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    [title] => Let's save the Black Friday natives
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Commentaries - The religion of consumption and its sacrificial rites


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 23/11/2018


Black friday 2018 02 ridIf anyone still has any doubt that our capitalism has become something very similar to a religion, they just have to take a good look around on the web and the big shopping malls today and then try to figure out what's really going on. In the places where Black Friday is celebrated what is happening is something very similar to a religious phenomenon, with many traits in common with the functions of traditional religions.

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Even this capitalism has a growing need for rites, liturgies, churches, festivals, processions, songs, sacred words, priests and communities; just like any other religion it wants us to cross the threshold of the temple to enter another time in which to enjoy non-ordinary dimensions of life.


But, if we look at it more carefully, we realize that from each of these 'sacred' elements one or more essential components have been amputated. It is precisely this amputation that distances consumer capitalism from 'real' religions (particularly from the Jewish-Christian biblical horizon), and brings it closer to the idolatrous cults typical of the first archaic religious forms, without having the purity of the eyes of ancient people. And so, in the twilight of the gods of traditional religions, contemporary man finds himself in a world freed from the biblical God and repopulated by an infinite number of idols that are less interesting than those of Egypt or Babylon.


To understand this, let's think of the discounts that make up the centre around which the ritual of Black Friday revolves. Even if doubts are raised about their 'truth’ every year, discounts are generally real. It is so because real discount is an essential element of the cult. Discounts must be real, because there is no religion without some form of gift, grace and sacrifice. With one fundamental difference, however, that reveals much of the sacred nature of this day. In traditional religions it is the faithful who offer gifts to their God, in the capitalist 'religion' it is instead the enterprise - god who offers 'gifts' to his faithful. The direction changes because the sense of worship is the opposite. In fact, in the religion of consumption, the idol is not the commodity but the consumer, whom businesses try to retain (or, to use another religious word, make faithful to themselves) with their discount-sacrifice. It’s a gift without gratuitousness, and therefore not religion but idolatry.


But that's not all. The gift of this day is a homoeopathic gift, that is, the like that cures the like. This concept is also very archaic. With the homoeopathic kind of gift you take a very small part of the disease you want to cure and you put it in your body in order to immunize yourself from it. Capitalism knows very well that the true and free gift would be subversive and destabilizing for corporate and financial balances, also because it has no price, it is not for sale, it cannot be encouraged; and so it sterilizes it by introducing 'giftlings’ into its body. In its essence, Black Friday is therefore the great operation attempted by the market to immunize itself from gifts by means of discounts, to try to keep authentic gratuitousness far from its temples.


 It is not by coincidence that Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the memorial of the great abundance of the first harvest when the ‘pilgrims’ (the first settlers - the tr.) arrived in the New World. It is therefore a feast of gratitude and gratuitousness, which the next day tries to neutralize nowadays. We must do everything so that it does not really happen. Because on the day in which gratuitousness is definitively expelled from the markets and the enterprises the whole economy will implode. The magnificent economic system lives and regenerates every day because millions of people give their businesses more than they should give as per contracts and incentives. And they do it simply by working, entering every morning into offices and shops as whole people, and therefore also with their ability to donate and to donate themselves, because this is where much of our dignity and freedom is played out. The main defence against the constant, tenacious and growing war unleashed against gratuitousness therefore lies above all in trying to preserve our moral and spiritual capacity to distinguish gifts from discounts. We must save this distinction especially for today's children, the 'natives' of Black Friday, because on the day they begin to confuse the gift with the discount they will find themselves in an infinitely poorer world. The price of gratuitousness is infinite; no discount can reduce its value.

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Commentaries - The religion of consumption and its sacrificial rites


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 23/11/2018


Black friday 2018 02 ridIf anyone still has any doubt that our capitalism has become something very similar to a religion, they just have to take a good look around on the web and the big shopping malls today and then try to figure out what's really going on. In the places where Black Friday is celebrated what is happening is something very similar to a religious phenomenon, with many traits in common with the functions of traditional religions.

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Let's save the Black Friday natives
EN - Avvenire Editorials

Let's save the Black Friday natives

Commentaries - The religion of consumption and its sacrificial rites by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 23/11/2018 If anyone still has any doubt that our capitalism has become something very similar to a religion, they just have to take a good look around on the web and the big shopping malls... 
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Why we should start again from common goods and relational goods. From economist Luigino Bruni’s talk he gave on the second day of the World Meeting of Families in Dublin.


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 23/08/2018


Famiglia Avvenire ridEconomy is a word of ancient Greek origins that refers directly to the house (oikosnomos, rules for managing the house), therefore to the family. Yet modern economy – and its contemporary version even more so – has been thought of as an area governed by different principles, distinct and in many ways opposed to the principles and values that have always held up and continue to hold up the family. A founding principle of the family, perhaps the first and the one underlying the others, is that of gratuitousness, which is the furthest away from capitalist economy that only knows surrogates of gratuitousness (discounts, philanthropy, sales) that play the role of immunizing the markets from real gratuitousness.

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The family, in fact, is the most important place where we learn, throughout our lives and in a very special way as children, what Pavel Florensky called 'the art of gratuitousness'. It is there that – above all as children – we also learn to work, because no job can be well done without gratuitousness. Our culture, however, associates gratuitousness with free things, gadgets, discounts, half an hour more of unpaid work, or the price zero (although St. Francis taught us that gratuitousness is an infinite price: you can neither buy nor sell it because it is priceless). In reality, gratuitousness is something very serious, as it was explained very clearly to us by Caritas in Veritate, which reclaims the status of economic principle to gratuitousness. Gratuitousness is charis, grace, but it is also agape, as it was well known by the first Christians. They translated the Greek word agape with the Latin expression charitas (with the h), precisely to indicate that that Latin word translated to agape but also charis at the same time, and for this reason that different love was neither only eros nor only philia (friendship). Gratuitousness, this gratuitousness, then, is a way of acting and a way of life that consists in approaching others, oneself, nature, God and things in a way not to use them in a utilitarian manner for one's own advantage, but to recognize them in their otherness and in their mystery, to respect and serve them. To say gratuitousness therefore means recognizing that a certain behaviour must be practised because it is good, and not because of a reward or sanction for it. Gratuitousness thus saves us from the predatory tendency that exists in every person, it prevents us from devouring others and ourselves. It is what distinguishes prayer from magic, faith from idolatry, what saves us from narcissism, which is the great mass disease of our time, because of a lack of gratuitousness.


