It gives the impression that industrial society had a wealth distribution system that is no longer working in the digital society. For centuries we have built a mechanism to finance infrastructure and public services based on the fact that whoever earns money must contribute a part to the common pot. Our system of redistribution of wealth in the territory has been organized, basically, around salaries and taxes, but this formula is quickly exhausted because the large global digital platforms capture a lot of wealth, but proportionally they have few workers in our country and therefore both here they pay few salaries. Thanks to the unfortunate coordination of global tax mechanisms they have also learned to benefit from legal ways to pay few taxes here. They do not distribute what they earn enough.
For example, the possibility of listening to music streaming has made us stop buying in record stores, which have ended up closing and therefore have stopped paying taxes and salaries. We don't buy music, but we pay a monthly fee on platforms like Spotify, which doesn't hire people here and can legally pay taxes anywhere else in the world that works better for them. The proof that the digital model distributes poorly is that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, in just over 20 years has accumulated a personal fortune of $144 billion.
Another example: Google has only 337 workers in all of Spain and a ridiculous share capital of 3,006 euros. Digitalization allows us to earn a lot of money without it being correlated with job creation and without clear mechanisms to return part of the wealth obtained to the territories.
Furthermore, technology is becoming more and more disturbing. When we discover something else that machines can do well, what really worries us is that we are left with one less job option. We need employment to earn a living and if machines take our jobs it is not clear what we will live on. We need economic resources to access housing, food, leisure, education or health. Nobody gives us those resources: we receive the money in exchange for doing something. The problem is not that machines know how to do things, but that we need to do something if we want to get paid, if we want to live.
Work is ceasing to function as a system for distributing wealth, both individually and collectively, and is also ceasing to function as a key system for our subsistence. For most of the 20th century, if you were well prepared, you could find a good job and make a living, but this logic has not stood the test of time.
Currently, having a job does not guarantee living in society with the minimum requirements. We have significant segments of the population in conditions of poverty despite having a job, and large segments of the population over 30 years old and well educated who live in shared apartments because it is impossible to assume the price of a rental alone.
Something has broken. Many young people no longer want to explain themselves through work, even if they have it, because it is too volatile to become the center of their life. Before, a job was for life and now no job is. It is a disconcerting moment because the model of life and society that we have proposed for everyone for 200 years is no longer credible for more and more people.
Digitalization is achieving increasingly autonomous and efficient processes, and this has a direct impact on the world of work and, therefore, on our social system of wealth distribution. Digital transformation will create jobs, but they will not be enough to support the system we come from. We need to find a new model if we want the digital society to be fair in terms of the creation and distribution of wealth, and in this transition, everything seems to indicate that work will have less weight.
We will certainly have to get more serious about fiscal issues, and if we manage to recover part of the wealth generated, perhaps we will be able to talk more about universal basic income or other similar solutions. From a society built around work to a new society built perhaps around information. In any case, over the next few decades we will have to build a new model, a new social contract.
