Cardenas' commitment to the social welfare of the less well off has not been shared by most of his successors, who have responded to other concerns and groups.
Roderic Camp, 2003126
Since at least the time of Humboldt, it was evident that there was widespread poverty in Mexico. However, it was only at the middle of the twentieth century that sufficient data became available to measure the distribution of income statistically. This data indicates that while income remained highly concentrated, middle-income earners were gradually increasing their share of income at the expense of both of the poorest and wealthiest sectors of society.
The obvious reason for the maldistribution of income is the maldistribution of wealth. In each sector of the economy, ownership was not only highly concentrated but also becoming more concentrated as years passed. The 1965 industrial census indicated that the largest 1.5 percent of industrial firms accounted for 77.2 percent of capital and 75 percent of industrial production.
In 1960, the largest 0.6 percent of commercial establishments controlled 47 percent of capital and generated 50 percent of income from sales. In 1960, the top 0.65 percent of producers held 30 percent of the cultivated land, while the bottom 50 percent only cultivated 12 percent.127
Inflation, which soared due to the Second World War shortages, continued to ravage wages through the mid-1950s as the government relied on deficit spending to stimulate the economy. By 1952, the value of industrial wages in Mexico City had declined to 60 percent of their 1940 level. After the mid-1950s, as inflation declined, the buying power of industrial wages began to rise again, reaching 108 percent of their 1940 level by 1970. During the Diaz Ordaz administration, the purchasing power of wages increased by 6 percent a year, an increase that kept the working class loyal to the regime.128
Increases in productivity per worker were largely captured by business owners, further concentrating income. Between 1940 and 1970, the productivity of industrial workers increased by 200 percent, while the buying power of their wages increased by only 8 percent. 129
As a result of population growth, the supply of labor in both rural and urban areas exceeded demand, which was an additional factor concentrating income. By the 1960s, 400,000 new workers a year were coming into the labor force—an influx that depressed wages, as most employees signed on not with union contracts but as individuals, leaving them at the mercy of their employers. As capital was replacing labor throughout the economy, employers prospered, some workers earned a steady wage, and millions of others joined the marginal population.130
Regardless of whether the income of the poorest was rising or falling, it was clear that many millions of Mexicans, often referred to as the marginal population, were mired in poverty. Political scientist Lorenzo Meyer observed:
Marginality, that is, the low productivity which results from underemployment, was a phenomenon found both in rural areas and in the city. The enormous slums surrounding the major cities indicate that population growth long ago surpassed the capacity of the urban economy to absorb the available labor, a product of births in the cities and of migration from rural areas to the city.131
It was clear that given low educational levels, malnutrition, and the resulting low productivity of marginalized workers, there was no quick fix for these millions of Mexicans. In 1970, sociologist Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, evoking the Cardenas administration, suggested, “There must be legislative, political, and economic reforms in order to ensure the integration of the marginal strata into full economic and political citizenship.”132