shows how neuroscience can methodologically move beyond the isolated brain and observe organisms in relationship. (PubMed)

For Decolonial Neuroscience, this opens another question.

If our economic decisions happen within relationships, cultures, histories, and territories, why should we continue treating the economic agent only as an abstract individual maximizing benefits?

The same income does not mean the same possibilities of life

Two people may earn exactly the same salary.

One lives close to work.

The other spends four hours a day commuting.

One has access to clean water.

The other has to buy it.

One lives in a tree-lined neighborhood.

The other faces extreme heat.

One has schools and healthcare nearby.

The other has to cross the city to access them.

Monetarily, both may belong to the same income bracket.

Territorially, they do not possess the same wealth.

Body-Territory does not propose abandoning income, GDP, or productivity.

It proposes adding what these indicators cannot see by themselves.

Perhaps we need to grow what sustains life

The discussion does not need to be reduced to growth versus degrowth.

We can ask a more useful question.

What needs to grow?

Sanitation needs to grow.

Knowledge needs to grow.

Healthcare needs to improve.

Adequate housing needs to increase.

Biome restoration can grow.

Energy efficiency can grow.

Freedom and available time can grow.

At the same time, we can ask whether waste, obsolescence, degradation, and extraction also need to grow at the same pace.

This is the provocation behind Production of Excess.

One question for all presidential candidates in the 2026 Elections

Lula, Flavio Bolsonaro, Romeu Zema, Ronaldo Caiado, Renan Santos, Augusto Cury, Clariana Barao, Edmilson Costa, Hertz Dias, Rui Costa Pimenta, Samara Martins, and Wilson Grassi present profoundly different economic models.

Pablo Marcal should be incorporated into this comparison when an official and verifiable government plan becomes available.

We do not need to decide here which of them has the correct answer.

We can ask all of them the same question:

After four years, Brazil may have produced more monetary wealth. But will its territories also be more capable of sustaining life?

And a second:

If an activity generates money today but reduces water, soil, biodiversity, or future productive capacity, where does that loss appear in the accounts?

Perhaps an economy prepared for the future is not one that simply transforms increasing amounts of territory into money.

Perhaps it is one capable of using money, technology, and knowledge to expand the possibilities of life without destroying the conditions that make those possibilities possible.

This question leads us to the next step in the series.

If keeping a biome alive produces value for the whole of society, why does that value remain almost invisible to those who keep the territory alive?

This is where we begin to discuss Biome Income.

References

Folha de S.Paulo. Presidential candidates and summary of government plans registered for Brazil's 2026 Elections. 2026. (Folha de S.Paulo)

United Nations Environment Programme. Global Resources Outlook 2024. (UNEP)

Svampa, Maristella. Dilemas de la transicion ecosocial desde America Latina. 2023. Thinking about Ecosocial Transition: Lithium and Energy Colonialism. 2024. CONICET research records. (CONICET)

Krenak, Ailton. Futuro Ancestral. 2022. Discussions on sustainability, ancestry, and development at Unicamp, 2023. (SciELO)

Santos, Antonio Bispo dos. A terra da, a terra quer. 2023. Discussions on quilombola knowledge, land, community, and ways of life. (ODEERE)

Escobar, Arturo, Tornel, Carlos, and Lunden, Aapo. On design, development and the axes of pluriversal politics. 2022. (University of Oulu Repository)

Iribe-Burgos, Fabiola Alejandra et al. Effect of reward and punishment on no-risk decision-making in young men: An EEG study. Brain Research. University of Guadalajara, Mexico. 2022. (PubMed)

Oku, Amanda Yumi Ambriola et al. Applications of graph theory to the analysis of fNIRS data in hyperscanning paradigms. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. Researchers from UFABC, ITA, and USP, Brazil. 2022. (PubMed)