Todd, you raise an interesting observation. Brazil did not get into oil as an income source because the technology to do deep-sea drilling only became availalbe recently. In effect, the pace of technology saved it from taking the "wrong" fork in the road, and as they say "necessity is the mother of invention." When they could not tap oil, they needed an alternative energy. Enter ethanol!
Sometimes people who think they are winning - oil producers for example - in fact are losing as time passes. Today oil dependence is a losing situation. Brazil was a loser when it could not drill its own oil, but, in fact, this forced it to take a different path which has made it, in effect, a winner today because it is not dependent in any way on oil to run its economy. Ethanol from sugar cane works prefectly.
The answer to who is winning and who is losing depends on when we ask the question.
This is why it is dangerous to extrapolate the present into the future.
This insight into a standard flaw in our perception of winning and losing trends comes from classic Chinese Taoist thought.
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