Of Andrea Cavalleri
I mentioned it in my essay on libertarian-communism and I owe this explanation to the readers.
The London School of Economics has produced a sort of rudimentary theory that would place the blame for the financial crisis of the last decade on the decline in the birth rate.
The reasoning, very simple, it sounds like this: fewer births means that there are fewer young people paying contributions, while the number of pensioners does not decrease. Therefore the State has to go broke to pay pensions and this fact dramatically increases the public debt and induces the crisis.
This explanation, suggestive and on a superficial level quite attractive, it is absolutely wrong.
To understand this, it is enough to analyze the proposed mechanism in its entirety: if young people are too few to pay pensions to the elderly, it means that they, despite working like crazy, they are unable to bear the burden of maintaining the commitments already made.
Therefore the system would need to make the most of the work of young people in an attempt to cover pension expenditure.
On the contrary we observe a system that, in the official data largely toned down, produces over 30% of youth unemployment and that, actually, produces a percentage close to 50%.
So if the economic mechanism in place produces high youth unemployment it cannot be, and it isn't, the lack of young people led to the crisis, otherwise all existing young people would be employed. Conversely, the overabundance of young people compared to available jobs indicates that, according to our economic-financial system, young people are about double what they should be. Read More
