Economic disinterest

People in general aren't interested in everything related to public policies or the results of the country's economic indicators. In general, for the vast majority of people, the overall state of the economy isn't interesting.

It only becomes of interest when, due to some extraordinary circumstance, it directly impacts their "lifestyle," either through inflation and the impoverishment caused by rising prices or through the greater or lesser creation of jobs in the formal economy.

Perhaps for another significant portion of the population, the value of the dollar is also a piece of economic information of interest. They simply aren't interested in anything else.

This lack of attention is largely due to the success of the Mexican economy over the last 30 years: having achieved the stabilization of economic variables, such as the exchange rate and inflation.

For almost three decades, Mexicans have been uninterested or unconcerned about the behavior of national economic variables. They're simply there, they're worth more or less the same, and that's it. There's nothing else worth knowing or spending time trying to understand.

For example, in countries where inflation is rampant, practically everyone is constantly concerned about the price of goods, as well as the exchange rate of the dollar. In Mexico, this isn't the case.

Recently, an Argentine YouTuber visiting our country was surprised to learn that we Mexicans didn't have a clear idea of ​​the dollar's value in Mexico. When he asked on the street, people would respond with something like, "Well, it's around 20 pesos, right?"

A cent or two, give or take a cent. What does it matter? The dollar touched the 20-peso range back in 2016. That is, despite all the economic events—changes in government, elections, presidents like Trump, Biden, and Trump again—the exchange rate has remained more or less the same.

Then people stop caring.

And if we add to this the fact that when the press reports on economic issues, it does so with a dramatic quality that the economy no longer possesses for the people: a few days ago it was reported that agents expected INEGI (National Institute of Statistics and Geography) to confirm that Mexico had fallen into recession since October of last year.

Performing my own calculations with the available data, I myself affirmed that the Mexican economy would indeed have contracted in the first quarter of 2025 and, therefore, would fall within the definition of a technical recession by accumulating two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.

INEGI released the data, and it turns out the economy didn't decline, but grew by 0.2 percent. The ghost of a recession vanished, and that's it. On to something else, butterfly.

Overall, while we can say the economy hasn't entered a recession, we can also see that, since last year's elections, the country has virtually stagnated. It's not falling, but it's not growing either. It's simply staying where it is.

But these details don't matter to the people. Not even the fact that the recession had been confirmed, since for the majority of the population, nothing would have changed. It won't be until the country experiences another economic crisis of the past, like that of the 1990s, that society will awaken from its slumber and begin to understand its country's economic performance and the consequences of the public policies of a government that today is only seen as dedicated to distributing aid, scholarships, and pensions every two months.