Paolo Legrenzi "The alphabet of money", Milan, Guerini Next, 2020, pages 225, Euro 18,50
Surely the results of the periodic surveys aimed at ascertaining the level of economic-financial knowledge of Italians continue to constitute a decisive propellant for those who support the need for actions aimed at strengthening it.
This book by Paolo Legrenzi, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the Cà Foscari University of Venice, is a direct confirmation of this and fits fully into that current of economic thought, which has placed individual and collective behavior at the center of its attention, the so-called behavioral finance. A current, which has also had considerable recognition. Just think of the Nobel Prizes for economics, awarded in the last century (1987) to Herbert Simon, psychologist and economist at Princeton University and, more recently, (2002 and 2017) first to Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and, then, to Richard Thaler, Professor of Behavioral Economics at Boston University.
The captivating title of the book introduces well to the illustration of its plant with which it is proposed guide the reader through some aspects of economic and financial literacy to help them consciously build their own life choices in the economic field.
The author, to achieve this goal, illustrates some lemmas related to money, universal tool for communication and identification of values to be attributed to needs and emotions, showing their intertwining with some factors, such as time, impatience, uncertainties and, why not, even a certain amount of stupidity, which characterize the our life and the choices we make.
In this way, pages flow which, with a light but no less rigorous style, lead the reader to do a decidedly stimulating journey, starting from the A, as the ABC of economic literacy, to reach the Z of hard core, also referring to the "ways of functioning of our mind which in the case of savings always tends to lead us astray".
A journey, which in its 19 intermediate stages tackles problems and knots from the perspective of behavioral finance, which concern, but also to a certain extent distress, humanity: from the B of big data to the D of demography; from C for conscience to O for obsessions; from the P of fear to the U of humanity; from the S of money and sustainability to the F of future & past; from the H of homo habilis to the T of time and its traps.
Everything is carried out, bearing in mind, as Legrenzi himself warns in the introductory pages, two conditioning aspects of our age: the fact that the largest generational transfer of goods in the history of humanity is taking place and the awareness that children will not be able to accumulate the same fortunes as their fathers, at least with the same times and with the same quantities.
Ultimately, a book that speaks not only to lovers of economics, but to everyone those who want to recover their serenity, an essential ingredient of life, understanding the deepest meaning of their choices, whether they are right or wrong, in the awareness that each of them constitutes a brick of their own cultural edifice, erected in the name of innovation and progress. Without neglecting a further value of this work: demonstrating that the economy is not just a set of binding rules in the context of a dry matter, the legacy of a sad science; but it is also the result of a mix of rationality and emotions that can be experienced, pushing back the daily anxieties in our lives.
