“We need worthy and decent unemployments”… and a Universal Basic Income could be useful for that.

Sir, Tobias Buck quotes Marcel Jansen, a professor of economy at Madrid’s Autónoma university with “More than a quarter of unemployed workers in Spain have been out of a job for more than four years. Their chances of getting back into the labour market are very dire” “Spain’s first quarter job losses less severe than usual” April 29.

It relates directly to an Op-Ed I wrote in Venezuela (before I was censored there) titled “We need worthy and decent unemployments”. I quote the following from it:

“What politician does not speak up for the need to create decent and well paid jobs for young people? But, if that's not possible, and the economy is not able to deliver that on its own ... What on earth do we do?

Society must of course do its utmost seeking to solve the problem of youth unemployment ... including taking leisure to levels never thought of… six months vacations! But it also needs to prepare itself to handle a growing number of unemployed, not cyclical but structural, that is, those who never ever in their life will have a chance to get an economically productive job.

The power of a nation, and the productivity of its economy, which so far has depended primarily on the quality of its employees may, in the future, also depend on the quality of its unemployed, at least in the sense of these not interrupting those working.”

And recently I have reflected on that a Universal Basic Income, as that is not-having-a-job-or-not related social contribution, could be a significant part of the efforts needed.

@PerKurowski ©

For some of us the gold of Venezuela, in Venezuela, even though worth less, is pure profit

Sir FastFT refers to the losses derived from that “Hugo Chávez… no fan of what he called the “dictatorship of the dollar”, and forced the central bank to hold most of its reserves in bullion rather than greenbacks.”, “Venezuela faces double blow as gold and oil prices slide” November 5.

But what the report misses is that Hugo Chávez forced the central bank to hold most of that gold… in Venezuela! That made these reserves much less operative, much less negotiable… something many of us who despair to see so many resources being dilapidated in our country, find not all that bad.

In February 2012, in an article published in El Universal I wrote: "I must express great satisfaction with the arrival of our gold to Venezuela, at least what came was saved, at least for the time being. Where that gold was stored it could easily disappear, in a flash, with the government just writing a check."

PS. After writing for El Universal for 14 years in July 2014 I was one of the first four censored by the new pro-government owners. (So you see FT is not alone in its opinions of me :-))

Venezuela: stop press?

Today I was censored in Venezuela

Financial Times