Sul Corriere della Sera of April 18 Antonio Polito strikes hard on what, according to him, are the inadequacies and errors of the left in the management of the welfare crisis: having "forgotten social hardship", having believed that "work had to take care of poverty", " that the social problem could be solved with education” and that he acted only in defense of the “guaranteed with a job and an income, like the recipients of Renzi's €80”. Having ignored the "losers of the new social competition" that "populism has gathered behind its banners".
Polito's thesis is that welfare consists in spreading "a net under which no citizen can fall".
It is a point of view, however rather distant from the positions he expressed The Reformist when Polito was its director, whom I would like to contest on the merits, not to argue with Polito, of whom I have always held great esteem, but because his position is emblematic of a self-flagellation tendency which is manifesting itself on the reformist left.
First of all, I believe that the vulgate of the "losers ... the forgotten men", the poor who would constitute the army of the populists, should be widely redimensioned: on the same page of the newspaper, the article by Dario Di Vico shows that the commonly accepted figures must be reviewed against the facts : 1 million 650.000 people already identified as recipients of the Citizenship Income (RdC), to which can be added 206.000 new recipients of the new applications booked but not yet worked (75% of 100.000 applications multiplied by 2,65 individuals per family) and, for statistical accuracy, about 80.000 immigrants who have been resident for less than 10 years and therefore not entitled. Total 1.936.000, very far from the 5.058.000 estimated by ISTAT and on which all accounts and evaluations have always been made.
Even thinking that the figure could grow further for various reasons, it will be difficult to reach half of the "expected" poor. Those who decreed the success of the M5S in the 2018 elections are not these "forgotten": even if everyone as a whole had voted for the M5S they would not have represented even 25% of the more than 10 million votes received by the party.
The legend of the Forgotten as a basis for populists it doesn't work..!
Unless introducing a new category: that of Forgotten perceived, i.e. those who, while not meeting the criteria for defining absolute poverty, feel poor. Of course the sentiment it is a serious indicator and should not be underestimated, but it must be traced back to some objective evidence if we are to take it into account when defining social protection policies. Now, the thresholds used by ISTAT to define the state of absolute poverty are not unreasonably low: for example, a family made up of two adults and two minors living in a large northern city and unable to spend 1.746,82 is considered poor. €5 a month, or a family of 1.466,77 adults who are unable to spend €XNUMX a month in a small town in the South.
On the basis of these thresholds, the estimate of 5 million poor people is plausible: however these 5 million when we come to the point do not jump out!
As Di Vico writes, perhaps the RdC will have the useful side effect of making us a true statistic of poverty in Italy! But it is appropriate to venture a few hypotheses about the reasons why, in all evidence, the real data tend to diverge from the estimated ones.
I think the reason is similar to the one in which the commonly released data on the amount of pensions show a desolate panorama of starving old people, but neglect to mention that each real pensioner receives on average 1,5 pensions, which changes basically the landscape. Similarly, a percentage that is difficult to specify, but which can probably be around 50% on the basis of the results examined above by the RdC, of poor theorists is the recipient of a mix of interventions/subsidies paid by the Municipalities, Regions or other provisions with various motivations (large families, support for studies, maternity, help for the disabled, help for rent, etc.) which ultimately determine a real income that takes them out of the statistically defined condition of poverty and the requisites envisaged for the RdC. Certainly not to a condition of well-being, but this can hardly be guaranteed by Welfare in the reality of the West in the third millennium.
And this is where the discourse on work comes in: the left was not wrong in saying that it is the only real remedy for poverty. 26,7% (ISTAT 2017 data) of the poor are unemployed looking for work, 11,9% are not active unemployed, only 4% are retired. Only 6% of the employed fall within the poor range (which in any case implies opening a reflection on the working poor).
Furthermore: the data show us that there is indeed an inverse relationship between education and poverty. ISTAT tells us that families in which the reference person only has an elementary school leaving certificate fall into conditions of poverty in 10.7% of cases, and if they have a middle school leaving certificate in 9,6%. If he has a higher education qualification, the percentage of poverty falls to 3,6%. Employment and education (as it is functional to employment) are effectively the most reliable insurance against poverty. So the main problem we should ask ourselves, even before the safety net, is that of education - training and employment service policies.
Finally: Renzi would have favored the "guaranteed" with the 80 €. In reality it is a different operation, with a non-welfare aspect: cutting the tax-contribution wedge means increasing net wages and therefore reducing labor costs. A provision on the side of productivity and not of welfare, still insufficient but oriented in the direction that has always been invoked by trade unions and entrepreneurs to grow employment and competitiveness.
Polito's reasoning seems to give rise to a vision of welfare as an alternative solution for those who are not working, which would be entirely acceptable if it were a temporary subsidy linked to a job placement process (as it is throughout Europe) except in exceptional cases of people unable to work due to pathologies or age (which, however, are usually assisted with ad hoc annuities), but not if it creates a condition in which, in fact, one can choose between welfare and work.
Which is exactly what the Citizenship Income will produce; but that doesn't bother Polito, who actually subscribes to Prof. Tridico's opinion: “taking people out of poverty matters more than getting them into work”. But this interpretation has very little to do with the "safety net".
But let's go back to the basic question: how many are the "real" poor in Italy? How many are unemployed even if they are not poor? What is the priority of a government agenda that thinks about the future and not the next elections? Assistance (a few, cursed and immediately!) or employment?
Of course one does not exclude the other, but where should the emphasis be placed? This, and it must be made explicit and valued, is the distance that runs between the welfare of liberal socialist reformism and populist welfare. (
