- (december 2008)
The Italian labroatory.
(This is a continuation of the article A HREF=italy08.html#ital0508> The fascists to the rescue).
A comedian, Beppe Grillo, is an appropriate metaphor for the Italian people
at the beginning of the 21st century. He likes to satirize the politicians,
and just about everything in his jokes is literally true. But all he can do
to change the system is to use the Italian equivalent of the "F" word ("vaffanculo"). If you read an article on how Italian politics works, you are likely to
think that it was written by such a comedian. The government passed a law
releasing thousands of criminals from jail for the sole purpose of salvaging
Cesare Previti, who happens to be Berlusconi's trusted lawyer and was about
to go to jail. Convoluted laws have been passed for apparent no practical
purpose, until you realize that they grant immunity on politicians involved
in organized crime (they even made it illegal to prosecute members of the
Parliament for dealing with criminals over the phone, thus denying the police
any motivation to wiretap their phones). If the laws protect the politicians
from being arrested or even just investigated, the system at large even protects
them from losing their seat. The vast majority of Italian politicians are over
the age of 70. Even in the rare occasion when they lose an election their party
simply recycles them in some other political job (typically in the European
parliament).
Foreigners have trouble understanding how it is possible that the city of Naples
cannot get an adequate system of garbage collection, but it's quite simple for
Italians to understand how decades of extreme corruption can lead to such a
situation.
Italy was always like this, except that for a long time political corruption
worked. The standard of living increased enormously between the end of World
War II and the 1960s, and it kept increasing until the early 1990s. Italians
knew that their leaders were robbing them, but that behavior was tolerated
because everybody benefited. After all, few countries in the world can boast
a welfare system as generous as the Italian one.
That "is" precisely the problem that Italians don't like to discuss: that they
benefited and still benefit as much as the corrupt politicians from this
corrupt system. Beppe Grillo shouts "vaffanculo" to the politicians but not
to the ordinary Italians who fundamentally don't want to change the system.
In fact, the biggest protest marches in Italy (after the ones against the USA)
are always in defense of something that the government wants to change.
Italians are united on one issue: keeping the current system as it is.
Italians are shocked to learn that Italy (a relatively small country) has double
the number of members of Parliament than the USA; and they earn twice as much.
But many of these Italians are themselves part of a grotesque class, whether
the "dirigenti" (who are entitled to colossal monthly payments at retirement),
or the state employees (who enjoy the best benefits and cannot be fire from the
job), or the bank employees (who often get paid 14 months a year), or the
teachers (who are entitled to retire at a relatively young age with a
full pension), or, quite simply, the women (who retire at 60).
If i keep listing all the beneficiaries of Italian oddities, i will probably
have listed 90% of the population.
Recently the Roman taxi cabs protested against a decision to increase the number
of taxis: they make more money (and are virtually assured of work for eternity)
if the number of taxis is inadequate.
Italy still has the class of "tabacchini", who are stores that sell cigarettes
and all sorts of "marche da bollo", that are stamps used to pay taxes on a
multitude of official documents. They now sell bus tickets too. They are
virtually untouchable: it's unthinkable of shutting down all the "tabacchini"
of Italy because they are tens of thousands.
Italy still has an army of "notai" that control business transactions and de
facto impose an additional tax on doing business in Italy, but the "notai" are
so many that they could start a revolution if the government tried to change
the rules.
One of the reasons that Italy is so uncompetitive on the world stage is that
for decades all sorts of industries asked the government to subsidize them and
to protect them against foreign competition. The result is that today most
Italian industries are not competitive (duh). The Italian economy relied on
protectionism and currency devaluation. Now the global economy and the euro
have called the bluff. But, again, that was happening because the Italian
workers were underperforming, both in quantity and quality. In no other country
workers catch the flue so easily and in no other country they stay home sick for
so many days and in no other country so many of them are handicapped for life.
All the Italians who helped create these embarrassing statistics thought that
they were smart: they weren't working as much as they should have, and they
were enjoying life instead. Now that their standard of living is beginning
to collapse they blame the government and forget all those sick days and all
the "handicapped" friends and relatives who have generously been awarded a
pension for life. More than 500,000 Italians have been retired for more than
40 years, paid monthly by the state to do literally nothing.
