But where does the malaise that runs through the whole West come from? What is his real disease? Perhaps it is worth reflecting on the fate of the work. Work has always been the pivot on which the organization of the Western world was founded. However, in recent years, thanks to the crisis and the consequent increase in unemployment on a global scale, the picture has changed radically. Work is progressively losing value, both economically and culturally, to the point of undergoing an authentic mortification. This process has been effectively analyzed by Marco Panara, editor of 'Affari e Finanza', in his latest book 'The disease of the West', published by Laterza. As the title of the volume testifies, the author has identified the debasement of work as the main reason behind the dynamics that are bringing the world economy to its knees. “The West is sick. The infection is at least twenty years old, perhaps twenty-five, and it is one of the silent ones, which slowly but progressively conquers one piece of the body after another without that body noticing it. What has been happening in the West for a quarter of a century now is that work is constantly decreasing (…) The causes are only partly political and the effects affect everything, from the distribution of wealth to the perception of the future, from geopolitics to the change of values, from finance to the quality of democracy to the way of being of society".
The figures mercilessly certify the dramatic growth of this phenomenon. As shown by the OECD data, out of the total wealth produced each year in industrialized countries, the share allocated to work in the last 25 years has decreased on average by 5 points. It is a dynamic that precedes the great crisis that exploded in 2007. Suffice it to say that, as Luci Ellis and Kathryn Smith pointed out in a research published in 2007 by the Bank for International Settlements, if in 1983 the total gross domestic product of the Italy 100 went to work and 77 to capital, in 23 the share for labor had already dropped to 2005 and that for capital had risen to 69. In France and Japan the share of capital had gone from 31 to 24 per cent, in the United States from 33 to 30, in Canada from 33 to 32, in Spain from 38 to 28, in Ireland from 38 to 24.
According to Panara, the two factors that most contributed to triggering this phenomenon were technology and ungoverned globalization. They have fed and strengthened each other, having an impact throughout the industrialized world. An interesting study by Frank Levy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Richard J. Murnane of Harvard highlighted how the new global mechanisms and computerization have changed the demand for work. Today, in fact, many activities are carried out in some cases by a computer or are delocalized and entrusted to subjects far from the western world whose labor costs are rock bottom. “An assembly line job can be replaced by both a computer and an assembly line worker in China, just as the task of preparing a basic income tax return in the United States can be outsourced to an accountant Indian as to a computer that has Turbotax and Tuxcut or similar software installed”. All of this has had serious repercussions on the labor market, since there are numerous averagely skilled workers competing for a small number of places. As a result they end up competing on the unskilled labor market and are forced to accept a lower income with an automatic contraction of wages at the bottom of the social pyramid. The debasement of work is not taking place exclusively from an economic point of view, but it is also happening from a moral and cultural point of view. “We come from a society in which work was the key to fulfilling one's expectations for defining one's role in society. We live in a society in which money matters much more than work, or the way to do it (…) Money more than work seems to have become the way to protect one's status, to maintain, at least individually, a high standard of living, even if a high standard of living in a very fragmented society does not guarantee an equally high quality of life”. Work represents the essence of democracy and when its historical role fails it is the whole social scaffolding that shakes dangerously. What then is the medicine to heal this "disease of the West"? Panara, at the end of the volume, offers its recipe. ""Going back to recognizing the social value of work is the first mission of a political class that really knows how to interpret the novelty of the XNUMXst century, and rebuilding its economic value is the most modern project it can adopt". Every time work has been relocated to the centre, a phase of civil and economic progress and the conquest of freedom has always followed. It has already happened other times in history, thanks to St. Benedict, Calvin and the great modern constitutions. The work must therefore constitute a new starting point for healing the West.
