The old saw “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” now seems so wrong.  The place feels increasingly conservative, and it is aging rapidly.  In the domestic airport you see couples with only a single kid, not two or three kids, never mind four.

Country and Western music, in their Brazilian incarnations, are very popular.

It does not feel like the next Pelé will be coming from Brazil.

Sao Paulo as a city is much improved.  The murder rate has plummeted, and the nice neighborhoods are very nice and are growing in size.  The business community is strong, interesting architecture abounds, and there is a real arts scene.  It is arguably Latin America’s number one city, with only Mexico City as a rival.  It has, along with Mexico City, evolved into a “must know” global city, though it is rarely treated that way by outsiders.  In the three days I spent there, going around to many places, I did not see a single person who was evidently a foreign tourist.  That is crazy, but also a sign there is good value here.

Sao Paulo has food to die for.  It is top tier for Brazilian (of course), meat/steak, Japanese, and Italian, and pretty good in many other offerings as well.  I had a wonderful fifteen-course omikase for $110 at a Michelin star restaurant.  The establishment, Kan Suke, has only eight seats, but I could get a table by inquiring only an hour in advance.

For Italian food it is probably the second best country in the world?  For meats it might be number one, at least if you are willing to put aside the small country of Uruguay.  For beans it is top two, and the fruits are excellent as well.  Chocolate ice cream and gelato abound.  All constraints considered, I would rather spend a week dining out here than in London or Paris or Rome, or for that matter New York City.

People are very friendly, surprising few speak decent English, and Brazilian warmth still abounds.

I was very pleased with my stay at Hotel Unique, due to its architecture and also a perfect location.

Observers should be more optimistic about the Brazilian economy.  Yes it is overregulated and the government is locked into far too much spending.  But hyperinflation is now a distant memory, a reasonable fiscal consolidation occurred in the 1990s, and the country has plenty of its own energy.  Keep in mind that for emerging economies, years of negative growth are a major problem.  Brazil now has sidestepped most (not all!) of those risks.  Slow, steady growth should be able to get them somewhere, albeit at a langorous pace.

My biggest worry about Brazil is demographics and shrinking population.  In recent times TFR has been in the 1.3 to 1.4 range, hardly satisfactory.  A shrinking population is bad per se, and also it will hurt many regions of the country due to imperfect market integration, both nationally and globally.  More importantly, the country does not have an obvious and easy option for pulling in a higher number of desirable immigrants, at least not relative to its size.  There is Venezuela and Bolivia, but the former of those may go away as a major source of people.

Will Brazilian fertility tick back up?  Will Brazil re-attain its status as a highly influential culture on the world scene, as it was in the 1960s through early 1990s?  Unclear.  But if the question is “should you go visit?”, the answer is a definite yes.