If the family wants to - and it should - cultivate the art of gratuitousness, it must take great care not to import the logic of the incentive that exists everywhere today into their home. Woe to those who, for example, use the logic of incentive within the family dynamics. Money should be used very little in the family, especially around children and young people (actually everyone), and if used it should be used as a reward or recognition of an action well done for intrinsic reasons, and never as a price. One of the typical tasks of the family is precisely to form the ethics of work well done in people, an ethics that arises precisely from the principle of gratuitousness. If, on the other hand, the logic and culture of the incentive is also practised in the family, and therefore money becomes the reason 'why’ one does or does not do homework and household chores, those children will hardly be good workers as adults, because the job well done in future always rests on this gratuitousness that one learns above all in the first years of life, and above all at home.


The absence of the principle of gratuitousness in the economy also depends on the absence of a female gaze – very much. The house, the oikos, has always been the place inhabited and governed by women. But, paradoxically, the economy has been, and continues to be, a matter entirely played out in the male register. Males, too, have always had to deal with the house, and a lot. However, their gaze focused on providing the means for sustenance, on outside work, goods and on money. And when the economy left the domain of domestic life and became political, social and civil, the female gaze and genius remained inside the house, and the male one remained the only perspective in practice and above all in the economic and managerial theory. Women look at the home and the economy seeing first of all the connections of human relations taking place in them. The first goods they see are relational goods and common goods, and inside these they also see the economic goods. It is certainly not a coincidence that the Economy of Communion was born from the gaze of a woman (Chiara Lubich), or that the first theorist of common goods was Katherine Coman (in 1911), and that Elinor Ostrom was awarded (as the only woman so far) the Nobel prize in economics for her work on common goods. And there are two women (Martha Nussbaum and Carol Uhlaner) at the origin of the theory of relational goods. When there is no feminine view of the economy, the only relations seen are the instrumental ones, where it is not the relationship that is considered as a good, but where human relations and those with nature are the means used to obtain goods.


If the female gaze and genius of the oikos-house had been present in the theoretical foundation of modern economy, we would have had an economy that’s more attentive to relationships, to the redistribution of income, to the environment and perhaps to communion. Communion is, in fact, a great word that can pass from the family to the economy of today. And here a specific discourse opens for Christians. The church today is called to be more and more prophecy if it wants to save itself and save people. Prophecy is also a word of the family. Most of the biblical prophets were married, and many of the prophetic words and gestures of the Bible are the words of women. Isaiah called his son Shear-jashub, which means 'a remnant shall return': it is one of the great messages of his prophecy. He couldn't find a better way to launch his prophetic message than by making it his son's name. Every child is a prophetic message, because they say with their own being that the earth will still have a future, and that it can be better than the present. To be credible, the prophecy of the family today must take the form of children and the form of the economy, and therefore of sharing, acceptance and communion. Because both children and the economy are nothing more than the ordinary life of each and every one, which is the only place where prophecy feeds and grows.



 

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    [text] => 
Why we should start again from common goods and relational goods. From economist Luigino Bruni’s talk he gave on the second day of the World Meeting of Families in Dublin.


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 23/08/2018


Famiglia Avvenire ridEconomy is a word of ancient Greek origins that refers directly to the house (oikosnomos, rules for managing the house), therefore to the family. Yet modern economy – and its contemporary version even more so – has been thought of as an area governed by different principles, distinct and in many ways opposed to the principles and values that have always held up and continue to hold up the family. A founding principle of the family, perhaps the first and the one underlying the others, is that of gratuitousness, which is the furthest away from capitalist economy that only knows surrogates of gratuitousness (discounts, philanthropy, sales) that play the role of immunizing the markets from real gratuitousness.

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How the female gaze can change the economy
EN - Avvenire Editorials

How the female gaze can change the economy

Why we should start again from common goods and relational goods. From economist Luigino Bruni’s talk he gave on the second day of the World Meeting of Families in Dublin. by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 23/08/2018 Economy is a word of ancient Greek origins that refers directly to the hous... 
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    [title] => A Nobel for the economics that gathers ashes
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Nobel Prize for "contract theory", simple and disastrous


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 11/10/2016


Oliver Hart Bengt Holmstroem ridThe culture of contracts is the big winner of our time of too many poor on the losers' side. It grew from the ashes of the culture of pacts, which had been the backbone of the family, civil and political edifice of the past generations. Until a few decades ago, the reign of the contract was important but delimited, because much of people's life was ruled by the register of pacts (family, friendship, politics, religion, work...).

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Pacts and contracts have lived together for many centuries and they were complementary tools for social life. Until the point when the globalization of markets and finance as well as the emergence of an ethos - where each bond is experienced as a snare for the individual - decreed the gradual transformation of all the pacts into contracts. The pact is (was) a community and symbolic fact. It does not originate from the register of personal interest only but has its constituent elements coming from gratuitousness, forgiveness and collective bonds and interests. Weddings, unions, cities, constitutions, work - these were pacts and not contracts; and as long as they "live", they still are. The postmodern individual likes contracts very much because they appear as "human relations without injury", that is, relationships with very low "activation" and "exit" costs that are certainly lower than the costs of the pacts.


And so contract is replacing pact very rapidly in the family, at schools, in health care, in the "labour market", presenting itself as the only truly liberal and civil tool for regulating human relationships, possibly all of them. So upon learning about the rewarding of economists Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström yesterday, we can understand why the committee for awarding the Nobel Economics Prize explained their choice by saying that their work in contract theory now covers a constantly expanding area, "from bankruptcy legislation to political constitutions."


