Mr. Carlos Slim keynote address in Business Summit Mexico, 2010 (October 24-26, Toluca, State of Mexico). This 8th edition was titled “Take-off Time: Actions for Change”.
Toluca, State of Mexico, October 24, 2010.
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In respect to education, what is the condition for educating more young people? What we need to make to get involved in educating more young people? In investing in education we will create many jobs. The same can be said about investing in health care.
We have a very good tourism offer. We should make sure having many more American visitors. Tourism is not only an important employment source for many Mexico’s regions, it is also an employment alternative for rural activities. Many rural areas have tourism potential.
I think we have missed big employment opportunities by neglecting health-care service offering for American retirees.
Another important area is the domestic market. I have lasted many years in calling attention to it and I hope we will avoid making the same mistake again. We have oriented our economy to exports, foreign trade and signing free-trade agreements with many countries, but neglected the domestic economy which could create many jobs and generate economic activity for many domestic sectors.
I use to say: “You could have economic growth without jobs and employment without economic growth”. By instance, rising oil prices spur economic growth, not employment.
On the other hand, there are activities whose contribution to growth could be small, yet they could create jobs, like small and medium-size firms, building, infrastructure and infrastructure maintenance, as I have said.
Question: Felipe González holds that creating one hundred new businessmen is easiest than creating 10,000 job posts. First question: how we could encourage more people to become businessman and how to help their firms to survive in the short and medium term? Second question: you just have surpassed a capitalism paradigm. First we encouraged individualism just to embrace consumerism; now we have realized this and go back to encourage consumerism.
The big problem is as follows: should we send younger people to work? None of us would entrust our firms to inexperienced 24-25 years old people. In fact, what we precisely require is experience. As to my knowledge, we should send people to work at 16-17 years old in order they get experienced and, once graduated, they could contribute to our firms.
Carlos Slim Helú: I would distinguish consumerism from wellbeing. I mean, we could have a wellbeing state generating consume and demand, not consumerism as a derogatory meaning.
In respect to employment we should recall that agrarian society families had many children, and such is the picture for current rural regions where children begin to perform domestic tasks at 5-6 years old age. Many of them begin to assist their parents in the field or in household activities at 8-10 years old age.
In the agrarian society people begin to work at 5-8 years old age and, in the past, they used to die at 40-45 years old age. In the industrial society of the 19 and 20th centuries, young people entered to fabrics at 14-16 years old age as apprentices and they didn’t go to school.
Nowadays we are in the knowledge society, so young people should be better educated and trained. Scholarly education is at the base of human capital formation, both technical and humanistic, of course.
Service society requires better-educated people. In the past people were trained to perform fixed and routine tasks, as in Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times film. Today young people manage computers and they must know the production process to control it. I am not meaning to say that all of the 30 million Mexican young people should course a university career. Unfortunately, that is not possible.
But we should make possible that most of them have an opportunity to get educated to get better jobs and create a more industrialized country.
Let’s see China. What is China doing now? It is getting about 25-30 million people out of poverty each year. They come from rural subsistence areas to spend 12 working hours in industry for a meager income. But many talented young people are enrolled in western universities at the same time. So, the key is that everybody has a chance to study, although just the talented and disciplined ones will succeed. The rest will enter to the labor market.
Question: How would you like to be remembered?
Carlos Slim Helú: I will not be here by then, so I don’t know. What I can tell you for sure is that up to the present day, since seven or eight years ago, my own challenge has been contributing to mitigate our own country’s underdevelopment and improving our social conditions through our foundations, firms and investments. We make efforts for education. Our maternal and children Nutrition Program, which we jointly designed with Hospital Infantil, was adopted by President Zedillo’s Progresa Program and it remains in Opportunities Program.
I really believe that we must do what I have to do. All of us enjoying privileges have responsibilities also. The more privileged, the bigger our own responsibilities and commitment. I have assumed this commitment with Mexico and Latin America not to be remembered. I have assumed it because it counts for my own responsibility and commitment.
Question: I fully share your educational stand because education is the only way to overcome underdevelopment. However, Mexico’s digital gap in respect to the rest of OCDE countries is enormous. I would like to know your own view about how we are going to narrow that gap, diminish costs and enlarging people’s access to information technologies.
Carlos Slim Helú: Technology is a bridge rather than a gap, yet a bridge to be built and get crossed. As I have said, mobile-phone penetration in Latin America equates that of the United States, but U. S. per capita telecom consume is about 800 minutes per year, while ours is 100 minutes, eight times lesser, so U. S. mobile-phone firms income is bigger than ours. Latin America mobile-phone penetration is bigger than Canada’s, that is, we have more mobile-phones per person than Canadians.
In broad-band services we have to attain two goals: universal access (everybody’s access) and access to all of the applications and content. To achieve these goals ─I’m talking in Telmex name─ we have to reach out convergence. Mexico is the only OCDE country that it has not attained it yet. All of the firms and monopolies of the rest of OCDE countries have full convergence.
One important thing is that we already have ten million broad-band connections after a 94% growing path during a seven-year period. Our penetration was negligible in 2002. Nowadays we have ten million connections in a 27-28 million homes universe, almost 35% fixed connections, and still growing rapidly.
Mobile broad-band connections are going to grow fast too, yet its pace is not exclusively dependent upon firms; it is related to equipment costs, mainly smart phones. Once iPhone and Blackberry prices go down to 100-150 dollars each thanks to our own subsidy policy, mobile broad-band penetration will grow bigger.
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