My HeyDay

El presidente de Mercadona, Juan Roig, dice hoy en una entrevista en El País: "Solo saldremos cuando el nivel de productividad se corresponda con nuestro nivel de vida. Tenemos que producir un cambio cultural. Nos hemos pasado 20 pueblos."

En otras palabras, lo que Juan Roig está sugiriendo es que nuestro nivel de renta per capita se tendrá que (se va a...) ajustar a nuestro nivel de productividad. Aunque, como en Rebelión en la Granja, parece que el ajuste será igual para todos, pero más igual para algunos que para otros.

En la gráfica de abajo observamos como la renta per capita en algunas partes de España se ha alejado por encima de la línea de regresión (que sería donde "deberíamos" estar), aunque no en demasía.


Existen varias razones para ello. El crecimiento de la renta per capita por encima de la productividad del trabajo se puede deber a, entre otros factores, la productividad del capital (burbuja immobiliaria) o el impacto del cambio tecnológico en la productividad de otros factores (por ejemplo, el costo de las infrastructuras básicas de comunicación ha caído enormemente).

Desde antes de la crisis, aparecían esporádicos artículos en prensa recordándonos el deterioro de nuestros niveles de productividad (Cinco Días, 2007). Y eso que la calidad de la fuerza laboral en España no ha parado de aumentar desde los 1980s. En la tabla de abajo vemos el notable incremento en el nivel educativo alcanzado por la fuerza laboral, hasta 2004 (fuente de los datos que siguen). La fuerza laboral en los años 2000 alcanzó su mayor nivel de calidad de las últimas tres décadas, y eso en paralelo a un deterioro constante de la productividad en el país.

Si no es la calidad de los trabajadores, quedan tres culpables posibles:

a) el uso que se les da, siendo empleados en sectores de la economía que tienen poco valor añadido (p.ej. inmobiliario) y que son poco intensivos en tecnologia (de modo que se benefician poco del cambio tecnologico y ofrecen pocos trabajos muy productivos en ese campo). Abajo la radiografia de como es la estructura española, con un incremento muy pequeño (30.75% al 32.06%) de trabajadores empleados en sectores de la economía que se benefician de las nuevas tecnologías (ICT), de 1985 a 2004.

La consecuencia, si se contrastan los datos de arriba con la información sobre productividad laboral que se muestra abajo, es que los sectores que podrían ser potencialmente más productivos (ver abajo la productividad comparada entre sectores de la economía) no han ganado el peso suficiente en nuestra economía, mientras que sectores poco productivos -como la construcción, el comercio, las reparaciones o el turismo hotelero- se han mantenido como bases de nuestro modelo productivo. Incluso entre los sectores más tecnológicos (ICT), los trabajadores han sido arrastrados principalmente hacia Servicios a los Negocios (Business Services), cuya productividad se ha estancado, e incluso declinado, en estas dos decadas.

b) La otra posibilidad es la tan manida falta de "emprendimiento" e innovación de nuestra juventud sociedad. Se puede argumentar que son razones culturales: mientras en Estados Unidos una amiga con un sueño (hacer una película) ha organizado un acto de recaudación de fondos (fund-raising) y ha montado una sociedad para producir la película y, quien sabe, tal vez hacerse un hueco en un festival indie, de ahí a la crítica semanal de Roger Ebert en el Chicago Sun Times, la lee un productor de Hollywood y decide escalarla o tal vez contratarla para una producción mayor... en España gente en similar situación, con los mismos sueños, miraría en las páginas del Gobierno (nacional, autonómico) en busca de una subvención. Puede que mi amiga fracase o tenga éxito y suerte, pero en ningún momento creo que le haya pasado por su cabeza la opción de ser subvencionada.

