Populism is hard to define. Is commonly labeled by whatever the speaker doesn’t like. But João Pedro "JP" Bastos argued we can do better than that, and helped build an index that measures it.
Welcome to Episode 6 of From Ideas to Innovation. JP recently defended his PhD in economics at my alma mater, Texas Tech University, and his research focuses on populism, institutions, and economic development in Latin America. Our conversation is an exploration into why these topics matter far beyond the region and should be discussed beyond academic circles.
About This Episode’s Guest
JP Bastos didn't set out to become a skeptic of state-led development. He started in local government in Brazil, an atmosphere he describes as similar to Parks and Recreation, working to simplify the legislation required to open a business. What he found motivated his entire research agenda.
When he asked bureaucrats why certain permitting requirements existed, the answer was rarely a law. It was usually: "that's how we've always done it." This search pulled him toward public choice economics and a career-defining question: is underdevelopment less about labor and capital than it is fundamentally an institutional problem?
JP pursued that question through a PhD at Texas Tech, where he became a Research Assistant at the Free Market Institute. There, alongside Nicolás Cachanosky and Alexandre Padilla, he helped build the first index to measure Latin American populism using actual policy outcomes, not just rhetoric.
This fall, he joins the University of Austin as an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Center for Economics, Politics, and History
What You’ll Take Away
How to define and identify populism, beyond the common packaging of “what I don’t like”
Why populist governments in Latin America made their countries roughly 20% poorer than expected
How a single populist leader can wipe out a generation of progress on liberal democracy almost overnight, including the staggering example of Venezuela’s Supreme Court
The difference between good and bad inequality, and the deeper institutional problems behind it
Why crime and public safety, not economics, may be the most misunderstood driver of Latin American politics
A surprising take on Argentina’s reforms under Milei, and what a smarter long-term strategy might have looked like
Cross-Sector Connection
Something that stuck with me was JP’s point about inequality in Brazil. His research is a reminder that the source of inequality matters more than its size. A country where a star quarterback earns more than an economist looks very different from a country where federal judges earn 200 times what the poorest citizens earn simply because they wrote the rules that protect their own pay.
That distinction is exactly the kind of insight that gets lost when academic research stays in journals and never makes it into the broader conversation about policy. JP’s work, and the index he helped build, is a model for what it looks like when rigorous research is built specifically to inform that conversation rather than sit outside of it.
Beyond this point, there is a key takeaway for all three of our sectors:
Researchers and academics should use JP’s index as a tool to test what populism does, not just what it says, separating populist rhetoric from populist policy.
Policymakers, particularly in the U.S., need to understand how crime shapes elections in Latin America. When institutions fail to deliver basic security or fair treatment, populist leaders gain a permission structure to bypass democratic constraints, and the economic damage that follows can be severe and long-lasting.
Business leaders and entrepreneurs experience the consequences of weak institutions directly. JP's early experience working on local business permitting reform in Brazil was a small-scale version of the same problem his research identifies at the national level: rules that exist for no clear reason, enforced by people who have never questioned them, create exactly the kind of rent-seeking and uncertainty that scares off investment and strangles growth.
Related Reading
Learn more about the methodology behind the Latin America Left-Leaning Populism Index on JP and Nicolás Cachanosky's Substack, Public Choice in Latin America.
Inequality obviously exists, but what kind of inequality are we actually dealing with? As JP and I discuss with Brazil's federal judges, there is such a thing as "good" and "bad" inequality. I explore this further on my economics Substack, Debunking Degrowth.
I've also highlighted JP's work before in my piece on the consequences of socialism, using his research to illustrate what Cuba's growth trajectory might have looked like without the post-Revolution socialist policies.
Next Time…
Check back in for my conversation with Alex Cartwright co-founder of HotelShift. We will discuss his work in academia and real-estate, the rise of NIMBYism, and housing development.
In the meantime, please subscribe and share the episode with a colleague who will find the topic interesting.
