MSB / MIB Theory

Origin of MSB and MIB

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been the dominant indicator for measuring a country's economic health for over 80 years. However, it is a blind metric: it doesn't distinguish between growth that benefits everyone and growth that only favors an elite. It doesn't capture distribution, doesn't measure subjective well-being, and is completely invisible to the informal economy — which in Mexico represents over 50% of economic activity.

Juan Robles proposes two complementary indicators that directly address these limitations:

• M
  MSB — Gross Substantive Mobility: Measures the gross economic mobility of a territory. An aggregate indicator that weights transactions by their contribution to real well-being, distinguishing virtuous from toxic growth at scale.
• I
  MIB — Gross Internal Mobility: Measures whether a specific person has more agency capacity. Weights individual transactions with biometric well-being data (cortisol, dopamine, serotonin) to capture real well-being, not just economic activity.

The 1:1:1 architecture

The proposal is elegantly simple. It consists of three elements that work as a system:

How does it work in real life?

Imagine María, an informal worker in Mexico City. Today she sells food on the street, receives cash payments, has no bank account, and doesn't appear in any official statistics.

With the 1:1:1 architecture: María receives a universal monthly dividend in a digital wallet. That payment not only improves her income, but connects her to the formal financial system. Her MIB rises because she has more economic agency. If a thousand Marías experience the same, the MSB moves.

The key point: the indicators are not an academic exercise. They are the metric that allows knowing whether the policy is working or not, and adjusting it in real time.