<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Ferran Navinés]]> 10 <![CDATA[Crisis and crisis]]> In November 2008, I finished writing this introduction for an article for the magazine Lluc with the same title, which was published in issue 867 of January-March 2009: “Not all crises have the same etiology. There are conjunctural crises, which once the storm has passed, disperse and the sun shines again. However, there are true tsunamis, that devastate everything in their path and require a significant task of reconstructing the economic, social, and institutional architecture that orders our lives. I understand that the current crisis is not a conjunctural crisis, but rather that we are facing a true structural crisis or 'crisis of regulation' that will change our social imaginary, productive structures, and institutions on a national and international scale”.I sensed that important changes were coming, but not on the scale of what has happened to us in these last seventeen years in terms of the impact of recent technological revolutions: intensive use of the internet by a new generation of mobile phones and the creation of new applications to manipulate public opinion on an unthinkable scale, social polarization and, above all, since covid and the emergence of generative AI, an enormous concentration of scientific, economic and political power in very few hands, which would make Marx himself pale with his law of the concentration of capital.The first major technological revolution was that of agriculture, 10,000 years BC. According to Cristian Canton, associate director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the time until the massive social impact of the agricultural revolution took between 1000 and 4000 years. In terms of a technological system, it encompasses slavery and feudalism where wage labor does not exist and a few individuals concentrate maximum economic, political, and social power through the exclusive ownership of land and labor. Throughout this period until the modern age, writing and money were invented.With modern science and the Renaissance, Humanity moved towards the industrial revolution over a period that represents less than a tenth of the time it took for the agrarian revolution to achieve its massive impact. This period introduces revolutionary economic changes with the emergence of wage labor, capital accumulation, and leaving land rents in a marginal place. Not to mention the political and social sphere with the introduction of parliamentary democracies and the welfare state, without forgetting the scientific and technological advances: vaccination, printing press, aviation, electricity, railways, automobiles, telephones, antibiotics, nuclear energy, among others.And now we enter another major systemic change with generative AI, which has its precedent in the emergence of the web and the intensive use of the internet for more than twenty years now. Why is it a systemic change? Because the internet and its massive use to generate value through generative AI are at the base of the internet of things, robotization, financialization and tertiarization of the economy, and the geostrategy and security of states. And now all this is in a few hands that want to control everything, that is, power in capital letters and on a planetary scale. It is a revolutionary change that has come upon us suddenly at a surprising speed, less than ten percent of what it took to implement capitalism. As The Economist says in its latest issue of May 16: “Finally, humans could, like horses in the age of the car, become uneconomic. Incomes could go mostly or entirely to the owners of capital, who then spend it on things made by AI and robots using natural resources they monopolize. This dystopian possibility is behind the warnings from Silicon Valley that state intervention, and perhaps a Universal Basic Income (UBI), will be necessary”.It is not surprising that for this reason Pope Leo XIV signed, on Friday, May 15, his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, on the protection of the human person in the era of artificial intelligence, where it is affirmed that the technological revolution of AI represents a social transformation of a magnitude comparable to that of the second industrial revolution.The dilemma is this: either a democratic way out of generative AI control by society and a UBI is proposed, or we can fall into capitalist neo-feudalism, that is, into a new barbarism where democracy and the control of capital and labor will once again fall into a few hands on a global scale.

]]> <![CDATA[Far right and tyranny: the dangers of voting for extremist governments]]>

Polls indicate a growing proportion of young people who want to vote for the far right. Perhaps they should ask themselves what the far right would do if, for example, Trump decreed that, for the good of the Empire, not only were scholarships cut—that is, military spending increased to 5% of GDP—but also mandatory military service reinstated. They should also know that if they no longer liked this and wanted to protest, the far right would prevent them from doing so, for the good of the Empire and Spain's service to the Empire's vassalage. Who would defend them from tyranny then? No one, unless they themselves reorganized to defend their rights and freedoms, so absurdly lost to those who can enjoy democracy today but prefer to vote for tyranny tomorrow.

]]> <![CDATA[Let's talk about housing]]> The UPC's Centre for Land Policy and Valuation has published the study Five theses on housing policy in SpainPrepared by professors Blanca Arellano-Ramos and Josep Roca-Cladera of the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), these five theses dismantle the PP-Vox arguments regarding the neoliberal housing policies they advocate. Let's examine them:

]]> <![CDATA[Annual economic reports in the Balearic Islands: 1969-2024]]> The main reference point for annual economic reports on the Spanish economy is the Bank of Spain. What is less well known is that the first Annual Report wasn't published until 1962, thirty-two years after the creation of its Research Department in 1930. In the case of the Balearic Islands, the figure of Miquel Alenyà Fuster cannot be overlooked if one wishes to provide, even briefly, a concise outline of the origins of annual economic reports. In his memoirs From my memory: 1939-2017' (Ed. Lleonard Muntaner. Palma, 2017) comments on the beginnings of the 'Economic and social report"In February 1969, Carles Blanes Nouvilas, then general manager of Sa Nostra for a year, (...) commissioned the writing of the four chapters that made up the first edition of the report mentioned in 1968. The economist Pere Costa Porto was in charge of the chapter on trade and the trade balance, Casasnovas wrote the one on tourism, and I wrote the one on industry. Under the direction of Miquel Alenyà, the annual economic reports for the Balearic Islands continued until 2000, since from 2001 onwards Sa Nostra began l'Report from the Center for Economic Research (CRE), which breaks radically with the trajectory of previous reports, since: "(...) The quality of the reports gradually declines (...) From the outset, the entire previous team, its experience, and the values associated with a 33-year trajectory of continuous, prestigious, and consistently pluralistic public work are dispensed with. The model shifts from authors who sign the chapters of the report to a model of a single author and responsibility (...) On November 9, 2012, the last actions of the CRE are carried out, and on Monday, November 19, 2012, the termination of the agreement with the UIB by Sa Nostra is made public through a press release (178-179).

]]> <![CDATA[Catalonia, Madrid, Balearic Islands: which model to choose?]]> If we look at the latest Eurostat data on per capita income for 2023, the best figure is for the autonomous community of Madrid at €47,000, while Catalonia's is €39,400, and the Balearic Islands at €38,300. This higher per capita income in Madrid is often explained by its higher labor productivity. In terms of the EU-27 regional labor productivity ranking, Madrid ranks 117th; the Balearic Islands, 119th; and Catalonia, 120th.

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