"Certifying the end of an era, in 2020 the sales of gray suits - the symbol of clerical and managerial work in the last century - are more than halved compared to 2011". Difficult to better summarize the change of pace imposed by smartworking. But once again the Report on Capitalism of the Einaudi Center edited by Professor Deaglio's team, now in its 25th edition, stands out for the quality of combining macroeconomics and the change it induces in society. A necessary reading key to interpret the present, shocked by the year of the pandemic, but also by evils that come from afar.
“Let's try to compare the days lost in school last year. Abysmal distances emerge between region and region, confirming the weight of local powers". Here is Italy, with its stresses and its full of fears which, alas, today tend to prevail over the desire for change. “The temptation – says the former editor of Il Sole 24 Ore – is to want to go back to as we were before. But this is not enough to face the world that has changed”.
Italy, is the lesson, cannot limit itself to returning to the starting point, for several reasons. ”First of all – he continues – let us not forget that debts, sooner or later, they have to be paid. A country like ours cannot afford a decline in its financial credibility. But to achieve the goal we cannot give in to the temptation to restore the past in the workplace, perhaps relying on bank moratoriums”. “But dear Gros Pietro – he says to the president of Intesa San Paolo – as you rightly said the role of the bank today is to help weak companies to change”.
They are not only Italian problems, please. But, as in the case of falling birth rates or youth unemployment, Italy is the country that suffers the most, afflicted by a downward slide phenomenon which is also the result of a wrong approach in the past. “It's enough to say that they don't have children because there are no nursery schools – he comments George DeRita of Censis in the discussion – The real question is the nature of the work, the limits placed on the process. A forty-year-old today has behind him 15 years of zero growth in which he has not had the opportunity to grow". In this context, moreover, the Bel Paese is the one which, with the comfort of financial support from Europe, must demonstrate that it has learned its lesson. “It would be nice if on the occasion of the G20 next 30-31 October Italy showed up showing that it had learned from the past. In this case, perhaps, it will also have something to teach" to a world that, in the space of months rather than years, has shed its skin: "Globalisation, as we have experienced it in the last twenty years, belongs to the books of history".
Hence the rhadiography of a planet profoundly changed, where Amazon recruits almost half a million workers to make home deliveries, Europe rediscovers its function, China advances with an extraordinary willingness to restart. And America, split in two on many issues, rediscovers unity in the challenge to Beijing in a competition that unfolds on all international geopolitical chessboards, from Europe, to the Pacific, to Africa, to Central Asia. “This too is an evolution that has been going on for years, but which has undergone a change in the last eighteen months abrupt and conspicuous acceleration” as the eruption on the scene of the digital revolution and the environmental one.
The report develops this script more compelling than a novel in broad themes. A reading for educated and inclined that has the merit of never boring. Thanks to that mix of academic culture and acumen for the news which has always been a rare quality of Mario Deaglio, economist once lent to journalism.
