The history of inequality in Mexico

Diego Castañeda Garza, a young Mexican economic historian, has written a short book on the history of inequality in Mexico. The book is titled “Desiguales” and has recently begun to circulate. I had the opportunity to be the commentator of one of the first presentations of this book and in this column I summarize some of what I said there.

First I will refer to the book and the context in which it appears. This book is part of a series of recent publications that may seem similar, but actually complement each other naturally. Let us remember that recently the books “Desigualdades” by Raymundo Campos Vázquez, “No es Normal” by Viridiana Ríos and “Por una campo even” by Roberto Vélez and Luis Monroy Gómez Franco were published.

On the one hand, the books by Raymundo Campos and Viridiana Ríos address different dimensions of current inequality in Mexico. Raymundo’s book does so from a more academic perspective, supported by his multiple research on the subject, and touches on topics such as regional and gender inequality, in addition to addressing other aspects related to racism and discrimination. For its part, Viridiana’s book uses an approach more focused on dissemination and statistical evidence, pointing out and emphasizing the aberrations that are observed in terms of inequality in Mexico. His book has been a resounding publishing success and has allowed many people to learn and now be aware of the magnitude and different dimensions of inequality in Mexico. Finally, Vélez and Monroy’s book addresses the issue of inequality of opportunities, which is what is at the basis of the inequality of results that we observe in Mexico. This book emphasizes the weight and contribution of a series of circumstances that are beyond people’s control and that significantly affect their results and the lack of social mobility that characterizes the country. Within these circumstances are the region where one is born, the level of education of the parents or the color of the skin, to name just a few.

In that sense, Diego Castañeda’s book complements all these other works very well. His arguments and analysis are historical in nature. Diego tries to explain to us in 200 pages the evolution of 200 years of inequality in Mexico. Throughout its seven chapters, the author tries to summarize the existing empirical evidence on this topic. The task is not easy, because some more recent instruments and measurements must be adapted to contexts in which the information is not necessarily available for their use. But the author is very skillful and, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative elements, he is able to tell us an interesting, although at times bleak, story of the evolution of inequality in the country.

The author tells us, for example, the effect of the wars of the 19th century on inequality. The result was tremendous: all social strata lost and the destruction of wealth was enormous, which produced an increase in inequality. Later, the author takes us through what he calls “the first buddy capitalism in Mexico”, the period of the Porfiriato. A period of economic growth and significant increases in inequality, which in turn was the seed for the overthrow of the regime and, therefore, of the Mexican Revolution. During the post-revolutionary period, by the way, inequality decreased slightly thanks to some of the social reforms that were carried out at the beginning of the new regime; this reduction, however, was not lasting, as the author himself explains in detail. The author continues with his analysis to the present, where I believe that the analysis is somewhat hasty and with some obvious biases derived from the polarization that occurs around the current government.

Diego Castañeda is an excellent economic historian and a great storyteller. This, by the way, we already knew from his previous book, “Pandenomics”, a brief history of pandemics and their economic effects. Diego has the instrumental arsenal of an economist and the patience of historians to go to archives and rescue information that, at first glance, might not seem relevant, but that, once in his hands, becomes a fundamental analytical piece. to understand a part of the economic history of Mexico. Thus, Diego is able, among other things, to reconstruct an image of the concentration of wealth in a region of Mexico based on testamentary information.

This is, overall, a very good economic history book. The book has, perhaps unintentionally, a very obvious common thread: the fragility of Mexican public finances, which, for this reason, have historically been incapable of mitigating or significantly reducing inequality in the country.

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