José Luis Sampedro, illustrious in the field, said that there are two types of economists: “Those who work so that the rich are richer and those who work so that the poor are less poor.” José Ignacio Conde-Ruiz, who together with his daughter Carlotta Conde Gasca has written The Docked Youth, is located in a third way that “works to make young people richer.” And, with them, the rest. That’s what this book is about, with the permission of the politicians.
In fact, the subtitle of the work gives us a good initial clue to understand that its proposal is not a confrontation between generations, but rather a point out of the flagrant imbalance that occurs in the attention that politics dedicates to young and old: “How a “Aging electorate limits the future of young people.”
But the bad guys in the movie are not the old ones, mind you. And it should also be noted that the use of this term and not “older” is raised insistently and at the express desire of the millennial of the writing tandem. She and her father do not put a negative connotation to the word “old people,” but simply want to make it clear who their competitors are for politicians’ attention: young people.
A necessary book, thus, for the political-social reflection it proposes, and also revealing for the solidity of the data provided by José Ignacio Conde-Ruiz, professor of Economics, passed through the translator of his daughter, a first-year student of Physical Sciences. .
And much is studied about the aging of society and its effects on the economy, but little attention is paid to the political repercussions of this demographic reality. For example: the prevailing pragmatism in politics leads its protagonists, to win elections, to focus on those who are the most. In the old ones. They are the portion of the electorate that votes the most. There are more of them (eleven million and with the prospect of being eighteen in the coming years) and they have a very homogeneous agenda. Therefore, it is very easy for politicians to say that pensions will not be touched, that taxes will not be raised (and even less estate taxes!), and from there, they start talking.
Read in terms of economy of resources and efforts, for politicians, young people are increasingly irrelevant. Something new, by the way, since not many decades ago young people were thirty percent of the population, and that also boosted them on the political agenda. To them and their desire to take on the world.
In contrast, the current location of young people as a distant priority for politics, added to the feeling that “they complain of vice”, led to the approach of this book that warns how touching pensions can encourage mobilizations in the street, while that the repeated reports about the decline in quality in education and the academic performance of our students do not mobilize anyone. There is no balance there, and that worsens scars that many young people accumulate since their school training phase, and that rapidly mutate into a crack between them and politics. Between them and their “elders”.
And that is when the economist takes out the calculator and proposes how a greater balance in the proposals and policies of public managers could combat the Futurphobia that affects many young people. The book, in parts, despairs at the unfairness of the treatment it describes, but what saves it is that it does not stop at socializing the feeling of robbery, but rather proposes in a solvent way how to redirect it. Not even out of pure survival instinct. From the politicians. Of the older ones. Of all.