Como soy fóbico de las explicaciones culturalistas, más bien pienso que es una combinación de dificultades institucionales y regulatorias (montar una empresa en EEUU cuesta $200 y esperar 10 días a formalizarla, versus 3000 o 4000 euros en España y más de 3 meses de burocracia), el desincentivo que produce conocer que se dan tantas subvenciones por todo (¡frente a premios a la iniciativa individual!) y, sobre todo, qué hace tu grupo de pares, de amigos, marcan el comportamiento a medio plazo de los individuos. Sin duda, si tus amigos no tienden a tomar este tipo de riesgos, te sentirás menos motivado a hacerlo.


c) La tercera razón es una combinación de las dos anteriores. En un mundo donde la gente es aversa al riesgo (por imitación y comportamiento de rebaño, y por desincentivos institucionales), el capital invierte en "lo más seguro" (vivienda). Cuando lo "más seguro" deja de serlo, reinvierte en oro y otras cuestiones, pero le cuesta invertir en innovación. Cuando esa dinámica se repite en el tiempo, tu economía empieza a parecerse a la española, con una miopía inversionista que sólo invierte capital en sectores poco arriesgados, pero poco productivos en el largo plazo.

Este cóctel es nocivo. Cuando estas tres fuerzas mencionadas arriba se combinan, a la gente que sale del bachillerato y la universidad le ofrecen principalmente trabajos en sectores poco productivos, y no le estimulan a buscarse la vida con su talento y capacidad emprendedora. Dada la alta cualificación de la masa laboral actual, el título universitario en cuestión deja de ser muy relevante en marcar diferencias salariales, y los salarios tienden a ecualizarse (lo cuál no es malo, necesariamente). Esto hace que los trabajadores no tengan demasiados incentivos para moverse hacia sectores más productivos de la economía, donde las oportunidades de innovar y mostrar tu talento sean mayores.

Y la dinámica que conduce a los trabajadores hacia los sectores menos productivos no hace más que perpetuar el modelo.

Se pueden salvar las Cajas de Ahorro, estimular la economía con infrastructura urbana y de comunicaciones, favorecer que la gente aprenda inglés, etc. Pero el punto básico de por qué el modelo hace aguas no está siendo afrontado por nadie.

La solución del presidente de Mercadona es, simplemente, dejar que el nivel de ingreso caiga hasta el nivel de productividad actual. Esto se está haciendo por la vía del desempleo, sobre todo, castigando a los segmentos más vulnerables de la sociedad (mujeres, jovenes, immigrantes), y muy modestamente, por la vía de los salarios (los empleados del sector público y privado han visto sus salarios congelarse). Sin embargo, me concederéis que es una estrategia de supervivencia a largo plazo un poco pésima...

Labels: españa

"And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing". I read this sentence today and kept my thoughts playing with it for a while. The news are packed with stories about governments around the world trying to fix the misfortunes of this trembling capitalist-consummerist system, to agree on how to stop climate change, on how to -in general- save us from our homemade monsters.

The European Left, that oxymoron empty of new ideas, of any new answer to the ills of the world, is unable to dream. It is trapped by the fear of change, by commitments with the "moderates" -who are they? where do they hide?-, by a comfortable rethoric of social liberalism -more gay rights! fight climate change! end the war!- unable to think big about the human being, about the human experience, about what the hell makes us genuinely happy. Nowadays, nobody would be so blind to see that the system we have created, where we are designed to grow, work for megalocorporations -or their subsidiaries, produce, consume, e-consume, multiply and die is forgetting the bottom line of human life: we weren't meant to be connected to this Matrix. We were meant to enjoy from the simple pleasures, the company of our beloved, the tribal sense of community around the bonfire in a starred night, the feeling of the wind and the light rain in the face, the pleasure of our hands smelling to wet ground and fruits after harvesting them. The joy of enjoying, slowly, from the feast of meats and greens, from the company of others, from their careness, from their desire, from the music bringing us back memories of good old times... But the European left, and the left around the world, doesn't have any imagination, and they shameless stamp a seal of approval to a system that commits many injustices every day, the biggest one being to curtail our right to happiness. "And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing"...


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An excerpt from a study just-released:

One of the greatest paradoxes in the field of time psychology is the time–emotion paradox. Over the last few decades, an increasing volume of data has been identified demonstrating the accuracy with which humans are able to estimate time. Confronted with this amazing ability, psychologists have supposed that humans, as other animals, possess a specific mechanism that allows them to measure time...