The economic theory of contracts has in fact now become a universal grammar to design human relations not only in businesses, but also at universities, in politics, and in more and more forms of organizations. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences seems to know this very well. But what they may not know, or do not say, is that contract theory is profoundly changing our way of being together in the world, and not for the better. In fact, it conveys a very clear vision of man and an increasingly intrusive and influential ideology which is based on certain dogmatic axioms that are far from being ethically neutral. The main and most powerful one is the theory of incentives, according to which if you pay a human being in an adequate and sophisticated way you can get almost anything from them.


And so all the other non-monetary and not self-interested kinds of motivation of human beings should not be taken seriously because they are neither credible nor reliable. The worker or the citizen - according to this economic theory - does not work well because they attribute a value to work well done in itself, but only if they are appropriately remunerated. And after decades during which economists have continued to think, write, and teach all this, it is more and more difficult to find someone who thinks that the first motivation that drives a person to work well is their work ethic or sense of duty.


A side effect of this newly awarded contract theory is presenting all human relationships as free relationships between equals (as contracts, in fact, are). Therefore, we are living the eclipse of the great theme of power, which is declined as simply a matter of the right incentives. Everything is simple, too simple. A simplistic approach founded on the big weak point of a strong anthropological reductionism, of which contract theory is the highest expression.


The motivational, symbolic, relational and spiritual complexity of people is left in the background. Oversimplified men and women are depicted, real contracts are designed to the measure of these "economic gnomes", and finally we end up also believing that we are really such as the economy sees us - an economy that chases the old utopia of reducing human relationships to a technical matter, and therefore to something ethically neutral, universal and abstract.


And also something useless, if not manipulative. So the real question becomes: are we sure that today, while we continue to pay for the disastrous consequences, it was appropriate to reward the leading representatives of this economic and financial theory, presented as a simple "toolbox"? Perhaps, if we want people to get back on friendly terms with economic theory and economic theory to be proven a friend of the people, we need more humanist and less technical minded economists. Scholars who, if asked the question: "What motivated you to become an economist?" may give similar answers to the one that the great (and forgotten) Achille Loria gave almost a century ago: "Human suffering."

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    [text] => 
Nobel Prize for "contract theory", simple and disastrous


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 11/10/2016


Oliver Hart Bengt Holmstroem ridThe culture of contracts is the big winner of our time of too many poor on the losers' side. It grew from the ashes of the culture of pacts, which had been the backbone of the family, civil and political edifice of the past generations. Until a few decades ago, the reign of the contract was important but delimited, because much of people's life was ruled by the register of pacts (family, friendship, politics, religion, work...).

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A Nobel for the economics that gathers ashes
EN - Avvenire Editorials

A Nobel for the economics that gathers ashes

Nobel Prize for "contract theory", simple and disastrous by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 11/10/2016 The culture of contracts is the big winner of our time of too many poor on the losers' side. It grew from the ashes of the culture of pacts, which had been the backbone of the family, civil ... 
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    [title] => Anorexia of Compassion. A New Concern for Feelings
    [alias] => anorexia-of-compassion-a-new-concern-for-feelings
    [introtext] => 
Commentaries – Facing all the pain pervading our days


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 29/07/2016


Our capacity to suffer because of the suffering of others and to rejoice for their joy has gone through a very rapid decline in a few decades. The consumer and comfort-focused society confuses well-being with the reduction of all forms of suffering, forgetting one of the most profound and ancient truths: that there are many good pains in human life, as there are many evil pleasures, too.


    [fulltext] => 

And so television, this new postmodern totem, promises us a happier life, making us move on from the latest massacre in France to the latest game show  in a matter of seconds, resulting in a flattening out of the events which generates a downward levelling of our emotions and feelings.


The great achievements of democracy, rights and freedoms are the mature fruit of millennia of civilization and faith, where we learned to suffer and become indignant for new and different things: for the denied freedom of others, for their crushed rights, for the injustices towards people who were not our relatives or friends. Without these new pains we would not have been able to come out of regimes, we would not have broken free from the pharaohs or the many forms of slavery and servitude.


This type of social emotions is partly natural, but its intensity and quality are the result of culture and the education of character. Of course we feel a sense of discomfort when we come in contact with those suffering around us, but to feel it so strong as to move us to action, to rush to their aid something more than natural is needed. Experiencing discomfort because of a victim that we meet along the way is natural; taking care of them is called culture.


Empathy is natural; compassion isn't because it comes from the cultivation, on an individual Varsavia Sinagoga Ghetto Esterno ridand collective level, of some special emotions and higher feelings. Social norms, as Adam Smith reminded us already in the mid eighteenth century, are generated by the capacity that human beings have developed to approve and blame the actions and feelings of others (and their own), using the faculty he calls 'sympathy'. Social balance is the result of the spontaneous order of the dynamic of feelings, just as the market is the result of the dynamics of interest.


This balance of feelings, however, can get stabilized either at low levels (for example, in a bandits' society) or at a high levels, when people develop religions, art, philosophy, beauty and pietas. But also the 'high' moral order of feelings, like all things fragile (because delicate), can be shattered overnight due to a lack of care and care giving. And as with almost all abilities and virtues, if compassion and indignation are not cultivated and practised they get wasted and regress to lower moral levels.


Constant exposure to the economic ideology and that of consumption turns us into animals less and less able to sympathize and become indignant: only twenty years ago we were much better at it. We are facing a world where we will be increasingly capable of natural and easy emotions towards kittens and puppies, but we will not be able to show solidarity and feel pain over the poverty and injustice around us. Globalization did not empower these feelings, but crushed them and reduced their intensity and effectiveness, making us more capable of simple, ‘low-cost’ emotions but less capable of complex and ‘expensive’ ones. In the western part of the world this latter type emotions were the result of a complex process, where biblical Christianity and humanism have played a key role.


