Mexico 2050 (1)

For several months I have been working with my team on a series of proposals to build the Mexico I love living in. Brilliant minds have joined me in developing proposals across different fields. The work we have undertaken as a team spans action plans for every cabinet ministry, prospective visions across key areas, and a set of pillars to anchor all national public policy. Searching for projects, exploring options, and debating perspectives to forge policy consensus brought me back to the work we did developing Mexico City's vision as a City of Knowledge.

I will share three of the visions developed by those of us working on this project. All of them are framed across a generational time horizon: the goals will be achieved over six presidential terms (sexenios), targeting Mexico 2050. The first priority is reimagining health as a universal aspiration, ensuring that Mexicans have access to healthcare services without conditions. The second element calls for rethinking the national electricity system as a platform for innovation, new frontier projects, and guaranteed sufficiency over the next 30 years. The third element I will share today focuses on young people, offering them a generational and aspirational shift toward decisions aligned with stronger interpersonal relationships and the cultivation of ambitions and dreams. I will start with this last vision.

Mexico's youth are caught in a maelstrom of information overload, the erosion of their social communities, an education system that fails to raise incomes, and a fading sense of what it means to be Mexican that goes beyond mere social prejudice. We created this problem ourselves. In 2024, 8 million new voters will enter the electorate, and this segment is almost entirely ignored by politics. These Mexicans deserve a real path out of the reality of violence and social breakdown that Felipe Calderón (FCH) set in motion, regardless of whether his decisions were justified at the time. What are those paths? The opportunity to reclaim education and sport as routes to higher income, richer life experience, and stronger communities: experiential education. One proposal: the top 10% of students who graduate from high school with grades above 9.5, participate in national sports programs, and perform some form of community service could study one to two years of their university degree abroad. The aim is to make the connection explicit: education, sport, and community engagement unlock access to unique and desirable experiences. The cost is USD 800 million, equivalent to charging USD 20 per tourist visa currently issued for Mexico each year. It is feasible, desirable, it improves tourism, generates more jobs, and develops our future: the young.

The national health system is already sufficient and functional to provide all health services free of charge. A reference point for my fellow economists. The work to reduce the number of medicines procured by the Mexican government is currently only half-done. We started with 14,000 items on the formulary and brought it down to under 5,000, a genuine achievement by Raquel Buenrostro and Thalia Lagunes. But this effort falls short when benchmarked against the British social coverage system, which treats its entire population with fewer than 1,000 medicines. Making this shift in Mexico would save hundreds of billions of pesos in national healthcare spending. It would, however, provoke a direct confrontation with the interest groups that profit from keeping healthcare inefficient and wasteful. Working with the healthcare unions is central to this change. We need fair compensation for health workers, expanded care positions, larger medical staffing, and a professional civil service track for physicians. Through efficient, transparent procurement of medicines and equipment, we can free up enough resources to make healthcare in Mexico genuinely free. The economic spillover would be of a scale unseen in this country since José Vasconcelos built the public education system.

Finally, how the country moves depends on a hypothesis centered on energy and transport. Energy is a means of enabling action. Mexico needs a new electric transport system and a fundamental reoptimization of its power generation capacity. Regional imbalances in the national grid make the current generation system dysfunctional and vulnerable to distributed demand peaks across the regions. Proposing the electrification of transport runs counter to Europe's bet on hydrogen. While electrification aligns with the U.S. approach, the hydrogen path could leverage Pemex's existing infrastructure. These two options are not mutually exclusive, and Mexico should position itself to capture subsidies from both the United States and the European Union.

Rethinking how the electricity system works requires a proposal that will be controversial for audiences conditioned to equate nuclear with destruction. Mexico earned a Nobel Peace Prize for making Latin America a nuclear-weapons-free zone, but the overcorrection has led us to foreclose genuinely safe, next-generation nuclear technologies. Not all nuclear options are large reactors with turbines. There are multiple modular, low-cost systems capable of transforming electricity availability and cost across the country. Sweden, France, and Germany already do this. All three now regret following the playbook of hydrocarbon-funded activists who drove them to bury their nuclear programs. Mexico should restart its own program and deploy the trillion-dollar technologies the United States has developed but cannot fully utilize due to oil lobby interference. Through this reframing, a modular, low-cost, safe, efficient, and geographically distributed model can power the country, leapfrogging the gas era that is falsely marketed as clean.

Mexico deserves a new national dream. A return to the Mexico of great projects, to the world power we actually are. That means completing the infrastructure works of the current administration while discontinuing those that run against the national interest. Every political project must weigh its options for the future. The Maya Train is one that does. Mexicans must work so that every generation aspires to a community and a nation they are proud to live in. As long as we have a clear vision of the future, not for a single six-year term but for a full generation, we can live with hope and purpose.

I will be sharing other proposals developed as a team. I have been encouraged to publish all three texts we prepared. I am not yet sure I will, but I deeply enjoyed this project. Without the team I have the privilege of leading, none of it would have been possible. Thank you all.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three pillars of the Mexico 2050 vision?

Youth and experiential education (study abroad tied to academic achievement, sport, and community service), universal healthcare through efficient pharmaceutical procurement, and a reimagined national electricity system centered on modular nuclear energy.

How much would the youth abroad study program cost, and how would it be funded?

Approximately USD 800 million, equivalent to charging USD 20 per tourist visa currently issued for Mexico each year. The author argues the program is self-sustaining through improved tourism revenues and employment generation.

Why does the author advocate for nuclear energy in Mexico?

Modern small modular reactors offer a low-cost, safe, and distributed alternative to fossil fuels. The author cites Sweden, France, and Germany's regret over abandoning nuclear programs and argues Mexico should deploy advanced U.S.-developed nuclear technologies to leapfrog the gas era.