Divulging the economy is not easy and we are all "extremely vulnerable, exposed to all sorts of errors or manipulations, even when we believe we have evolved enough not to run this risk".
The intervention of the director general of the Bank of Italy, Salvatore Rossi, during the Lectio Magistralis held at the economic campus of the Ca' Foscari University in Venice, starts from these premises. The theme is very topical because the need to divulge serious and reliable information increasingly clashes with the ease of divulging, often on social networks, "hoaxes" or news that is not entirely false but only partially true. Thus generating disinformation, confusion and easy illusions. Especially if the bad information is used for political ends. But the dangers of the past have even worsened today. “When ideologies have faded away until it almost disappeared and the electorate was transformed into the audience of a continuous and endless show, iPolitical marketing has become the only language spoken by politicians in democratic regimes to the masses and understood by them".
“Today the discourse between voters and those elected must be continuous, uninterrupted – said Rossi – and take place through all types of means of communication, especially those, such as social media, for instant consumption. It should be noted that all this does not apply only to economic facts in the strict sense, but also to other fields of administrative and political action, such as foreign policy for example”. If “in order to tell the state of national interests and international relations, narratives based on story telling techniques – to be clear, those at the basis of television dramas – spread in order to tickle the moods of the public; if the success of ratings in the short term counts, regardless of the effective reality of national interests in the medium to long term; then the diplomatic apparatus of a democratic country finds it increasingly difficult to direct the action of rulers interested only in minute-by-minute advertising of one's political party to current and potential voters".
It is necessary to reflect, concluded Rossi, on the fact that "science (including economics) is indeed "democratic, but only within it". "All those who are outside of it - he underlined - that is the community of citizens, must trust the fact that the scientific community has strict rules, designed to ensure that it works in the best interest of all humanity". Rossi concluded his lectio with a peremptory invitation to economists to make their voices heard. “What in past times was only recommendable – that is, that economists make more and better dissemination of good, validated economic theories and data – becomes imperative and urgent in times, such as the present ones, of ubiquitous bad or imprecise economic information, used political ends. It affects not only the good name of the economic profession, but the correct functioning of our democratic societies".
The examples with which Rossi motivated his analysis are countless. Here's one. Italy is growing little and less than it could.” The cliché states that the Italian economy could be prosperous and happy if only Europe, out of Teutonic stupidity, and the markets, out of occasional political antipathies, didn't impose a shirt of financial strength". But that's not the case: "The main issue of the Italian economy is that, when something is produced (an industrial machinery, a legal opinion, a history lesson), it is not done efficiently enough". And so "the Italian economy suffers from a competitive disadvantage and a lack of growth compared to others". Conclusion: “The causes of this situation are many and we are not discussing them here. One thing is certain: the problem cannot be solved by inducing the State to go into debt”.
In his Lectio Rossi addresses the media and researchers but not only. The ability to disseminate – understood as the ability to translate but also to prune and go to the essentials – “has become essential to curb the drift towards superficiality, approximation, falsehood, manipulation that threatens to overwhelm us. Anyone who is in the trenches and laboriously pushes forward the frontier of knowledge in his small field can no longer turn his head and say: it's none of my business, it can't be my business to make my neighbor understand that he's a lawyer or a plumber. So you become accomplices of those who make superficiality or manipulation their creed. Of those who transform economic or foreign policy into instantaneous political marketing”.
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