A Nice Place to Visit
It is sometimes sunny though
Tomorrow Italy will vote and we should say something about that.
“Upper Italy” is fatally attracted by what is “interesting”, though to a degree we may save ourselves with an eccentric definition of just what that might be. Still, if we can’t tell an odd story about something, we’re not likely to write about it.
The problem with this is that readers are likely to get a kind of “Fat Greek Wedding” view of this country, dysfunctional but entertaining and somehow cuddly.
If you have been reading our notes carefully, we have been writing about a severely flawed Western democracy characterized by extensive public and private corruption, incompetently led and which takes its “moral” guidance from a technophobic, misanthropic and misogynist Church now in full flight from the modern world.
It is, in other words, a country in deep shit. Not much fun in that.
This sounds like an opinion, and not a very generous one. But if we are even at all close to speaking the truth there must be some objective confirming evidence. The flaws in attempting to actually know anything through statistical data are well understood, but we would not want you to just take our word on the dramatic and rapid decline of Italian society.
This is what the new OECD Factbook 2008 – that’s (here), if you want to look yourself – has just said about Italy in terms of leading economic indicators:
Italy is in last place among the principal industrialized nations for productivity. In terms of GDP for hours worked, growth has been nearly nonexistent (“below 0.5 per cent”) since the turn of this Century.
According to a somewhat dodgy OECD-flavored piece of data called “multifactoral productivity,” which is supposed to take into account elements relating to technological and organizational innovation, growth has actually been negative, falling by about half a per cent per year.
The country is still the world’s sixth largest economy, but it has slipped to 20th place in terms of GDP per capita, just behind Spain, and it is dead last for economic growth in recent years among the 30 most industrialized nations. It’s index of population increase is extraordinarily low (+0.08 per cent in 2006), as is its birth rate (1.34 per thousand) and the female employment level (46%).
There are though lots of old people. Those above age 65 were 19 per cent of the population in 2006 and are calculated to be just over a third (33.7 per cent) by 2050, when Italy will be in the most unfavorable position of any OECD country in terms of the proportion between employed persons and retirees, meaning there will be nearly no-one to pay the bills.
In the meantime, the Italians are among the lowest paid of any of the big industrialized countries, with an economy-wide average compensation per position of $35,833 in 2006. Statistically, this is the result of an average 2 per cent annual increase in wages between 1995 and 2006, the third lowest in the OECD.
It’s not that the Italians don’t work enough: they are in eighth place at 1,800 hours a year, with an astonishing 26.7 per cent self-employed in the “civil” sector. Italy further is that OECD country with the greatest internal geographic differences in local unemployment levels. There are vast swaths of territory, mostly in the South, where the unemployment rate climbs well above 30 per cent.
The country does enjoy one particular form of excellence, if we may use that word; it has, after Turkey, the highest level of “inactive youth” in the OECD. 10.9 per cent of males and 11.4 per cent of females between the ages of 15 and 19 do nothing at all; they neither work nor attend school. Those who are studying instead do not seem to be getting much out of it. The so-called “PISA” performance testing, administered annually across OECD countries, places Italian high school students near the bottom of the list (24th place of 30) for academic achievement.
Italy invests very little in research, just over 2% of GDP, and is at 24th place out of 30 for researchers employed. It does very well instead in terms of the number of telephones (fourth place overall for telephone access) and rather worse for freeway construction (next to last place). It is third to last for international development aid (0.20 per cent of GDP in 2006) and, perhaps surprisingly, spends little for culture and entertainment (families about 4.1 per cent of GDP in 2005 and the State about 0.8 per cent). So they’re not even having fun, at least of the organized variety.
If you believe we have been “cherry picking” data to paint a dark picture, unfortunately, we haven’t. Things suck.
Tomorrow and Monday the Italians will go to the polls, and their choice is essentially between the Center-Left heirs of the previous Prodi government – which stank – and the return of Silvio Berlusconi and his Center-Right coalition, which stank too when it last governed.
We hold similar opinions in Italian and the last time we expressed them in that language we cleverly observed that the country was getting a choice between “incompetenza e incontinenza” – “incompetence and incontinence” – between, that is, the Prodi government’s evident level of ability and Mr. Berlusconi’s mouth. The problem with this formulation is that it suggests that while Berlusconi continuously says and presumably thinks stupid shit, his side might at least be competent. Unfortunately, it is not.
These last days before the elections have been depressing, a continuous round of friends calling to say, “Who in the hell should we vote for?” The young and ambitious are voting with their feet. It is something more than a “brain drain” of highly trained scientists, technicians and managers. It is a vitality drain. There is no real data. Young and youngish people are just leaving. It is the dirty secret neither the Left nor the Right wants to talk about.
There is no way around it; this new desperation must be laid at the door of the Establishment that governs Italy – and of whatever political flavor, since both have had a crack at it.
It certainly can be argued that Western economies and prospects appear to be going to hell in a generalized hand-basket at the moment. This is undeniable. We are though reminded of Olivetti’s explanation when it quite suddenly was no longer able to sell the personal computers it used to make. There had been a “downturn” in the market. Quite true. Why then were Dell or Compaq or someone still able to make quite a good thing out of it? That was then, of course…
All boats, it is said, float with the tide – meaning, in stock market jargon, that broadly speaking all shares tend to rise and fall together. Okay. But when your boat is always stuck in the mud, through good times and the bad, well, maybe you might want to toss the officers overboard and try again.
Italy though has cleverly rigged itself and its system into immobility. Most likely the last straw came a few years ago when, without paying any attention to speak of, the population gave up the right to vote for individual parliamentary candidates. Since election is now only by party lists, it is at present not in any way possible to vote for a candidate because you believe him to be competent – or to vote against him if you know for a certainty that he is not.
These are the people making the laws and, ultimately, governing the country. It is of little satisfaction to know that they are far and away the most highly paid parliamentarians in Europe.
The problem about this for Italy is that there is no-one to revolt against. As the saying goes, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The place isn’t harshly governed, it’s just badly governed. The degree of overall individual freedom is remarkable and laudable, certainly higher than it is in the US. All this however is not without cost and the fact that neither the population nor its leaders have wanted to pay the ticket is now, ah, coming home to roost.
But after all, you don’t get ruins by building them. The country has too much proof laying around that you can sometimes make a fair living just out of letting things go to hell in a colorful way…
(We have, unreasonably probably, assumed that anyone who bothered to read all the way down to here would probably already know that the OECD is the “Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.” Based in Paris, it is an entity jointly sponsored by thirty countries “that accept the principles of representative democracy and a free market economy.” In practice, these are the world’s thirty leading economies.)