The Missing Bric

That's not a Shel Silverstein title, but rather Gideon Rachman's label for Mexico. His column for the Financial Times seeks to explain why Brazil, India, China, and Russia are part of an elite club from which Mexico was excluded. The basic thrust of his conclusion seems to be security, which is the subject of the first six paragraphs of the article. One of those graphs was a meek acknowledgement that Mexico is not as dangerous a place as it is made out to be, but the effect of that section was limited by the fact that the other five basically furthered the very image the author admitted was untrue. Irritatingly, Chapo Guzmán's Forbes ranking was the piece's opener, a reminder that the magazine's decision to rank him among the world's richest was not just stupid in an academic vacuum, but harmful in a practical sense.

Anyway, since Mexico is on average much safer than both Brazil and Russia, one can only conclude that insofar as Mexico's security problems inhibit economic growth, it is mostly a problem of image. And among the largest impediments to improving that image is influential columnists viewing Mexico almost exclusively through the prism of its struggles with organized crime, and in the process inflating the significance of that challenge.

Rachman tackles other elements of Mexico's problems later in the column, such as over-reliance on the US, monopolies, and Calderón's relative lack of prestige compared to Lula (although the same charge could be labeled at virtually every world leader not named Obama). He could have also mentioned that the somewhat arbitrary concept of Bric nations is much tidier than the reality, and being left out isn't like being demoted from the Premier League. (After all, Russia, hardly a paragon of economic dynamism, is a Bric nation.) Such explanations may be more boring, but they are also more important.