When Berlusconi stopped the judicial inquisition against corrupt politicians
called "Mani Pulite", many Italians agreed. They were beginning to sympathyze
with the various corrupt politicians who had stolen from the state. The truth
is that most Italians would have done the same thing, had they had the chance,
and many were probably friends or relatives of someone who had committed the
exact same crime at some level of the political or industrial hierarchy.
Italians complain that the state has been too tolerant towards illegal
immigrants. But the embarrassing truth is that immigrants account for about
10% of the gross national product, despite being only 5% of the population:
they literally produce twice as much as the Italians.
Immigrants represent
an increasing percentage of the workforce in all sorts of industries that
require "real" work (not just sitting at a desk and filing for early
retirement). The reason why immigrants get those jobs is simple: very few
Italians are willing to take those jobs, no matter for how long they have
been unemployed.
And there there are the ubiquitous street vendors, who are hated by the
shop-owners. But the shop-owners shut down their shops for lunch, for strikes,
for their grand-aunt's funeral and sometimes just for a soccer game, and
always early in the evening and
certainly on sunday, and in most cities also in the afternoon of one workday,
as well as on several religious and non-religious holidays, whereas the street
vendors work from sunrise to late night. Spend one month in Italy and you'll
wish that African street vendors also sold food, medicines, furniture, etc.
Universities have become a living symbol of Italy's decadence. They are infested
with the most obnoxious, incompetent and corrupt class of "professors" on the
planet. They are known as the "barons" because they exercise absolute power on
their subjects (the students). A university is just a bureaucracy intent on
maintaining itself. Some of those professors have never updated themselves
to the latest theories. Some of them have posters of Stalin in their office.
Investigations have shown that some employees of
universities obtained their jobs illegally. Far from resigning, they simply
took advantage of the fact that justice is so slow in Italy. After years of
investigations and trials, they were found guilty. Nonetheless they still hold
their jobs, and are currently raising a new generation of students.
No wonder that so many of Italy's brightest students end up moving abroad.
That's good riddance for their Italian professors, for whom they were mostly
an annoyance. If they ever return to Italy, they will be severely punished for
their experience abroad: the natural way to obtain an academic career in Italian
universities is to work like a slave for one of the barons, and every year you
spent abroad is an year wasted, no matter what credentials you accrued abroad.
Female students sometimes prostitute themselves to their professors in order to
obtain a position or just to pass an examination.
The fact is, though, that most Italian students take for granted that they will
obtain a degree without studying that hard, and then they will get a job in the
Academia without having done much to deserve it. It is true that the barons
run the system, but it is also true that this gives undeserving students a
chance that those students would not have in the USA; and the undeserving
students greatly outnumber the deserving ones. If a government enacted a reform
to fire all unqualified professors and run the university on strict meritocracy,
the students would probably complain: "are we supposed to study now?"
For example, the vast majority of Italian students cannot read, write or speak
English, despite the fact that English is a requirement. In 2008 this is
almost equivalent to being illiterate. Nonetheless they will graduate from
high school and then university, and will swell the army of substandard
workers of the Italian economy.
Hence the devastating record in research and development, the low number
of patents filed (i.e. inventions), and the inability of its companies to
come up with innovative ideas.
Hence the poor infrastruture. Very few countries in Italy have such a bad system
of highways, railways, phones. You get what you paid for: the people who run
all those systems are the graduates of those universities.
Italy is one of the biggest importers of energy in the world. That doesn't
come as a surprise in a country where the vast majority of voters approved
a referendum against nuclear power. While neighboring France and Switzerland
were massively investing in this technology, Italy annihilated one of the
best schools of nuclear engineers in the world. Italians have been long proud
that none of their electricity comes from nuclear power, as if that made them
the avantgarde in green energy. They are less open
about confessing that they produce 57 times less solar energy than Germany
(even if Italy gets a lot more sunshine than Germany).
