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Well let me tell you - being one of those Italian migrants - that Italy is stuck in a rut. What the parent wrote is painfully true even for myself. Only people

by eecc 9y ago

Well let me tell you - being one of those Italian migrants - that Italy is stuck in a rut. What the parent wrote is painfully true even for myself. Only people I know of that live a “normal” life are the privileged ones, who’d be elite anywhere else. I don’t know the exact causes: lack of focus on high margin activities (like, in the ‘90 the right was celebrating the small cottage industry in the North East, who was essentially competing with Eastern Europe and China... anyone’s guess how that ended?) Or if it was staying in the Eurozone, as until ‘90 we were ok deficit-wise. But very uncompetitive so we took a load of debt just to stay in the Euro - and buy German goods for cheap - and not to become competitive. In the meantime industrial production de-mobilized out of Europe and we’re just stuck with post-industrial parks and nothing to replace them with. I’ve somewhere read that neo-liberal single market zones develop a trend where human (economic) potential remains constrained by the local macro-zone, hence migrations.

toyg 9y ago
One of the causes is a cultural problem with elites being extremely short-termist in their outlook. Italy saw upheavals, revolutions and invasions during almost every generation since Roman times; the overall attitude is that you take your money today because tomorrow it might all be gone. Investing is considered foolish, people don’t like any sort of risk, and we celebrate taking advantage of others rather than helping them becoming the best they can be. It’s becoming increasingly clear that post-ww2 economic development in Italy was exceptional: powered by the Marshall plan and the need to rebuild a country from scratch after being bombed back into the middle ages, the market boomed. Once that wave was over and public money ran out, the traditional approach came back in fashion and the country stalled.
danmaz74 9y ago
We took most of our debt during the 1980s, well before the euro. During the 90s we already had to tighten our belt because of the high debt, which we were actually able to reduce, but, instead of investing in the future, we paid lots of money to keep existing industries that had no future here (eg Aluminium smelting, when we have the highest cost of electricity in the EU) and save jobs; for those jobs we couldn't save, we gave early pensions. When the Euro came, Berlusconi his voter base to use it as an excuse to raise prices - making us less competitive - while a very tax evasion friendly policy increased our debt again. In all, we got the the crisis as the most troubled EU economy after Greece - and we're paying the consequences.

by eecc 9y ago

toyg 9y ago

One of the causes is a cultural problem with elites being extremely short-termist in their outlook. Italy saw upheavals, revolutions and invasions during almost every generation since Roman times; the overall attitude is that you take your money today because tomorrow it might all be gone. Investing is considered foolish, people don’t like any sort of risk, and we celebrate taking advantage of others rather than helping them becoming the best they can be. It’s becoming increasingly clear that post-ww2 economic development in Italy was exceptional: powered by the Marshall plan and the need to rebuild a country from scratch after being bombed back into the middle ages, the market boomed. Once that wave was over and public money ran out, the traditional approach came back in fashion and the country stalled.

danmaz74 9y ago

We took most of our debt during the 1980s, well before the euro. During the 90s we already had to tighten our belt because of the high debt, which we were actually able to reduce, but, instead of investing in the future, we paid lots of money to keep existing industries that had no future here (eg Aluminium smelting, when we have the highest cost of electricity in the EU) and save jobs; for those jobs we couldn't save, we gave early pensions. When the Euro came, Berlusconi his voter base to use it as an excuse to raise prices - making us less competitive - while a very tax evasion friendly policy increased our debt again. In all, we got the the crisis as the most troubled EU economy after Greece - and we're paying the consequences.