According to psychologists, cognitive dissonance It is a clinical term that refers to the intimate internal discomfort that people experience when two ideas that contradict each other coexist, however, within their particular system of beliefs about how the world works.
Also according to psychologists, this kind of intellectual substitute for schizophrenia tends to generate a mixture of stress and intense feelings of guilt among individuals who suffer such types of logical failures in the consistency of their worldview, the one from whose prism they interpret reality.
And now that it is fulfilled the first half century since the end of the dictatorship of General Franco, a period of time already sufficient to begin to analyze that historical period with the necessary emotional distance, the economists assigned to the orthodox, neoclassical current, the majority that is taught in universities, perhaps should finally face their own cognitive dissonance, which refers to the deep contradiction that exists between the undeniable success of the political economy of the second Franco regime and what they are taught in all the manuals and textbooks on the subject.
A radical contradiction, that, whose essence can be synthesized in a very simple dichotomy: either what is taught to students in classrooms about the only effective strategy for a society to escape poverty is wrong, first possibility, or, second and last, those who are very wrong are the history books, especially when they maintain that the growth rates of the Spanish economy during the sixties can only be compared with the also astronomical rates of China throughout this first third of the century. XXI.
And it is that, in the image and likeness of the eclectic and de-ideologized China that Deng Xiaoping promoted after the collapse of that collective delirium that was Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Franco’s developmentalism does not cease to constitute, seen with perspective, an amendment to the entirety of liberal economic thought, that which shapes the dominant common sense of our present time.
The prodigy of growing at an average close to 7% annually, between 1960 and 1973
Who was going to tell us then that those anodyne technocrats of the Opus, the cadres who directed economic policy from the Stabilization Plan until the very moment of the physical extinction of the dictator, would they represent over time an intellectual threat to orthodox academic thought, which is shared by the entire establishment?
But the truth and paradox is that, right now, they are. And they are so because of the very disconcerting evidence that their astonishing success, in a similar way to what was going to happen much later with their equivalents of the Chinese Communist Partywas consummated thanks to applying self-produced recipes that seemed to ignore almost all the indisputable axioms that inspire what is conventionally called a free market economy.
And so, going against the canon of ideas that the overwhelming majority of the economics profession shares today, that Spain with an agrarian, backward and definitely anachronistic matrix, the same one that had spent the entire 19th century and the first half of the 20th still with one foot in the Old Regime, would act. the prodigy of growing at an average close to 7% annually, between 1960 and 1973.
To begin with, this pace of growth, something so absolutely unimaginable right now, took place in a legal-institutional environment characterized by the existence of labor legislation that is more rigid, regulatory, interventionist and corporatist, as well as paternalistic, than one can imagine.
To the point that a dismissal judged unfair by the corresponding Labor Court It cost the employer four years’ full salaries in compensation.; the full four-year payrolls, yes.
The brand new Kingdom of Spain, and according to the BBVA research service, has a GDP per capita equivalent to 88.1%
Add the enormous tariff framework, a system of impregnable customs fortifications expressly designed to combat any slightest shadow of free trade, a commercial bunker that would leave Trump’s wettest dreams in a nun’s pinch.
And add, finallythe additional heresy of a State focused on the creation of public companies with the express purpose of having a direct presence in strategic sectorsa hyperregulated banking system in which financial repression was the usual norm or, finally, a regime of exchange control and prohibition of capital mobility thanks to which anyone who got a little confused when going through customs with more banknotes than necessary in their wallet could end up in jail. Well, that was the same country that, year after year, yes, at that time it was growing at a sky-high 7%.
On this matter there is a devastating statistical fact, a genuine elephant in the room, that no one, absolutely no one, neither on the right nor on the left, ever wants to mention in this contemporary Spain, so unanimously devoted to Brussels and enthusiastic about the project of European integration.
It is a simple numerical evidence, which reminds us of something that our complacent and proud postmodern self-esteem cannot bear to hear, namely: that that shameful, shabby and filthy Spain, that of the dictator’s final agony in 1975, turns out that, in terms of GDP per capita, which is how these things are measured, it maintained a lower distance in relation to the Europe of 15 than that of 2025, the current one.
No, this is not a typo in the text. The distance with the richest Europe was, in fact, smaller than the present. Specifically, That November 20, 1975, Spain’s GDP per capita represented, according to Funcas, 81.3% of the then Common Market, an embryonic entity of which the poor officials of the family (Portugal, Greece and Spain itself) were not yet part and of which the very rich British had not yet left.
As I write this, on November 19, 2025, half a century after the official report of Franco’s death read by a tearful Arias Navarro on Spanish Television, the brand new Kingdom of Spain, and according to the BBVA research service, has a GDP per capita equivalent to 88.1% of that corresponding to the Europe of 15, a group that would include the States already mentioned plus Sweden, Finland and Austria. Finally, the reader must do the corresponding arithmetic operations if he wants to arrive at the opprobrious truth.
*** José García Domínguez is an economist.