Cultural Prediction: The Research Science Culture - Claudia Sheinbaum
The Cultural Prediction - Sheinbaum: Episode 5
Claudia Sheinbaum is remaking Mexico. She’s doing it by shifting the economy from extractive to inclusive. That’s what science says is best for a nation, and science is her cultural perspective.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics, define inclusive institutions as those that spread power and opportunity among many people, and extractive institutions as those that concentrate power and wealth in a few hands. By that test, Mexico is moving in both directions at once, inclusive economics but extractive government. Thus far, it has improved people’s lives while centralizing government.
Sheinbaum earned a doctorate in energy engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and did her doctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. She wrote sections of two United Nations climate science reports, in 2007 and 2013, as part of the panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. She ran Mexico City’s environment department from 2000 to 2006, governed Mexico City from 2018 to 2023, and became president on October 1, 2024, the first woman to hold the office.
From this cultural perspective, the basic unit is the experiment. An idea (a government policy, in this case) is grounded in observation and data and tested against real measurements. If the data support the expected outcome, the policy was right and should continue moving forward. Winning is when the policy produces the result the model predicted. Policies become experiments that have worked in other nations, aimed at achieving specific targets: reducing homicides and poverty, or increasing the minimum wage, or expanding access to healthcare. The price is that independent institutions, which a leader cannot direct, become variables she cannot hold constant, so she removes them from the experiment.
Research science is the operating system, but it is not the whole picture. Three other cultures have shaped Sheinbaum and the way she governs.
