Water and pasta are not subsidised by highly progressive taxes. I can't speak highly of the education system in Italy, it didn't change since the fascist era an

Water and pasta are not subsidised by highly progressive taxes. I can't speak highly of the education system in Italy, it didn't change since the fascist era and it's still mostly a bunch of rote memorisation and teachers with sadist tendencies. I had to study Latin in a computer science focused high school, for **'s sake. I found the education in Finland or in the UK to be way more reasonable in terms of load. Italy is not overrepresented in the number of people in tech, as far as I can tell; the way in which the author was lucky, was that he had access to tech and was in a stable (familiar and societal) environment that allowed him to focus on computer science, which happened to be a good move, given the value of tech nowadays. Besides "highly progressive taxes" just means that wealthy middle class are footing the bill with half their salary while millionaires use company loopholes to pay 0. Taxes are never going to be fair, because the richest people in society will always have the greatest incentive (aka: a large potential tax bill) and the greatest skills (aka: a lot of bribes and lobbying) in changing the laws so that they're somehow exempt.