Il paese delle pensioni anticipate e delle culle vuote

Abstract

In a recent book (La società signorile di massa, 2019), the sociologist Luca Ricolfi has provided an interpretation of Italy’s economic and social decline in recent decades. It would have become a lordship society, in which the economy has been stagnating for over two decades and in which “the citizens who access the surplus without working are more numerous than the citizens who work”. Ricolfi examines some of the major problems of contemporary Italy: the growing gap between the Center-North and the South; the stagnation of labor productivity for over twenty years; the reduced level of education of the population. It ends by signaling the risk of a “slow Argentinization” of Italy.The book presents a shareable description, but does not indicate the mechanisms that generated, and generate, the current situation in Italy. In particular, Ricolfi ignores the past and future dynamics of the systematic deficits in pension and welfare expenditure (regulated by political decisions) from the 1980s onwards. It also ignores the reduced female fertility rates, among the lowest in the world. The first contributed (1,491.18 billion euros in thirty-six years) to the creation of a gigantic public debt; the reduced fertility caused an increase in the average age. This also results from a comparison between Italy and other advanced countries.In Greek mythology the god Chrónos devoured his children for fear of being dethroned by them. The son Zeus, saved by his mother, drove his father into Tartarus, inaugurating a kingdom of order and justice over gods and men. In Italy, the country of early pensions and empty baby cots, the kingdom of Zeus still seems far away.