Looking at the statues and stories of martyrs and saints we have learned to feel differently in our soul as we observe and meditate about the paintings and frescoes of the Nativity, the parables, the crosses and the resurrections in the churches. During mass, our grandparents did not understand all the words, but they understood the gospel of the images very well - we can see this even today, when children come to church, and are much more capable than us to enter into a dialogue with the paintings and the faces around them.


If we want to seriously respond to this crisis in our ability to feel and suffer about great and high things, we have to work harder and differently with our young and our children today, recognizing a special role of the school, which is one of the few global public goods that still remained. Literature, art and music are essential to form the emotions and the deepest and greatest kind of feelings in all but especially in children and young adults. The first fairy tales, a famous poem, the stories of Don Rodrigo, the prodigal son or St. Martin have all given us as a free gift the letters with which we wrote down the first few sentences of our consciousness and indignation, the ones with which we have learned to cry for the sorrows and joys of others, to suffer and rejoice for people we have never met and who never existed (but are more real and true than many of our neighbours). If we do not encounter at least one poet who loves the naked truth (Giacomo Leopardi, for example) while we are still young, as adults we won't be able to free ourselves from ideologies, and will surrender to some idol offering simple answers to our even simpler questions.


Varsavia Sinagoga Ghetto Interno ridToday our children grow up being educated mainly by the television and mobile phones, in the company of new soap operas for kids, which do not represent anything more on the screen than what the boys live every day, without any ability to make them dream and wish for greater things than what’s already in their heart. The television stories of my childhood were 'Pinocchio' by Collodi, played by Comencini and 'Michael Strogoff' by Decourt, adapted from Jules Verne. Not long ago I listened to the soundtracks of those films again and suddenly I had a flashback of those days and my first emotions about good and evil by others - I learned it without a teacher’s help that a father can sell his only jacket to be able to send his son to school and that a poor farmer may donate his only horse for a greater ideal.


There is little hope for a change of course in television, whether public or private, as it is increasingly in the hands of profit oriented sponsors. What about school, though? Western governments are reducing the space of art education and humanities, in all types of schools and in all grades. In a culture where faiths and the great collective narratives have lost their space, if young people are also systematically deprived of literature, art, loud music and poetry, it will only produce people without those passions and feelings that are the more important for living together in peace and freedom. If we do not react to this anorexia of compassion, our children will quickly pass through the city centre of Warsaw but will not 'revisit' the ghetto with its 450 thousand Jews who were deported and killed there, they will not get into that synagogue and cry there for shame. And that would be an awfully sad day. The capacity for compassion for one's people is an immense resource of the peoples. It is no less valuable than oil or technology. Starting to talk about its deterioration is the first step to try to reconstitute this heritage that's in ruins now.


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    [text] => 
Commentaries – Facing all the pain pervading our days


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 29/07/2016


Our capacity to suffer because of the suffering of others and to rejoice for their joy has gone through a very rapid decline in a few decades. The consumer and comfort-focused society confuses well-being with the reduction of all forms of suffering, forgetting one of the most profound and ancient truths: that there are many good pains in human life, as there are many evil pleasures, too.


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Anorexia of Compassion. A New Concern for Feelings
EN - Avvenire Editorials

Anorexia of Compassion. A New Concern for Feelings

Commentaries – Facing all the pain pervading our days by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 29/07/2016 Our capacity to suffer because of the suffering of others and to rejoice for their joy has gone through a very rapid decline in a few decades. The consumer and comfort-focused society confus... 
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Commentaries - Work, its non-places and value


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 01/05/2016


Falegname ridA great utopia of our capitalism is the construction of a society where there is no more need for human labour. There has always been a spirit of the economy that dreamed of "perfect" enterprises and markets to the point where you can manage without humans beings. Managing and controlling men and women is much more difficult than managing docile machines and obedient algorithms. Real people go through crises, they protest, they enter into conflict with each other, they always do things other than those that they should do according to their job descriptions, often they do better things.

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Simply because we are free, spiritual beings, and therefore always excessive in relation to our tasks, contracts or incentives. A truly perfect market would then be the system of techniques, controls, incentives and instruments that are finally able to ensure maximum efficiency and maximum production of wealth, reducing everything to the point of eliminating human presence from the new cities of the new economy.


Today, thanks to the extraordinary achievements of automation and digitization, there is a serious danger of that ancient utopia coming true. In fact, if we look closely at the climate that reigns in big companies, we can notice that the objective that lies behind the rhetoric of a certain type of managerial culture (which says exactly the opposite) is standardization, predictability and formatting the behaviour of workers, to depotentiate the charge of freedom that cannot fit in technical rationality. They would want work performed without workers, work without people, extracting only the part that's perfectly oriented to the objectives of ownership from human action. Reduced to its barest essence, this is the nature of the increasingly sophisticated ideology of incentives, which is the new religion of post-modern capitalism.


But when work is reduced to technique and performance, when organizations become so rational as to "build" workers who imitate the logic of machines, nothing remains of the primary anthropological activity that is human labour, or of its mystery. And if men and women lose their ability to work they lose a lot, too, almost all of their dignity, of their having been made "a little lower than the angels" (Psalm 8; the word-by-word translation of the Italian quote is: "little less than Elohim"). The realization of the utopia of labour-without-humans would then only be a realisation of the perfect dehumanization of life in common. And to continue to live, we would be forced to emigrate en masse to other lands and other planets where it is still possible to really work.


