IN ORDER TO SOLVE UNEMPLOYMENT 

IN ORDER TO SOLVE UNEMPLOYMENT 

Faced with  dramatic situation of unemployment it is exasperating to see how the solution to the serious problem of unemployment is attempted by storing and playing with numbers and more numbers in the multiple grids of the offices of our ruling technocrats. They believe that the economy is another physical-mathematical science where by means of statistics, historical data that has already taken place and induction, quantitative laws and unknown equations are discovered that will solve macro-economic problems unfailingly in a regular, determinist and unalterable way. Wanting to predict“scientifically” the economic future, we are treated like atoms that do not feel, enjoy, suffer, think, make an effort, nor make a mistake. 

The uselessness of such methodological positions is evident when we realize that the economy is a human science where the almost always surprising individual disparity of appraisal plays a crucial and preponderant role that blocks the route to all regularity, uniformity or perseverance. The direction of billions of human decisions taken daily is marked and insinuated by the conscious or unconscious personal desire of converting certain situations into other more beneficial ones and in accordance with our own objectives and preferences. It is impossible to predict them. 

Precisely because of all this, if somebody were to ask me what the root of the social drama which fearful unemployment in Spain causes, I would answer with two widespread and interdependent human attitudes: the gap in managerial mentality and the lack of spirit of continuous and qualitatively well carried out labour. Notice that I am speaking about lack of mentality, not lack of managers. There are many theoretical managers that look for grants, sinecures, privileges or speculative fortunes, who lack that mentality. 

Strictly speaking, the manager invents the product or service standard that should guide the subordinate in the realization of his work, and projects it determining the species and characteristic of the future effect in which it will be materialized. The rest of the organization tends to mould the previously conceived model in a concrete material and assisted by appropriate instruments. In the manager the paradigms of diverse productions are gestated. That complementary directive task always assumes the risks of its own freedom, and therefore its responsibility, in success as well as failure. In the manager the task of endowing his goods with capacity of service to make them more tempting for potential clients and the attainment of maximum profit or aspiring for the best as a consequence of the former are welded together. The better and the more a company produces, the more firmly it will be established in a competitive market lacking privileges, monopolies, inflexibilities and oligopolies. 

But this managerial process is perfectly applicable and general to any worker, proprietor of intellectual and human physical goods, or to any person for the mere fact of being. All workers in this sense are employed managers. That managerial mentality that searches for innovations in other people’s service, resulting in an increase in profit, and that improves professionally in the exercise of that activity, can and should be assumed, if one wants to act economically in a rational and human way, by all economic agents, even in the situation of official unemployment or being miserably poor. Even if we were not proprietors of any material goods on which to exercise free assignment power on them, we shall always be proprietors, because of our freedom, of one’s own person and, therefore, of one’s own talents and potentialities. We shall always be able to work exercising that managerial mentality that acts in society with regard to the legitimate goal of increasing material and human patrimony. 

Do not ask me how to sum up the above-mentioned because it is easy to deduce. The whole varied range of concrete measures that stimulate managerial mentality and working spirit are good. Those that hinder their activity looking for and fomenting passivity, grants, privileges or theoretical security entrusting everything to the State, are counteractive. 

Let’s not deceive ourselves. In the same way that there is a tension towards the infinite of the best and that everything is improvable, there is also a tendency towards the quasi-infinite of the worst and everything can worsen. In the free harmonic competition of life, he who does not advance goes backwards. We reach the bottom and we drag it up: then we go backwards. 

JJ Franch Meneu