However, under the influence of emotions, humans can be extremely inaccurate in their time judgements (Droit-Volet & Meck 2007). For example, the passage of time seems to vary depending on whether the subject is in an unpleasant or pleasant context. It drags when being criticized by the boss but flies by when discussing with our friends. That is the time–emotion paradox: why given that we possess a sophisticated time measurement mechanism, are we so inaccurate in our temporal judgements when experiencing emotions?

Droit-Volet, Gil (July 2009) "The Time-Emotion Paradox". Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009 Jul 12;364(1525):1943-53.

Labels: ciencia

An excerpt from Barry Schwartz -the author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less":

"[People] had very low expectations. They had no particular expectation when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what this is going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results".

And instead of a pair jeans -his example- think in candidates and political parties in new democracies, and what do we expect from them and what do we get. Maybe is this why so many older generations develop that sort of nostalgia for the years of Franco, the Mexican PRI or the PCUS?

Here his TED Talk about how more choices make us less happy. He couldn't conclude any other way: "the secret to happiness is low expectations".

Labels: ciencia política, democracy

"Philanthropy can appeal to people who want to be loved more than they want to make a difference", writes Jacqueline Novogratz , after many years wandering through Africa, continent where she arrived as a naive aid-idealist. And after facing during decades the limits, contradictions and corruption plaguing development aid, evolved to an aid-realist - at least avoiding to become another aid-cynical.

Novogratz also says many other interesting truths:

"It is so often the people who know the greatest suffering--the poor and most vulnerable--who are the most resilient, the ones able to derive happiness and shared joy from the simplest pleasures", and continues in a pessimistic tone, "That same resilience, however, can manifest itself in passivity, fatalism, a resignation to the difficulties of life that allows injustice and inequity to strengthen and grow..."

Aid agencies and organizations are frequently more doing experiments -and failing- than being effective. Add that there is no accountability for their actions, and the flux of knowledge between them is overrun by competition and egos. Said that, things may and should change in the way they operate... or they should disappear. Critical is how knowledge is shared and managed. For this reason, I am pretty optimistic with this new initiative from the social entrepreneurs of Ashoka, in order to solve the chronic ineffectiveness of development aid: in Changemakers.com they collectively look at social problems and discuss and propose actions to solve it, one problem at a time. This is a good start, coming from below.

Labels: development

For more than a century and a half, Partido Colorado and Partido Nacional ruled Uruguay. But with the victory of Tabare Vazquez in the 2005 presidential elections, the left party Broad Front took office with a long-pending redistributive agenda.

One of the first priorities of the new cabinet was to introduce a fairer tax reform. In Uruguay, as it is usually the case of small nations, equality is a highly ranked social value. And it is also highly correlated with satisfaction with democracy across the region. Even if Uruguay's poverty line and inequality levels (0,45) are the lowest in Latin America, the long corporatist tradition of the country, tweaked by the liberalization in trade and capital unleashed in the 1990s, emphasized an unfair distribution of the tax burden, coming mainly from [formal] workers' shoulders and poor households' pockets.

Same tax burden, but a more equitable burden distribution

Tabare's government wanted to increase vertical and horizontal equality of the tax system, and to do so he had to reduce consumption taxes -which affects mainly to the poor- and increase the weight and progressiveness of income taxes.

• Income tax levels became more progressive and went up for the richest, especially the 10% richest, who saw a 150% increase compared to the previous system:

• Consumption taxes went down for everybody, especially the poorest, who consume most or all their income:

• The tax burden became fairer, more efficient, less economically disturbing, and more Western European. Inequality post-tax and poverty levels dropped a little bit, but the whole system provided future governments with the right tools to raise more revenues if they are willing to expand further social policies. At the end of the day, equality is mainly achieved through social expenditure, not taxation --but you need to have the money first:

The reform revealed the scheme of winners and losers: businessmen protested, and the most negatively affected groups demonstrated, mainly medical doctors, lawyers and other very well-paid liberal professionals. But again, a sense that equality was a social value to be pursued in Uruguay mitigated their resistance, adding to the countermeasures of this tax reform: a general improvement in the quality of government-provided services, especially universal healthcare.