This Labour Day may therefore be the right moment to remind us and to remember what work and the workers really are. We should remember, for example, that if we really want to get to know a person we have to watch them as they work. That is where they are revealed with all their humanity, that is where their ambivalence, limitations but also, and above all, their ability to give freely and exceedingly can be found. We can party together, go out for dinner, play soccer with friends, but nothing compares to work as an anthropological and spiritual window that reveals those around us to us. It is not uncommon that we thought that we knew a friend, a parent, a child, until one day we happen to see them working and suddenly we discover that we had never really known them, because an essential dimension of their person had been veiled from us, one that was only opened up while we watched them work: as they were repairing a car, cleaning a bathroom, teaching a lesson, preparing lunch. All of us are present in the hand that tightens the screw, in the pen that writes, in the rag drying: it is here that we encounter our humanity and that of others. And, almost always, a new appreciation and a new gratitude for work are born and we see and discover them as a gift. Few organisations actually give more joy of the work well done, and so very few (if any) give more misery of bad work, even when we cannot do otherwise. We all have grown up watching the grown-ups work.


I "got to know" my grandfather Domenico when, as a child, I saw him in his workshop building a small stool for me with his own hands. Only there did I realize what his big, callous and expert hands really were, and it was from then on that I really got to know him. The only thing I have left of him now is that cutty-stool, kept in my studio next to my books, and his spirit is perfectly and entirely present in those pieces of wood, because one day I saw him incarnating in that object, built as a gift to me.


A severe form of poverty of our children is not being able to watch the work of adults anymore, because too many jobs are becoming abstract, invisible, confined in far away non-places, inaccessible especially to children and young people. What work will they create tomorrow if today they live immersed in a thousand shows, but are deprived of the sight of work being done, which is the greatest show to see on this earth? A great gift for our children is to give them a chance to see real and concrete work, to begin to see the world from there.


There are few more real human and spiritual experiences than walking through cities and watching people as they work. Therefore, there is no better way to celebrate work than starting to watch it again, seeing it, recognizing it, and then returning with feelings of thankfulness. Our esteem and appreciation – on a personal and collective level – for work and for workers is the first and real reform the world of work needs. And maybe, on this day of non-work, let's read a few pages of the classics of the Italian civil tradition about work again: "There is no work, or capital," Carlo Cattaneo wrote, "that doesn't begin with an act of intelligence. Before any work, before any capital there is intelligence that begins the work, and first impresses the character of wealth on it."


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Commentaries - Work, its non-places and value


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 01/05/2016


Falegname ridA great utopia of our capitalism is the construction of a society where there is no more need for human labour. There has always been a spirit of the economy that dreamed of "perfect" enterprises and markets to the point where you can manage without humans beings. Managing and controlling men and women is much more difficult than managing docile machines and obedient algorithms. Real people go through crises, they protest, they enter into conflict with each other, they always do things other than those that they should do according to their job descriptions, often they do better things.

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Human Wealth
EN - Avvenire Editorials

Human Wealth

Commentaries - Work, its non-places and value by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 01/05/2016 A great utopia of our capitalism is the construction of a society where there is no more need for human labour. There has always been a spirit of the economy that dreamed of "perfect" enterprises and m... 
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    [title] => Through Risen Eyes
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Commentaries – How wounds and crises become blessings


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 27/03/2016


Gesù Risorto Pochet 01 ridResurrection is a great word on earth. Life reborn from death is the first law of nature, that of plants and flowers that fill the world with colour and beauty, because they tell us that life is greater than death that feeds it. Women and men are reborn many times throughout their existence, finding themselves resurrected after grief, abandonment, depression or diseases that had crucified them before. Sometimes we rise again by resurrecting someone else from their tomb, and those have surely been the most beautiful and true resurrections we have witnessed. If resurrection had not been a human word, a friend and something familiar, those women and men of Galilee would not have been able to perceive anything of the unique mystery that had been completed between the cross and the day after the Sabbath.


If resurrection is a human word, then it is also a word of economics. There is much resurrection in the economy, in business, in the world of work. We can see it every morning, even in these times of crisis, and especially in these times of crisis.

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But we must learn to see it and recognize it, looking at the world with "eyes of resurrection." It is not easy to see and recognize the risen ones or resurrections for many reasons, but mainly because the bodies of the resurrected are bearers of the stigmata of passion. And our wounds and those of others make us afraid, so we flee from them and we cannot experience them as the beginning of resurrection and the sacrament that always accompanies it. And as we are looking for resurrection in the absence of wounds and pain, we do not find it, or maybe confuse it with success. We do not see resurrection because we think it's the anti-cross or the opposite of passion, and not its fulfilment. We flee from those crucified and abandoned, and do not encounter the resurrected that can only be found there. Resurrection begins on the cross, and its signs are forever.


The Risen Christ is the resurrection of his wounded body. The novelty of this resurrection is found in its corporeality, too. The resurrected body, however, is not a return to the body of Thursday (the day before the Passion); resurrection is not an event that erases the signs of the lashing and the Way of the Cross. The Christ appears with his wounds, the light of resurrection did not eliminate the stigmata of Good Friday. The glory of the risen one is therefore not the glory of the ancient hero: his is a wounded glory which is humble and weak. Risen ones appearing without wounds are ghosts, illusions, dreams or ideologies, and so their light is fake. Our resurrections start while the abandoned on the crosses are crying out. And if we do not learn to cry out, we shall not learn to rise again either. We shall not understand the logic of the beatitudes if we do not look at them from the perspective of someone resurrected with the stigmata.


The wounds that remain after the resurrection are fundamental to understand the economics of salvation, but also the salvation of the economy. If the wounds remain on the resurrected bodies, then there is an economics of the crucified and an economics of the risen. The cross and resurrection are in the same economy, in the same life. Therefore, to find the instances of true resurrections in our society and economy, we should go and look where no one is looking any more. We should start searching among the many companies that are being set up by immigrants and their wounds, the many cooperatives that flourish inside prisons, among those young people who decide not to leave their country and land, and humbly learn the ancient skills of the hands, or in the midst of those workers who do not capitulate in the face of the many reasons for property and the market but resurrect their company. Without making the mistake of thinking that the wounds that generated the resurrection will disappear one day, and there will be only light, everywhere.


