Yearly Archives: 2014
The World After Crimea
Forbes – May 2014 Ari Shavit, a shrewd Israeli journalist, notes that “the West Wing of Barack Obama’s White House is different than any other West Wing before it. It’s full of young people and women, blacks, Hispanics and gays. There’s hardly a white middle-aged man to be seen, almost no people who personify the […]
Democratic myths
Luis Rubio There are occasions on which the youth of our political system makes itself more than evident, and I refer not to the age of Mexico’s incipient democracy but to its adolescence, if not its childishness, with respect to the criteria and behaviors that feed it. Mayoriteo (the passing of a bill by the […]
Guilt Pangs and Promises
Luis Rubio There’s something Platonic in the current domestic debate: the constitutional reforms are like Plato’s shadows, the secondary ones are the reality. The first described the dreams; the second encountered the world of interests of the most diverse sort. The big question is why the process got stuck. The easy part is identifying “the […]
Disorder and Authority
Luis Rubio Kenneth Waltz, the recently deceased and most prestigious scholar of the realist school of international relations, wrote that “the opposite of anarchy is not stability but hierarchy”. Anarchy is reached when hegemony does not exist or when there are no structures of order and control (or when these are lost) in a society. […]
Guest Blog: The Pacific Alliance: Where’s the Beef?
By Maria F. Mata & Luis Rubio // Thursday, May 1, 2014 The Pacific Alliance was born more out of political necessity than economic need. However, once it began to take shape, the potential economic benefits that all its member nations could accrue became obvious. Hence, an interesting new development began to take shape. The Pacific Alliance is a […]
Reforms in the Era of Globalization
Luis Rubio The contrast between the discourse of the politicians and the reality in the streets wields a great impact. As if it were about two contradictory worlds, which mutually ignore each other. There’s a lot of that in Mexico and in the provincialism of its politics, but I’m not referring to Mexico or not […]
Bringing up the Rear but with High Hopes
FORBES – Luis Rubio Companies employ diverse macroeconomic or sectorial indicators for decision making about investments, production lines, and business opportunities. Over the last years, the “World Justice Program*” (WJP) has been devoted to formulating indicators for another type of measurement: the degree of the Rule of Law that characterizes a country. Their purpose is […]
Academia and Politics
Luis Rubio For Machiavelli, successful political operators are those who give the appearance of naiveté and cultivate a reputation of benevolence, independently of what they are conniving sub rosa. In contrast, those who assume themselves to be Machiavellian and attempt to develop a reputation as such –crafty rumormongers and other pretentious politicians- are not. This […]
Cost-Benefit
Luis Rubio Mexico has two economies that almost don’t communicate with each other (at least in terms of what they produce), a circumstance that does not predict a happy ending. The dual economy does nothing but wreak havoc and, the longer their integration is postponed, the worse the impact will be on employment and the […]