If the entire legislature is consummated, as Pedro Sánchez intends, in 2026 young people born when the Great Recession began, in 2008, will vote for the first time. Citizens who have always lived under the concept of "crisis."
How will they vote? Will they determine a background current, capable of modifying general trends?
Sociologists talk about changes in the direction of greater individualism;
According to this thesis, these young people are more individualistic than the previous ones and make decisions taking into account a zero-sum game: for me to win something, someone has to lose it.
And if it's not that way?
These people are a historical exception, because in their short lives they have seen two major crises of the system develop;
They were born with the financial sector starting in the late 2000s, and have grown with the covid pandemic and its consequences, and during the Great Lockdown, when the world stopped completely for three months, which did not It has precedents.
Many of them could shout with the Sex Pistols
No future!
, since they have barely known the idea of progress.
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In each of these crises, opposite palliative measures have been applied.
There is little doubt that the Great Recession resulted in a negative redistribution of income and wealth.
“Quantitative expansion” has been valued as a scam, as a deception, with enormous suffering for the majority of the population.
It was when austerity was considered a dangerous idea that was applied with few limits.
In some aspects, countries have not yet managed to emerge from that situation and an economic policy in which the image of the “men in black” was decisive.
A dozen years later, when Covid arrived, the policy was, in general, very different: emergency purchase blocks for the pandemic, expanding liquidity, temporary employment regulation files, subsidized lines of credit, management of interest rates. negative interest rates, concern about deflation, multimillion-dollar investment programs in both the United States and the European Union, tax reductions on the most sensitive products, etc.
The discussion has been whether social shields have reached everyone who needed them, not about the social shields themselves.
Economists Face the Crisis (EFC) is an organization promoted in 2011 by a group of professionals concerned about the diagnosis and the principles on which the crisis that originated in 2008 was managed. From the beginning it confronted the
mainstream
of the economists of that time, those who had endorsed the responses to the Great Recession.
Now, EFC publishes a reflection on the two crises and their different treatments, and demands a series of structural reforms for a decade of progress (
Economy, politics and citizenship
, Catarata publishing house).
The book has value not only because of the quality of each of the chapters that make it up, but because as a whole it is another way of understanding the political economy of the time that, on many occasions, is obscured and ignored by the speakers of power.
In many faculties of Economic Sciences, the same old things continue to be taught as if the world had not experienced two major crises such as the Great Recession and the Great Lockdown.
One of the questions that runs through the text of EFC is whether neoliberalism is dead, if it is only in a state of hibernation, or if it has failed from an economic point of view but remains culturally hegemonic.
According to one of the authors, neoliberalism has become an unprovable doctrine and, as Popper would say, “non-falsifiable”, that is, its principles cannot be verified with reality.
Neoliberalism (a term in which no one recognizes themselves; no one says “I am neoliberal”) has ceased to be a current of thought and has become the worst version of an ideology.
It is about finding out if that generation of young people raised under the permanent concept of “crisis” resurrects it or hibernates it.
It will depend on whether or not it works in relation to your interests.
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