When we hide the marks of our wounds, our resurrection stories - even the authentic ones - do not become credible places of hope for those who are still in the phase of the cross. In our economy there are too many disheartened people waiting to put their hands into the wounds of the resurrections, to be able to understand and love their own, not yet resurrected wounds in a different way. Resurrections are not found where wounds terminate, but inside them.


Among the many meanings of the word pèsach (Passover), the first Easter, there is also the verb limp (psh). When the reader of the Bible reads "limp" they think of Jacob, the great limper. At the nightly ford of the Jabbok River, Elohim wounded him in the sciatic nerve, made him lame and changed his name to Israel. According to the rabbinical tradition, Jacob limped for the rest of his life. In another night fight, at the ford of the Red Sea the new people was reborn, but the sign-memory of the slavery in Egypt has never disappeared from its body. From the great battles of the Golgotha ​​a resurrected body with the stigmata flourished. Resurrections are wounds turned into blessings, never deleted. When we rise again, our wounds remain, but become luminous. True resurrections can be recognized by the light that radiates from their wounds.


Editor's note - The image of the "Risen Christ" by Michel Pochet (CentroMaria) is located at the Mariapolis Faro (Križevci, Croatia)


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Commentaries – How wounds and crises become blessings


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 27/03/2016


Gesù Risorto Pochet 01 ridResurrection is a great word on earth. Life reborn from death is the first law of nature, that of plants and flowers that fill the world with colour and beauty, because they tell us that life is greater than death that feeds it. Women and men are reborn many times throughout their existence, finding themselves resurrected after grief, abandonment, depression or diseases that had crucified them before. Sometimes we rise again by resurrecting someone else from their tomb, and those have surely been the most beautiful and true resurrections we have witnessed. If resurrection had not been a human word, a friend and something familiar, those women and men of Galilee would not have been able to perceive anything of the unique mystery that had been completed between the cross and the day after the Sabbath.


If resurrection is a human word, then it is also a word of economics. There is much resurrection in the economy, in business, in the world of work. We can see it every morning, even in these times of crisis, and especially in these times of crisis.

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Through Risen Eyes
EN - Avvenire Editorials

Through Risen Eyes

Commentaries – How wounds and crises become blessings by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 27/03/2016 Resurrection is a great word on earth. Life reborn from death is the first law of nature, that of plants and flowers that fill the world with colour and beauty, because they tell us that life i... 
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Commentaries - the Evil that We, Too, Are Feeding


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 17/11/2015


Siria LapresseFo 48406984 300 rid


Wars have always been fought by many poor, young and innocent people who were sent to die by a few rich, powerful and guilty ones, who did not die in the wars that they themselves wanted and that were fed by their interests. This ancient and deep truth is less obvious but no less true today. We are really in a world war, which is different from the wars of the twentieth century but no less dramatic. A war about which no one knows when and where it started, when, where and how it will end. It is a liquid war in a liquid society. The interests at stake are (almost) invisible, we do not know who wants it, who benefits from it, who does not want it to end.

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This inability to understand, which is present in all complex wars, is particularly strongly felt in this war, which should, however, not prevent us from the effort of thinking, and then fighting especially against the spread of false and ideological theses flooding in the aftermath of the massacre of Paris.


A very popular thesis locates the main, if not the only, reason for this war in religion, and in the inherently violent nature of Islam in particular. This thesis is as widespread as it is wrong. The Quran has its own ambivalence about violence, as we know. There are passages where it calls for a holy war. But there is also a version of fratricide between Cain and Abel in it that even more than the Judeo-Christian Bible, powerfully speaks of nonviolence. In the Quranic account, the two brothers are talking to each other in the fields. Abel senses that Cain is about to raise his hand against him to kill him, and tells him, "Even if you extend your hand to kill me, I am not extending my hand to kill you." (the Holy Quran, al-Ma'idah: Sura 5,28). Abel is presented as the first non-violent person in history, who dies so as not to become himself a murderer. In the Quran there is also this. As in the Bible there are the Benjamites, the daughter of Jephthah, the pages where we praise God because he smashed the heads of the enemy's children on the rocks, and there is the Lord of hosts, or Jesus who said he came to bring "not peace, but a sword."(Matthew 10). The sacred texts of religions were written in times when war was ordinary part of life ("at the time when kings go forth to battle," 2 Samuel 11). At the same time, the great religions - and Islam is among these few - have developed a wisdom literature (think of the Sufi tradition) that offered symbolic and allegorical readings even for the toughest and most archaic pages. In some periods the brightest pages of the Quran (and there are quite some) exerted such a great light that would obscure the dark ones. At other times violent steps were taken by those who, in the name of religion, were simply seeking power and wealth. Today, Islam is going through a difficult phase. Fundamentalist sects use pieces of the Quran to brainwash young people, victims and perpetrators of a nightmarish, mad dream in which they have fallen. They are but prey, fallen into the trap of the hunters of 'martyrs' to be used for purposes where the Quran is simply the snare. To combat this disease that has now sunken into the heart of Islam and is undermining it from within, it is necessary to strengthen its immune system to support the body, which as a whole is healthy but is suffering. It is the same body that has to expel the virus that has entered it more decisively and resist against those maddened cells that are making it weaker, inflicting a lot of pain on it. But all lovers of life must help Islam to manage. In the era of globalization, it cannot do it alone.


At the same time, we should not be so naive as to forget that in this war the economic stakes are enormous. It is by no coincidence that the terrorists of Paris came from the poorest Belgian town of Belgium, where youth unemployment is at around 50%. It is not for certain that the first Gulf War of 1991 was originated for the prevention of the spread of fundamentalism.


