Martin Sustrik

It is propelled by real concerns.

Hospital patients travelling hours to reach a proper facility, highways that were never expanded, banks and post offices that closed and never reopened.

But it does not champion managed decline.

It champions the opposite.

More investment, more infrastructure, more services.

Its flagship proposal, the 130 or 30 plan, demands 100 megabit internet everywhere, no more than 30 minutes to basic services, no more than 30 kilometers to a major highway.

They want to reopen what was closed.

They want to see more investment in healthcare and education.

They want young people back in the regions.

And it's hard to blame them.

But what that means on the ground, whether in Spain or elsewhere, is that the unrewarding task of managing the shrinkage falls to local bureaucrats, not to the elected politicians.

There's no glory in it, no mandate, just the dumpster fire and whatever makeshift tools happen to be at hand.

You can think of it as, in effect, a form of degrowth.

GDP per capita almost always falls in depopulating areas, which seems counterintuitive if you subscribe to zero-sum thinking.

Shouldn't fewer people dividing the same economic pie mean more for each?

Well, no.

It's a negative-some game.

As the town shrinks, the productive workforce, disheartened by the lack of prospects, moves elsewhere, leaving the elderly and the unemployable behind.

Agglomeration effects are replaced by de-agglomeration effects.

Supply chains fragment.