Lobster Generation: No Income Tax, No VAT, and Lifetime Employment

The 'lobster world': No income tax, no VAT, and lifetime employment

A Spain with a population mostly finishing primary education built the industrial belts of its capitals. This is the core of the debate: how a country with large pockets of illiteracy in the 1970s built factories, power plants, and aircraft while the state collected minimal revenue. The lobster generation—the colloquial label for those born roughly between the 1940s and 1970s—carries a specific economic biography: work upon arriving at the factory gate, cheap housing, and a pension now supported by others' contributions. The question is not nostalgic. It asks whether that model was more efficient or simply more benevolent to those who lived it.

What the 'lobster world' was and why it is called that

Society from the 1940s to the 1970s was, according to its describers, highly stratified. A massive population entered the job market with minimal skills—adding fractions was, it is claimed, an intellectual challenge—and found employment simply by showing up at the factory door. Many women did not consider working, confined to the role of housewife. High school served as a passport to a 'supervisor' position, placing holders above the majority.

The term 'lobster' arises from this: the idea of a generation that swept away everything in its path, from jobs to housing. The nickname is derogatory, and the narrative itself discusses it, but it has stuck as a label for a period where formal education mattered much less than today to make a living.

No income tax or VAT: minimal fiscal policy in industrial Spain

One of the most repeated contrasts is fiscal. In the country's most industrial era, there was no income tax initially, and VAT did not arrive until the mid-1980s. The state was tiny compared to today. Yet industrial employment was massive. This cocktail—low tax burden, many factories, little education—is what sustains the thesis that the economy of then created jobs without needing degrees.

The objection comes from another angle: that industry was largely subsidized and protected from competition, which some describe as another form of extraction. Public finances were not as bright as the absence of taxes suggests.

From errand boy to branch manager: lifetime employment

Internal mobility is another key argument. Stories circulate of someone starting as an errand boy in a bank and retiring forty years later in the same branch, now as branch manager or department head. No retraining, no interviews, no unemployment. The same is said of public companies, where it is claimed life was better in the 1970s than now.

The high school of the era—six years plus the Preu—acted as a key to the administrative middle class. Having it already placed you above most of the population. A university degree was not needed to secure a life.

How much did a flat cost and what was the salary?

Housing is where the contrast becomes most brutal. Rental incomes of 40 euros monthly circulate, which lasted until the year 2000 with little adjustment. Family stories tell of flats in central Madrid paid off in five years, complemented by new cars and a dozen garages to rent. And a salary of over 80,000 euros before retiring without having set foot in a university.

On the other end, today describes an interview with an offer of 1,100 euros and a ceiling of 1,500 for the company's most veteran programmer. The comparison between these figures is the fuse of almost all discussions on pensions: with pensions around 2,000 euros and rents exceeding a thousand, the intergenerational arithmetic does not add up.

The reverse side: 14 hours, hunger, and lost contributions

One must resist the temptation to idealize. Those who remember that Spain also speak of laborers putting in fourteen hours a day and being paid as extras in large companies, vacations legally lasting a month, and people of the same generation who worked forty years in a school to discover huge gaps in their contributions upon retiring.

Not everything was easy. Some remember a generation that ate chickpeas daily, arrived in the city with a cardboard suitcase, and ended up in a shack before receiving a flat. And part of the narrative distills bitterness: that of those who believe many of those enriched themselves by deceiving others slower than their own cohort. These are assertions made in the heat of the moment and unquantified by anyone.

Has society become stupider or just more qualified?

The most controversial point comes when comparing education levels. Today there are around 1.5 million people in universities, a figure unthinkable in the Spain that had a 10% or less population with higher education. For some, this is pure pogre. For others, the result is an undemanding university and an army of graduates unable to utilize their training.

The defense of the old system does not lag behind: it is claimed that the high school of then was much harder than the current one, that by twelve years old one had to study for real, and that the production of the era—ships, planes, power plants—was signed by technicians trained with a rigor gone today. Criticism of Villar Palasí's educational plan and the LOGSE is part of the same package.