dorsal1967

Essay · society · September 2026 A century ago the people who built the consumer economy wrote down what they were doing: training people to want new things before the old ones wore out, keeping them reasonably dissatisfied, lending them the money, making consumption a way of life. The evidence that it worked is not as simple as the story, but it points one way: persuasion, credit and status competition made us buy more, and to buy more we worked more.

Essay · society · September 2026 The heaviest bill the young Portuguese face is not sent by the State. It is the price of a home, which has more than doubled in real terms since 2013 while their pay has not, and which transfers wealth, every month, from those who need to buy or rent to those who already own. Set against it: the best educated generation in the country’s history, a labour market that has recovered from the crisis, and poverty rates that are now no higher for the young than for the old.

Essay · society · September 2026 What does the Portuguese State leave to the people who are young now? The public debt, the part everyone argues about, has been falling for five years and is back at the euro-area average. The larger bills are less visible: a decade in which the State let its roads, schools and hospitals wear out faster than it replaced them, and a pension system kept affordable by paying the next generation of pensioners less, relative to wages, than this one.

Essay · society · September 2026 Every year the Portuguese State collects about two-fifths of what the country produces and spends a little more. Assign each euro to the person who pays it and to the person who benefits, and most adults come out ahead, the middle roughly breaks even and the richest tenth pays in about a sixth of its income. How that result is built, what it counts as a transfer and what it assumes, matters as much as the result.

Essay · society · September 2026 A third of what Portugal earns in production is operating surplus, the part that does not go to wages. Follow it through the national accounts and most of it never reaches a Portuguese household as income: it pays for worn-out machines, for corporate tax, and increasingly for owners abroad. Of the part that does reach households, about five-sixths goes to the richest tenth.

Essay · society · September 2026 In 2023 Portugal asked a few dozen firms to work four days for the pay of five, and most of them liked it. Three years later the government has let the experiment lapse, parliament has voted down every attempt to extend it, and the follow-up survey was never published. The evidence from abroad says that most of the gains last a year, some firms quietly give up, and nobody has yet measured whether a shorter week changes what people think their job is for.

Essay · economics · September 2026 National income has two sources: work and ownership. For a century and a half about a quarter to two-fifths of it has gone to those who own, and that share is higher now than fifty years ago. The owners are few: in the United States, the richest tenth holds nearly nine-tenths of all stocks. The returns have beaten growth in almost every decade since 1870, and inheritance is back. Meanwhile the tax on work has risen and the tax on capital has fallen, and Portugal taxes a euro of wages more heavily than a euro of interest.

Essay · society · September 2026 For most of recorded history, work was what the lower orders did so that others need not. The idea that a job should be the centre of a life, the source of who we are, what we are worth and what it all means, is a few centuries old, and it did not spread by itself. It was preached, legislated, schooled and enforced, in Portugal until 1976 by the police. The evidence says it serves employers better than it serves the people who hold it.

Essay · economics · September 2026 Portugal is told that its pension system is unsustainable and that the only remedy is to work longer. The accounts show a contributory system in surplus, a reserve fund at a record, a closed civil-service scheme paid from taxes, and thirty years of forecasts that were too gloomy. The official projection is solvent, on one condition: that pensions shrink to a third of the average wage. That is a policy, not a law of nature, and there are others.

Essay · economics · September 2026 The first part of this essay followed the hours: a century of productivity, taken mostly as income rather than time. This second part follows the income and the work. Who received the gains, what they bought, how much of the work goes into things we need and how much into selling us things we do not, what the unpaid work at home and the hours in front of screens add to the picture, and what the long hours cost people and the planet.