The 21st Century is not working out the way many of us hoped: we witness the failure of nations and politicians to address the climate crisis, as well as social unrest in many countries over the failure of a neoliberal economic model that has neglected social equity and environmental sustainability. The Financial Times has even called for “a more sustainable and inclusive form of capitalism.”
To put these aspirations into practice, we could learn something from an entrepreneurial nation of a little over two million people, where the ratio of high wage manufacturing to Gross Domestic Product is double that of the U.S., and 16 percent higher than Germany or Japan. It has the fifth highest life expectancy on the planet (at 83.5 almost five years longer than the U.S.) and exports sophisticated machine tools to Germany and high-tech components for interplanetary space probes to NASA.
No, it’s not Denmark, but the autonomous Spanish Basque Country (Euskadi in Basque).
