As General De Gaulle said, Italy "is not a poor country, it is a poor country". A country that does not know how to govern itself, is not far-sighted, prey to insecurities that it thinks of countering by often relying on popular leaders who offer recipes that are as simplistic as they are unrealistic.
Historical investigation can clarify what are the root causes of the stagnation of our economy, and economists can show the way to return to growth. The new edition of the book by Pierluigi Ciocca, historian and former Deputy General Manager of the Bank of Italy, (Ricchi per semper? Economic history of Italy from 1796 to 2020 - Bollati Boringhieri) extends the previous work up to the threshold of this year. He does not speak directly of the economic crisis unleashed by Covid-19, of the problems and opportunities it can open up for our country, which often manages to react only after having suffered devastating crises such as in the post-war period.
And yet the lesson that flows from a history of the economy full of data and enlightening explanations on some of the most critical passages of our past, it is very full and urgently topical. If our Prime Minister, the lawyer Giuseppe Conte, before announcing some generic proposals on the relaunch in his press conference, had skimmed through Ciocca's book, he would certainly have been able to better specify the recipes necessary to break the vicious circle that keeps the country motionless. We are called, says Ciocca, to a general "civilization", cultural, institutional, political and therefore economic, a commitment that requires the mobilization of the will of the vast majority of citizens, but which can only be achieved by offering a framework of thought and clear and attractive concrete objectives.
The penultimate chapter of the book is significantly entitled "Why our growth has progressively slowed down to a complete stop". Ciocca examines what in his opinion are the remote and recent causes that have profoundly undermined the social body, a fracture which in turn has penalized the potential for growth. The main ones must be charged to governments and businesses. But of equal importance are the causes of context that pertain to politics, institutions and culture.
As a premise, it should be clarified that the ideas of some gurus or political groups, regarding the opportunity to slow down the growth of GDP in the name of a supposedly better "quality" of life in the absence of development, are considered by Ciocca to be completely erroneous. Italy still has many collective and individual needs to satisfy, many inequalities to mitigate, many territorial imbalances to reduce, which it will be possible to address only with the recovery of a more sustained growth rate.
It is certain, and history proves it, that our country cannot delude itself that it will be rich forever and therefore if he does not want to go back poor, he will have to change many things in his way of being. In the long list of problems to deal with I would put the cultural issue first. In fact, the national average culture appears divergent and often in conflict with the capitalist system based on companies competing on the market, which we have given ourselves, starting from the Unification and even more clearly after the Second World War. We have let school and university degenerate where not only are the graduates and graduates few, but also their quality is poor. 20% of young people aged between 18 and 24 with a diploma can define themselves as "ignorant graduates". Scandalous is also the conflict that developed between justly rigorous teachers and lax parents, until it resulted in real attacks on the teachers.
Ma a large part of the national culture is essentially anti-market and anti-enterprise. This can be seen from the fact that the Italian legal system remains distant from the needs of companies. The Constitution itself vaguely defines the role of the entrepreneur, while the judicial system not only has times that are incompatible with those of companies, but the same interpretation of the laws is subject to too many uncertainties between the various courts. The same institutional culture is undermined by a basic distrust of politics from which only individual favors are asked and not simple and clear rules on a general level.
The recent health crisis has highlighted the confusion of powers between center and periphery, the scarce ability of the parties to develop a strategic project for the country, the slowness of the bureaucratic machine infiltrated by politics for years without taking any account of the criteria of efficiency and effectiveness.
Information has also contributed to the cultural degradation of the country. Ciocca writes some very severe sentences on the role of information, not only of social media, but of newspapers and TV where professionals should have explained the complex events of Italian society instead of often becoming partisans of this or that party or group of power. Thus losing authority and credibility and leaving public opinion without points of reference. Yet Ciocca's pages could offer a mass of information and food for thought that is very useful for journalists who want to be adequately informed.
The mistakes of the policies of the various governments that have come and gone in the last forty or fifty years are numerous and serious. The first is to having the illusion that public spending could support development. Instead, not only has it progressively led to the arrest of growth but it has not even served to maintain the consent of the voters towards those who handed out pensions or bonuses.
Also the enterprises are judged by Ciocca with severity. After the 92 crisis they were no longer able to maintain an adequate pace of investment and technological innovation. They preferred to take refuge in the devaluation of the lira or, when the Euro then arrived, in the benefits that politics managed to bestow with the excuse of compensating external diseconomies or to keep non-market companies standing.
From Ciocca's analysis a picture that he has seen emerges clearly the progressive detachment of the entire ruling class (political, but also entrepreneurial and professional) from the country's strategic problems . This largely explains the reasons for a rift between the people and the elite, which is far from starting to recompose. The new political subjects who replaced those of the first republic enjoy a trust linked to the possibility of obtaining some immediate, therefore unstable, benefit. Entrepreneurs are trying to change gear: they are focusing on a strategic project and not on taking something from the state coffers. The trade unions find it difficult to embark on new paths. To a Bentivogli of the Fim-Cisl who is fighting to face the new, the CGIL contrasted Landini who has established himself as a leader in the battle against the contractual modernization desired by Sergio Marchionne in Fiat.
We have in one way or another made the big companies emigrate. Neither the right nor the left like them. The little ones are breathless. But dare not grow up seen the punitive climate of our legal system and cultural. To redo Italy we should start a real cultural revolution. But to shorten the time, it is necessary in the meantime organize themselves so that a real liberal political force arises, (the only one that has been lacking in our political experience, except perhaps the Giolitti decade) open to a well-regulated market, capable of engaging the country in a challenge to maintain, and indeed increase, the levels of well-being that our fathers and grandfathers gave us they assured.
