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Opinion | Polycrisis in Spain

Date: March 29, 2024 Time: 07:11:43

The words become fashionable. One day you come across a term in a report you don’t remember ever hearing and from there it starts to appear in everything you read. Economists devour analysis of the situation and a lot of prospective. Articles, studies, technical notes from universities, analysts or think tanks and in all these days a neologism is repeated: polycrisis.

In the fall of last year, Larry Summers, who was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, when asked about the economic situation, stated that he could not remember a moment with so many superimposed crises. The rampant inflation, the tightening of monetary policy, the energy shock, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the cooling of the Chinese economy and geopolitical tensions. And he subscribed to the thesis of the Columbia University professor, Adam Tooze, who in an article in the Financial Times in October 2022 spoke of polycrisis, as the concept that best summarizes the moment in which we live.

The succession of a series of interrelated risks that can feed into each other causing an unprecedented crisis or polycrisis, whose consequences are also unpredictable. In this edition of Davos it has been the most repeated word in the speeches, specifically, a report signed by climate change, underlying inflation, polarization, geoeconomic tensions and the crisis of raw materials. The list of interrelated risks includes the Ukrainian war and cybercrime.

An application of the Google search engine allows you to know the popularity of a word or what is the same, it works by people typing it to find it on the net. In the case of polycrisis today its popularity in the world has 100 points, the maximum. The curious thing is that in recent years it has been at zero or at most ten points, except for the 40 points it reached last year, coinciding with its appearance in the so-called bible of economic journalism. The website also allows you to obtain information by country. In Spain, according to Google, there is no data because nobody is interested in this term. In other words, all over the planet we are concerned about knowing what polycrisis means, about knowing why we are living in a time characterized by multiple global crises that are developing at the same time on an unprecedented scale, but in Spain nobody is interested.

Here we live a parallel reality. A sort of collective hallucination sponsored by the Government, which has conveyed that we are in a very favorable economic situation. The official media tell it, the ministers repeat it and President Pedro Sánchez in his intense international agenda recites it on the run. We enjoy the best energy prices, we are the ones that have the most green energy, at the same time we enjoy the lowest inflation rate in Europe, we are growing more than anyone else and employment does not stop giving us joy, either with the EPA data or affiliation to Social Security.

It would seem as if a frequency inhibitor located in the Pyrenees was preventing bad news from reaching our country due to the proximity of the elections. But just because nobody looks for polycrisis on the computer does not mean that we do not have a Spanish polycrisis.

The increase in almost 50% in two years of the shopping basket; the electricity and gasoline bill entrenched in unaffordable prices; unemployment that does not fall below three million homes; job creation only for part-time and permanent discontinuous positions; mortgages that have risen on average by almost 200 euros per month; the fiscal pressure to the creators of use in maximums; public spending above that of rich countries like Germany or Sweden; the unattainable rents, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of young people and seniors who have thrown in the towel to be able to work one day outside the underground economy or the half million moonlighting due to the economic emergency.

But economists have not been the ones to coin the word polycrisis. It seems to have been used for the first time in the late 1990s by two French sociologists Morin and Kern, who used it to describe intertwined and overlapping social crises. And in Spain some of these social situations too, although the official media are not discussed. Immigration, radical nationalism, systemic poverty, school failure, the delegitimization of the entrepreneur, populism or the subsidy culture. Social and economic crises that are very Spanish, but badly that it weighs on some, they are also polycrises.

* This website provides news content gathered from various internet sources. It is crucial to understand that we are not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the information presented Read More

Puck Henry
Puck Henry
Puck Henry is an editor for ePrimefeed covering all types of news.
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