While Italy was boasting that 0% of its energy comes from nuclear power, France
increased its production to 78% of its energy needs. The very same Italians
who voted against nuclear energy and who would still vote against it have no
qualms in emigrating to France, Switzerland, Britain and the USA, and maybe
even to live right next to a nuclear power... as long as it is not located
in Italy.
One of Italy's biggest problems for the future is that it is raising too few
specialists in the disciplines of the future, from digital communications to
biotechnology to finance to sustainable energy to software and hardware.
But it is not only a failure of the government: Italian students are not
particularly crazy about getting a degree in the productive part of society.
They prefer degrees that will lead to an anonymous career in one of the many
government agencies.
Beppe Grillo should start satirizing ordinary Italians and not only Italian
politicians. Italy will not solve its problems until ordinary Italians change
their habits.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (may 2008)
The fascists to the rescue.
Right-wing parties have swept elections all over Western Europe, with the exception of Spain. Merkel won in Germany, Sarkozy in France, Berlusconi in Italy.
It is only in Italy, though, that the conservatives won because of a dramatic
increase of votes for the far right. The two members of Berlusconi's coalition
that greatly increased their votes are the xenophobic Lega Del Nord (that used
to advocate the expulsion of all immigrants and the independence of the northern
regions) and the former fascist party (that has changed name countless times
but is still led by the same people, pupils of Almirante who was a pupil of Mussolini).
Italians are not fascist at all. In fact, Italy has no imperial ambitions
at all. Italians are more likely to dissolve the Italian republic than of
invading another country. Italians justify their vote by saying that they are
fed up with corrupt and/or incompetent politicians. They have tried the
less corrupt but also less competent (the Left) and now, out of desperation,
they want to try again the more corrupt but also more competent Berlusconi
alliance, and the votes to the Lega and to the fascists are votes to the
most competent and least corrupt of Berlusconi's allies.
In other words, the lesser evil of the lesser evil.
What most Italians neglect is that Italian politicians have to rule over
the Italian people. This is not an easy task. Giovanni Giolitti famously commented
that governing the Italians is not impossible, it is just pointless. One wonders
if he was an optimist because governing the Italians may have become impossible
too. Italians don't seem to realize that their politicians have to deal with
one of the least cohesive and most "decadent" societies in the world. Regardless
of whether one approves of modern Italian customs, it is certainly a new kind
of society, that few politicians in the world would know how to deal with.
The president of the USA has to deal with a nation that is largely made of
married couples with two or three children. The leaders of China and India
have to deal with nations that are rapidly changing, but still have strong
moral values that have been tested over the centuries.
Italians have created a society that is rapidly becoming the leader in terms
of free sex and drugs. Italy, that lags behind in just about every economic,
industrial, scientific, educational statistics
(no Italian university makes the list of best universities in the world, Italy ranks
49th in the "The Competitiveness Report 2007-2008" by the World Economic Forum, etc),
has staged impressive
"progress" in terms of teenage pregnancies, divorces, unmarried couples,
out-of-wedlock children, AIDS, drug consumption, drug addicts.
At the same time Italians read fewer books and newspapers than any other
major nation (they do have the largest-circulation sport newspaper in the
world though).
The decline in creativity and competitivity has been paralleled by a
boom in hedonistic customs that has no equal around the world.
Depending on your beliefs, Italians may live a great life or a terrible life,
but it is a fact that Italian politicians have to deal with a society that
is rapidly turning into a non-society (check out your dictionary's definition
of "society") that looks more like a non-stop orgy.
Italians who are not particularly attracted by the orgy are leaving the country
by the thousands. Many buy a house somewhere else (Croatia, Spain, even Morocco)
and retire. Others emigrate to the traditional destinations of Italian
emigrants (USA, Britain, Germany), except that these days Italians also boast
one of the worst educational systems in the world, which makes them less
likely to find a decent job abroad than immigrants from many developing
countries (count how many Italians can speak English, to start with the simple
one).
At the end of the day, foreigners who are shocked by the continuous re-elections
of a convicted crook like Berlusconi and by the increased support for fascists
and xenophobes completely miss the point. This is a nation that does not believe
in anything anymore. When you don't believe in anything, it is not clear what
your politicians should give you.
Governing such a nation may not be impossible yet, but it has become a lottery.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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