Throughout its brief history, Catalanism has tried four ways to create the nation, in response to Spanish centralism, as described by Borja de Riquer in his extraordinary biography of Cambó, The Last Portrait (p. 886). These are the Prats-Cambó, Macià-Companys, Pujol and Maragall projects. To which must be added the failed independence path of the process.
And now, what project do we have? The answer is none. What remains of the process? A Government that intends to run the country with 10% of the voters, an unusual event in Europe, which would scandalize all democrats. A pro-independence opposition reduced to reactive protest, without presenting any intelligible alternative. will be extinguished
But the historical dynamic does not stop, and in the present century, and unlike the two preceding ones, Catalonia declines. It suffers a loss of economic, social and cultural positions in relation to our two frames of reference: Europe and Spain. Over the years, I have written extensively in these pages about our decline, so that now I can limit myself to one last significant reference: from 2000 to 2021, our GDP per capita in relation to Spain has fallen from 121% to 113% ( Spain = 100), although the population has grown from 15.3% to 16.3%. Therefore, the compared productivity based on those two references has decreased by 14%.
Hence, I believe that the collective project has to focus on: 1) the use to the limit, and beyond, of the self-government available to us to achieve 2) economic recovery, 3) social cohesion and 4) the return of Catalan culture and language at levels of excellence.
Ray Dalio, in Principles to face the new world order (p. 107), underlines the importance of productivity to generate wealth, precisely what we are losing, and how the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit is decisive to improve it. But to approach it in those terms is to place oneself on the first floors of the building of productivity, innovation and entrepreneurial drive. Because our foundations, damaged by lack of care and material fatigue, fail. Like all of Europe, but with worse prospects, we cannot build this building if we suffer other dynamics, also unfavorable. That of the population, on the one hand, and that of education, on the other. Both make human capital.
We live insensitive to two great vectors of destruction that we have to alleviate. One is the accelerated aging of the population, which reduces innovative, entrepreneurial and productivity capacities. An aging due in its two thirds to the insufficiency of births. Immigration helps, but it is far from resolving the issue, given that the average of its human capital is well below the autochthonous. Only in a vigorous increase in the birth rate will we find the answer.
To achieve this, we need vigorous policies in favor of maternity, the stability of couples, the emancipation of young people, support for families with children, including retirement benefits, and access to housing. And also a dissuasive policy of abortion, instead of promoting it. A practice that destroys our human capital. In terms of life cycle economic value, each year that option liquidates the equivalent of 20% of GDP in 2020. It is an unbearable loss.
The other great disaster is teaching, which the Celaá law magnifies, especially in public schools. We have few students at the top two levels of the PISA reports and many at the bottom. Everything that refers to basic cognitive processes, such as attention, concentration, memory and the ability to capture meaning and process information judiciously, is in free fall in our educational system, on which I already insisted in 1845 the unjustly forgotten Jaume Balmes. And also, screens multiply stimuli infinitely, dispersing attention, degrading verbal and written language, limiting reading comprehension and reducing concentration.
We suffer a double cognitive deterioration, due to aging and disorder in teaching. With an aging country, with immigrants for low-productivity jobs and with few young people and largely unprepared for the demands of the innovative and entrepreneurial economy, how are we going to succeed? How will we be socially cohesive and culturally excellent?
