There is no one like Joseph DeRita with its Census able to make sense of the changes in Italian society, from the muddy layers of the depths to the ripples that announce its novelties. De Rita's sociology feeds on statistics and transforms them into a narrative with a style that has made school, and every year he produces a monumental "Report on the general situation of the country" - made public this morning at 10 in the Cnel headquarters - which offers infinite topics for reflection by the political class, economic operators, reformers and institutions. Of the 500 or more pages of the Report, De Rita always offers a suggestion that sums them up: a compass for reading, a viaticum not to get lost, a "superTag" that represents the dominant character of the year, often an image taken out of his sociologist-illusionist hat.
This year there are two characters: the “dormant capital”, and “land jars".
Let's start with the first. The Italian company told by Censis has left aside the fear of the crisis that has paralyzed it in recent years, and the portion of those who think that the worst is behind them has increased by 12 points, to 47 percent. However, this does not mean that optimism prevails. On the contrary. The general climate is quite thewait and see. Bad disease, because it means withdrawal and defense. You can see it on money: from 2008 to 2013 the portfolio of financial assets decreased, except for working capital. People have increased their liquid assets (from 27 to 31 percent of the portfolio) to have them on hand, ready for cash. And it can also be seen in the second strategy put in place to adapt to the times: the return to the informal economy, to the black economy.
What did the companies do? The part that should be the driving force of the country has put aside the verb to undertake and has declined the verb to accumulate. From 2007 to 2013 there was a record slump in investment equal to 333 billion euros (and to say that now we place our hopes on Junker's 300 billion, which doesn't even really exist!). Do you think this is due to the fact that companies have had to tighten their belts? Not at all. In the same years, the EBITDA of companies "remained high and at times increasing", writes the Report, but above all the available equity of companies grew, reaching 5,8 times the gross fixed investments made during the year. Just as the liquid resources kept on hand have grown (from 238 to 274 billion from 2008 to today). Other than credit crunch.
The behavior of these two social subjects is already enough to explain why Censis speaks of unused capital: it means that potentially rich deposit of resources that remains unused, stationary, sterile. That is, it ceases to be capital, there is only a pile of money left. And this is what is found in the country also under other profiles. That of human capital, for example, with its pool of 8 million individuals (including unemployed, discouraged and inactive willing to work), which reveals another dissipation of vital energies, and that of cultural heritage which produces no value. While France, Germany and Spain created jobs in the cultural sector and increased its added value, here - the first country in the world in the ranking of UNESCO sites - the added value of the cultural sector decreased and the employed grew yes but at an incomparably faster pace slow.
Then there is the key to reading the jars. What are jars in Deritian imagination? They are areas rich inside but not communicating, beautiful pot-bellied but closed vases. It is the mirror of today's Italian society but also of the forces that influence it, disappeared as are the connecting elements that were there in the past.
In fact, the "intermediate bodies", from parties to trade unions, have waned, but even the parliament is not doing so well. One figure for all: since the end of 2011, 82 decree laws have been presented by the various governments, 72 of which have been converted, then further modified, all with the final result of texts containing a flood of regulations with 1.185.1171 .11,6 words, which is XNUMX times those contained in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.
The disappearance of intermediate bodies has not produced greater direct social participation, but its opposite, as seen in the last elections in Emilia-Romagna and Calabria, with abstentionism skyrocketing. In short, the company is increasingly liquid. «And a liquid society makes the system liquefied», says De Rita, «which therefore becomes “asystemic”». But how does a society that no longer believes in the system organize itself? Here are the jars, that is, the different worlds that do not communicate with each other. Censis identifies seven.
The first jar is that of big international finance, very powerful, and which follows its profit logic completely detached from national needs and expectations, impossible to influence it. The second jar is the world of national policy, with the primacy claimed by Matteo Renzi, but with two obvious limitations: it lacks the power to condition - upwards - community policies; it does not have immediate power downwards, over public administration and collective behaviour. All of this runs the risk of "consigning it to the game of politics alone".
In the third jar is thepublic administration and institutions: “We have large structures that are now literally empty of skills and personnel”, writes Censis, “large ministries whose functioning is contracted out to external consultancy or IT companies; we have public structures that are ambiguous properties of personal principalities” (the CDP?)… which no longer provide a service to politics or society.
But also that active minority made up of capable and vital entrepreneurs, that lively part of the country that Censis had praised in past years has ended up in a jar: more and more locked up in their own logic, in the competitive challenge that I have to face, individualists and egoists: "it is vitality without collective efficacy", this is how the Relationship. And we are at the fifth jar, that of the “people” (gentism is a newly minted phenomenon), which goes neither forward nor backward, has no hope of improving its position, but has not yet acknowledged its decline; however, it can incubate new inequalities and a dangerous discontent, but today it seems rather exposed to a "deflation of expectations", which is nothing more than a transposition on the social level of the phenomenon that we already register on the economic level and which is a disease more dangerous than inflation.
The this picture there is also a big comeback: the black. That phenomenon that Censis itself discovered forty years ago as a component of the development of society, now returns as self-defense, escape from the crisis, a ploy of adaptation. It is in the sixth jar, and by its nature this gray area does not communicate with all the others. Nor does the world of communication anymore, placed in the seventh and last container of this molecular society.
Apparently the world of communication has never been so rich and powerful, with the multiplication of intersecting levels of participation, with thousands of subjects who converse with each other through Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on. Yet it is like a bubble that grows but is increasingly self-referential. For professionals in the sector, communication is above all hinged on the pairing of "opinion-event", says Censis, and it is no longer clear whether it actually has "antennas outstretched to understand the real changes taking place in society day by day". As for network users, they "create content in a continuous stream" but speak to themselves: the individual is mirrored in the media, of which he is both content and producer (everything is a selfie). Result: large and evident presence, limited collective effectiveness.
What can break the seven jars, what can bring all the components they contain back into dialogue? Here De Rita launches a surprise message: an opening of credit to politics. Breaking with a tradition that has always seen Censis as "apolitical", this year's Report indicates a way out of the system's loss of collective energy, from the inert acceptance of what exists, from the destiny of stable mediocrity. The action of politics. However, a policy - De Rita specifies in the pages written in his own hand - which knows how to show ruthless adherence to reality, which is faithful to our roots, which is not afraid of the dialectic to make decisions mature, and which is able to solicit others to think for themselves. It's not cheap, but you can try.
Is the grand old man of Censis ready to "get his hands dirty"?