In recent months there is much talk of the weapons fuelling this war. We must talk about it even more, because it is a decisive element. Just a few days ago a transport of missiles left from Cagliari to the war-stricken Middle East that was produced and sold by Italian companies. France along with Italy is among the largest exporters of weapons of war in the Arab regions, although there is a 1990 law in Italy that would ban the sale of weapons to countries at war. The politicians who shed tears, perhaps sincerely, and declare all-out struggle against terrorism, are the same people who do nothing to reduce the export of weapons, and defend national industries that move large shares of GDP and hundreds of thousands of jobs. A serious international moratorium that would impose a total ban on arms sales to countries at war would surely not mark the end of the Caliphate, ISIS and terrorism, but it would be a decisive move in the right direction. You cannot feed the evil that you want to fight. And this is what we are doing, and for many years now. We do not realize it until some splinter of those wars gets into our houses and kills our children. In fact we know that as long as the economy and profit will be the last words of political choices, such strong powers that no policy can hold in, we shall continue to cry for grief that we ourselves contribute to cause.


Hollande was wrong to speak of "revenge" in the aftermath of the massacre, and then perpetrate it by bombing Syria on Sunday, thereby responding to blood with more blood. This is only the law of Lamech, from before the same 'law of an eye for an eye'. Revenge should never be the reaction of civilized peoples, even after one of the darkest nights of the recent history of Europe. The largest defeat would be to bring back words like 'revenge' in the lexicon of our democracies, which have been eliminated after thousands of years of civilization, blood and pain.


Finally we have to give our serious and decisive support to those who are boldly seeking peace and dialogue in these difficult times. First of all Pope Francis, who cannot be the only one or the only voice to ask for peace and non-violence. If millions were to cry out that the only answer to death is life, and if we were saying this along with many Muslims wounded and torn like us, if we made it heard in the streets, in social media, before parliaments then our 'no' to the production and sale of our arms to those who use them to kill and to kill us would perhaps provide a stronger echo to the prophetic words of Pope Francis. They may have the strength to move even the lower economic interests, which increasingly control and dominate the world, religions and life.

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    [text] => 
Commentaries - the Evil that We, Too, Are Feeding


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 17/11/2015


Siria LapresseFo 48406984 300 rid


Wars have always been fought by many poor, young and innocent people who were sent to die by a few rich, powerful and guilty ones, who did not die in the wars that they themselves wanted and that were fed by their interests. This ancient and deep truth is less obvious but no less true today. We are really in a world war, which is different from the wars of the twentieth century but no less dramatic. A war about which no one knows when and where it started, when, where and how it will end. It is a liquid war in a liquid society. The interests at stake are (almost) invisible, we do not know who wants it, who benefits from it, who does not want it to end.

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Stop arming the war
EN - Avvenire Editorials

Stop arming the war

Commentaries - the Evil that We, Too, Are Feeding by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 17/11/2015 Wars have always been fought by many poor, young and innocent people who were sent to die by a few rich, powerful and guilty ones, who did not die in the wars that they themselves wanted and that ... 
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Commentaries - Hospitality is the Foundation of our Civilisation


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 19/08/2015


Immigrazione 02 ridThe duty of hospitality is the main wall of western civilization, and the ABC of good of humanity. In the ancient Greek world a stranger was the bearer of a divine presence. There are many myths in which the gods take the form of passing strangers. The Odyssey is also a great lesson on the value of hospitality (Nausicaa, Circe...) and the severity of its desecration (Polyphemus the Cyclops, Antinous). In ancient times, hospitality was regulated by real sacred rites, as an expression of the reciprocity of gifts. From the first gesture of welcome to the moment of the guest's departure, complete with a "parting gift" the host had several duties which he had to perform in a discrete and above all, grateful way.

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Hospitality is a connection, it is a relationship (and how nice it is that in Italian there is a single word, "ospite" for the one who hosts and the one that is hosted). The strangers who were welcomed in other people's homes were not asked about their name or identity, because it was enough to meet a stranger in a state of need for the grammar of hospitality to be activated. Reciprocity in relationships of hosting was at the foundations of alliances between people and communities that made up the basic grammar of peaceful coexistence among peoples.


The Trojan War, the legendary icon of all wars, was born from a breach of hospitality (by Paris). Ancient Roman civilization also recognized the sanctity of hospitality, which was also legally regulated. Then there is the Bible, which is a continuous song about the absolute value of hospitality and welcoming of strangers, who, not infrequently, are called "angels". The first great sin of Sodom was denying hospitality to two men who were the guests of Abraham and Sarah by the oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18-19), and one of the most gruesome episodes of the Bible is a desecration of hospitality - the murderous rape committed by the Benjamites of Gibeah (the Book of Judges, 19). Christianity gathered these traditions about hospitality, and interpreted it as a variation of the commandment of agape and a direct expression of the predilection of Jesus for those who count as the last ones in society and for the poor: "I was a stranger and you welcomed me" (Matthew 25,35).


In those ancient cultures, where the "law of retaliation" was still in force, where almost no human rights were recognized that have been conquered and proclaimed by the West in recent centuries, hospitality was chosen as the cornerstone of civilization – the one from which ours flourished. In a world that was much more insecure, needy and violent than ours, those ancient people understood that the obligation of hospitality is essential in order to emerge from barbarism. The barbaric and uncivilized peoples are those who do not know and do not recognize their guests. Polyphemus is the perfect image of anti-social and inhuman behaviour because he devours his guests instead of welcoming them. Hospitality is the first civil word because wherever there is no practice of hospitality, there is practice of war, and shalom, that is, peace and well-being are blocked.


We cease to be civil, human and intelligent when we break the age-old practice of hospitality. And if hospitality is the first step to enter the territory of civilization, its negation becomes automatically the first step to go back to the world of the Cyclopes, where only physical strength and size reign.


The wise peoples have always understood that hospitality is good for everyone, even if its costs regard everyone, individually. Because of this we have to protect it and talk well about it, if we want it to survive in times of high costs. Reciprocity of hospitality is not a contract, because there is no equivalence between giving and receiving, and especially because my being a welcoming person today generates no guarantee of finding hospitality when I need it tomorrow. There is no insurance policy for the future welcoming of those who give a warm welcome to someone today. Because of this, hospitality is a common good, and therefore it is fragile. Like all common goods it is destroyed unless it is supported by a larger collective intelligence of individual interests. But like all public goods, once it is destroyed, the good is gone and won't be available to anybody and will be almost impossible to rebuild.


