In his article on Corriere della Sera of 18 March, “Bocconians of struggle and government. The derby between the teachers of via Sarfatti starts from the stage ", Dario de Vico claims that on Saturday 17 March the Derby Monti – Giavazzi, leading economists from Bocconi, was staged at the Confindustria Conference. With all respect and with all the esteem I have for the two well-known colleagues, I would like to underline that fortunately the confrontation of ideas cannot be reduced to a derby, but must be considered a championship made up of many more scholars than the two “illustrious duelists”, as De Vico defines them.
Indeed Bocconi's unique thought does not exist, not only and not so much because "the differences between the two exist and can be seen", but above all because at Bocconi, as fortunately also at other Italian universities, there are many other ideas on the economy of the past (which caused the crisis we are facing), today and tomorrow.
The confrontation Monti - Giavazzi, government - union - Confindustria, between the parties of the strange coalition that supports a de facto government "of emergency and public health, is inevitably about the rules, at this moment concerning liberalizations and the labor market, two topics that will monopolize the debate this week. However, it should be emphasized that "social" rules are not and can never be of a deterministic type and that by themselves they are not able to change society and the economy for the better (as we all hope). The rules are the consequence of the "values" of individuals and social groups that confront each other, sometimes even hard, before finding a mutually acceptable balance. In turn, the rules, for example those on flexibility, on the homogenization of entry contracts into the world of work, on social shock absorbers, on exit flexibility, will produce different results depending on the culture and concrete behaviors which, faced with a new labor legislation will have not only future governments, political parties and trade unions, but hundreds of thousands of companies, including the foreign ones they want to attract, as well as millions of workers, managers and managers.
Precisely with regard to values, in addition to the differences underlined by De Vico, who recalls how Monti refers to the social economy of the Market, while Giavazzi to the creative destruction of Shumpeter and the positive effects of capital mobility, it should be highlighted that both forget, or do not sufficiently underline, other important interpretative keys of the economic phenomenon.
Many Bocconi teachers participate in the championship of ideas (and I am honored to belong to this group), who argue that companies not only have "the duty to serve the interests of investors", as Monti argued in the passage in which he defended Marchionne's policy "which moves in an international competitive context and must not only look at Italy", but have "the duty to respond to the legitimate expectations of all stakeholders" (those that economic and management theories unanimously define as stakeholders), such as workers, customers, suppliers and local communities, without destroying the environment. Even a guru of global hypercompetition, such as Michael Porter, who in the 90s and mid-60s was a highly paid consultant to global companies and governments eager to drink from the source of the culture of "competitiveness", has formulated for some years the setting of the CSV, Corporate Shared Value. According to this approach, the economic value is generated by the contribution of all the internal components of the companies and also by external subjects (for example the State and local authorities which guarantee more or less efficient services) and as such it must be distributed (not redistributed ) in order to meet the expectations of the various subjects involved in the production. Moreover, this is not a novelty since already in the 70s and XNUMXs, Professor Carlo Masini, an illustrious though little-known Bocconi researcher and professor at large, had written a volume with the significant title: "Work and savings" (the latter understood as real savings and not achieved through financial speculation or high-risk investments, such as sub-prime). One of the cornerstones of the book was the principle according to which "production must take place according to processes that guarantee a reconciliation of the interests of all those whose quality of life depends on companies".
If the liberalization policies, which Giavazzi would like to be much more immediate and radical and for which he accuses the government of not using all the strength it derives from the emergency situation, were understood as the subordination of labor policies to the choices of entrepreneurs and managers which respond only or mainly to objectives of maximizing investors' remuneration, would probably not lead to an improvement in the economic situation, but would almost certainly lead to an accentuation of social conflicts which in turn would have negative effects on the economy. On this front, the positions of Monti and Giavazzi are once again different. The first is certainly more careful to avoid that the sacrifices required of the unions and the world of work, such as those imposed on other subjects with the decree called "Save Italy", do not exceed a physiological level; while the second seems less concerned about the conditions of "social acceptability and political feasibility", with the argument that, if the condition of emergency persists, "like it or not" Italy will have to accept the rules imposed by the markets (always anonymous) or by supranational bodies.
