Yearly Archives: 2014
Vignettes on Inequality
FORBES – Luis Rubio Thomas Piketty’s book on inequality has created an enormous commotion because it touches a sensitive nerve worldwide. The financial excesses, the extraordinary valuations of the technological companies and of the Internet and the appreciation of the value of intellectual over manual work have created a new social reality that is the natural […]
Government and Democracy
Luis Rubio In one of our first arithmetic lessons, we all learn that the order of the factors does not alter the product. That which is so clear in keeping accounts is not always valid in politics: there it does indeed matter who does what and when. The democratic euphoria of the last decades and […]
Reflections
Luis Rubio What do soccer, the telecom reform and the Supreme Court have in common? At first glance, it would appear to be unconnected issues. However, the thread that weaves these and other themes together is the enormous disorder that characterizes our society, disorder that has many manifestations but one consequence above all: the disowning […]
We Don’t Learn
Luis Rubio Insanity, said Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Thirty years ago, within the context of a severe recession, Mexico opted to undertake the course toward economic liberalization as a means for recovering the growth that, since the end of the sixties, had been in short […]
Growth
Luis Rubio Mexico is suffering the consequences of all of the crises that it underwent from the seventies to the nineties. That is the conclusion that the participants in a discussion panel arrived at on the causes of Mexico’s poor economic performance*. The driver behind this notion is that Mexicans do not believe the government […]
Will the Energy Reform Work?
FORBES -Luis Rubio Mexico is encountering extraordinarily complex and simultaneous dilemmas at present. On the one hand, an economy that for decades has been yielding a performance that in the best case scenario is mediocre and on the other hand, a stale government system, inadequate for the current realities and circumstances and, in any case, […]
Déjà vu
Luis Rubio Déjà vu, the illusion that results in remembering a previous world. That appears to be the logic of the economic policy: recreate a world that no longer exists and that is no longer possible. But the attempt entails enormous costs and risks, beginning with the illusion that it is possible to separate and […]
Ominous Signs
Luis Rubio What does the most recent electoral reform tell us about the future of the country? It was doubtlessly a great success for the legislators of the three big political parties to have achieved resolving differences that had seemed impossible to work out. However, the fact of approving legislation does not imply it’s constituting […]
The Problem of Power
Luis Rubio Mexico’s main economic problem, says the PAN President, is its political system because it has impeded it from making the decisions and undertaking the reforms that the country requires. No one who has observed the way Mexico functions would object this appreciation that, not by chance, coincides with the disposition of the three […]
Order is for others
Luis Rubio Groucho Marx, the great satirical actor, argued that “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it and incorrectly applying the wrong remedies.” Governments are particularly good at identifying technical problems but they tend to be profoundly ignorant about what motivates people to act the way they do. They assume […]