Beautifully done, Tabare.

Labels: democracy, development

An interesting excerpt:
It is not surprising that many people frequently --and undoubtlessly, eventually all of us-- give up our intelligence to feel that group comfort. And to accept obvious lies. Shame takes many forms: feeling foolish, stupid, ridiculous, inadequate, defective, incompetent, awkward, exposed, vulnerable, insecure, helpless... but it invariably produces a society of weak citizens, of quasi-human beings, who give up their precious singularity and their ability to bright. I don't understand why combating the feeling of social shame is not a crucial theme in every school.


[1] Wilkinson, R. (2005) 'The impact of inequality: how to make sick societies healthier'

Spain’s Economy shrinks at a 7.2% annual rate until March 2009. Here an excerpt:

Despite some recent positive development (decrease in interest rates and prices, fiscal stimulus measures, slight improvement in confidence, ECB purchase of cédulas hipotecarias…), Spain will not recover even as other economies begin to breathe again. The worst year undoubtedly could be 2011, and the unemployment rate by that stage could reach anywhere between 25% and 30% of the labour force if you accept the March 17.5% number as good.

Bottom line, a complete nightmare, with the only bright spot being imminent control of the political system being assumed in Brussels and Frankfurt, since along with the economy the political “automatic stabiliser” system also seems to be broken.

Here is the complete country-briefing. It's plainly scary, even if in my opinion this analysis is misrepresenting the strong interdependency of Spain and the other European economies: as soon as the European demand will recover, factories making pieces integrated in continental supply lines (i.e. cars, planes, appliances) will restart production in Spain and tourists will flow in again.

But still, the idea of being above 20% unemployment for such a long period of time is frightening.

Labels: españa

In Brazil, because people pay very high taxes when buying stuff -indirect taxes- and income taxation is so low and barely progressive, a very poor family will pay 33% of their total income in taxes, meanwhile the super rich will have to pay just 23%.

In Brazil, income inequality has historically been among the highest in the world, despite some modest improvements under Lula.

In Brazil, several attempts to reform this crazy tax system since 1995 have repeatedly failed to be enacted. In every attempt, party discipline evaporated and some members of the Parliament switched to the other side of the aisle just before the vote, or there were "sudden" corruption scandals in the media discrediting the reformist government of the time.

Write your own conspiracy theory down here...

Labels: Brazil, development

Aqui otra vez... Una puerta de embarque, un empleado de Airtrain hablando rapido acerca del orden de acceso al avion, esta vez a Miami. Se supone que viajo alli a ver a mi buen amigo Galo, a aprovechar mis ultimos dias de vacaciones... Pero especialmente a celebrar de manera inusual mi 30 aniversario. Miami, playas, sol, amigos.. suena bien. Se supone, en el mindset yankee, que debes de hacer algo espectacular...

Pasan veteranos de la II Guerra Mundial, muy ancianos, y la gente aplaude. Otra americanada. Me pregunto si esos hombres tuvieron opcion de no ir a la guerra, aunque fuera justa, cuando fueron jovenes. Si pudieron escoger defender la patria de otra forma. Si los que no regresaron merecen un doble aplauso...

Siempre crei que la edad concede mayor experiencia, pero al borde de los 30 sigo cometiendo las mismas tonterias, tal vez mas: la edad da temeridad. Sigo confiando en cosas tan naives como que los buenos sentimientos, desnudos, siempre abren la puerta al alma de los demas.. que estupida presuncion.

Casi llegado a los 30, me doy cuenta de cuan seguro he estado siempre de que era lo correcto, y de que, sin embargo, esos mapas para pilotar la existencia, aprendidos y copiados en la adolescencia y despues, sirven realmente de poco para sobrevivir al mundo real, mucho mas duro de lo que nos anticiparon. Ya no estoy seguro de nada, y menos de mi mismo. Va a ser toda una aventura redescubrirlo todo en los proximos anhos.

'Entrando en pista', anuncia el piloto...

De momento, yo he vuelto a llenar el suelo de una habitacion de suenos rotos... otra vez...

Que torpe...