I often think about my role in changing the way Mexico is going.

As most idealistic, highly ambitious, young people, I try to imagine myself leading my developing country into a new, abundant future and the simple enough way of doing this always seems to be, of course, politics.

However, aspiring to be president turns out to be a fascinating activity but ultimately an awful idea.

We start by the simplest test: asking ourselves the way to get to a position of power.

In Mexico, there are two ways of doing that: either you make a career on a political party and eventually get elected as candidate or you run on your own.

  • Political career building is the easiest to deem inefficient: it is not only a huge time investment (and probably not a worth one unless you’re trying it full time, full focus) but also, as you get up in the ranks, you get involved with the social mechanics, favor-debt and overall annoying party alignment. Even winning, you’re not able to get rid of all this dead weight.
  • Running as an independent candidate is also not particularly better and significantly harder. Because even winning (with all the hardship that endues), you still don’t control the social organisms! No senate no party, unfortunately. (yeah, ideas that resonate with the masses might make the democratic machine churn out political allies, but that again is unknown) Which means, they give you a really cool title to get your ideas rejected.

Politics, at its core, involves understanding the game, working with diverse stakeholders, and striving for beneficial outcomes, a balancing act that even developed nations grapple with. However, I’m thinking specifically about Mexico, which offers a buffet of poisoning political dishes. Favor-owning means corruption, party alignment means unstable vision and nepotism, well that’s self explanatory. Every single country has a level of these on their back kitchen, but with Mexico you can see them from the street. It’s not about the moral stability of one’s actions but rather the existence of wrong incentives for reaching and maintaining power.

Now, even after winning, you have to think what you get to manage: Mexicans’ money. Government money is finite and extremely hard to organize. Most presidents don’t cut programs out of pure evil, they mostly do it to fund other projects. Yeah, you can always get in debt! But that also comes with the risk of turning into Japan (paying ~20% of your GPD on external debt) or, most likely, worse. A good and efficient usage of funds is a salivating idea but ultimately not enough to change the direction of the country if the problems are not addressed.

And then again, even using the money for useful things, you still hit the time barrier of 6 years, after which you are done and have to leave everything on the fate of whoever comes next.

Given these constraints, some might consider more drastic measures. An incorrect answer bubbles up to the surface: dictatorship! But that, even with the absolute best intentions, goes against basically everything modern universal morality has built (plus you get killed by a superpower). The blocks laid out by democracy - stable transfer and division of power, voicing the people - have proven time and time again to be the right ones for an stable society.

In conclusion, even without going to specific details on campaign running, the headache of dealing with local leaders and assuming you win absolutely everything and not lose your time, well, losing, being president is an incredibly poorly inefficient effort/time way of making a significant impact.

It seems like the examples of people waging politics as a trascendental force (measured in terms of impact, for better of worse; Hitler, Diaz, Mandela, Ataturk, Putin, etc) are as much a consequence of their times than an effective example of political power. If one is trying to be effecient on spreading ‘goodness’, the private sector is the most efficient way to go around it. Forget ruling the world, build it!