Modern Europe is born from the weave of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman humanism, both founded on hospitality. But the Benjamite and Poliphemic spirit has also survived in the West, and was dominant for long periods - these were always dark. It is the spirit that sees guests only as threats or prey. Today this dark, uncivilized and non-intelligent spirit is surfacing again, and so the valuable exercise of the discernment of spirits is to be performed very urgently. For example by not believing those who tell us that Polyphemus devoured the companions of Odysseus because there would have been too many people on board and the ship could sink during their return to Ithaca, or the Benjamites wanted to meet the guests of Lot only to check their documents. The recognition of the value and of right of hospitality should come before every policy and technique of managing it and making it sustainable.


Hospitality is a spirit, it is a good spirit. When it is missing, one can see it, feel it. Spirits should be known, recognized and called by name, and the bad ones should simply be thrown away.


In the house of humans, if there is no place for the other, then there is no place for me either. For it is written: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Letter to the Hebrews).

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    [metadesc] => Il dovere di ospitalità è il muro maestro della civiltà occidentale, e l’abc dell’umanità buona. Anche l'ospitalità è un fragile bene comune . Luigino Bruni su Avvenire di oggi.
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    [text] => 
Commentaries - Hospitality is the Foundation of our Civilisation


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 19/08/2015


Immigrazione 02 ridThe duty of hospitality is the main wall of western civilization, and the ABC of good of humanity. In the ancient Greek world a stranger was the bearer of a divine presence. There are many myths in which the gods take the form of passing strangers. The Odyssey is also a great lesson on the value of hospitality (Nausicaa, Circe...) and the severity of its desecration (Polyphemus the Cyclops, Antinous). In ancient times, hospitality was regulated by real sacred rites, as an expression of the reciprocity of gifts. From the first gesture of welcome to the moment of the guest's departure, complete with a "parting gift" the host had several duties which he had to perform in a discrete and above all, grateful way.

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We Are Not Cyclopes
EN - Avvenire Editorials

We Are Not Cyclopes

Commentaries - Hospitality is the Foundation of our Civilisation by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 19/08/2015 The duty of hospitality is the main wall of western civilization, and the ABC of good of humanity. In the ancient Greek world a stranger was the bearer of a divine presence. There ar... 
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    [title] => Besides GDP, there exists a type of wealth that cannot be measured as "flow"
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    [introtext] => 
"Bes" Report/26 - Relational wealth hiding by the side of GDP. In the era of the common goods it is the stocks (environmental, relational, spiritual and social) that must return to the centre of the stage


by Luigino Bruni


published in 


    

pdf


Avvenire

(49 KB)


 on 11/08/2015


BESThe topic of welfare, well-being, public happiness or social well-being has been and still is at the centre of the Italian tradition of civil economy. In recent years there was a significant growth of the debate around the need to go beyond GDP or, according to some, to start using other indicators telling about the other dimensions of well-being as well.


However, in this coupling of GDP with other, non-economic indicators there is a serious risk. The emerging scenario is very similar to what happens in football.

    [fulltext] => 
After the game, some statistical data are shown on the screen with a number of indicators: the percentage of ball possession of the two teams, the fouls made and sustained, the number of shots on goal etc. But, located on top of the statistics tables, the number of goals is the indicator that dominates: it is the only thing that really matters, and that no statistics on its side can change, not even remotely. Human development, ecological footprint, Bes (short for "benessere equo e sostenibile" - Equitable and Sustainable Well-Being; a category created by the Italian National Institute of Statistics) and other similar indicators today are very much like ball possession and the number of shots on goal, which act only as 'contours' for the number of goals scored (i.e. GDP). How to get people take other indicators of well-being really seriously and overcome the idea that GDP is the only important figure in the economic game of our society?


First, a bit of history. GDP, as we know it today, is a relatively new concept, since it is linked to the development of national accounting starting from the thirties of the twentieth century. Its actual founding fathers (or grandfathers) were the so-called Physiocrats, French scholars of the mid-eighteenth century who were convinced that the economic strength of a country is not measured by its capital (assets) or value stocks (as it had been thought until then, as the wealth of a nation had been largely based on the amount of gold owned by it). Instead, they said that what really mattered in terms of wealth was flow, i.e. income. Since then we have more or less all been thinking that a people is not made "rich" by its wealth of land, raw materials, coastline, museums, cathedrals, cultural or human capital, but by the ability to "turn over" those capitals in order to 'make them profitable' and generate new types of flow.


Today we know, and in Italy we see more and more, that if a people is not able to ensure that its funds are used in productive ways, it remains poor, even if its citizens are sitting on top of gold mines. The annual flow of new wealth is also a creation of the physiocrats: it serves to tell us how rich a national community is. So before doing away with GDP, let us treasure this value in its DNA: a person, a community, a region remains economically poor if it is not in the (institutional, cultural and political) conditions to transform its capital into income. But when a country - despite the capital - can no longer produce revenue, the income kills the profit, and societies start to decline. Other indicators or more sophisticated economic indicators are very useful in these cases, but let's not forget that without a flow indicator, we cannot measure our ability to value our capitals, to see if we are enhancing or depleting them over time.


For this reason, I believe that a major task in terms of more sophisticated measurements of the economic and social development of a country would be not to rely on GDP only but to consider some additional, but equally trusted and relevant indicators that year after year are capable of grasping the state of health of our capitals, especially that of our social, environmental, cultural, relational and spiritual capital. Despite the important lesson of the Physiocrats, it is still true that revenue (flow) is born by capital (stock), and if capital deteriorates or expires, revenue decreases and eventually disappears.


In the era of the common goods that we dramatically entered with the third millennium, stocks are expected to return to occupy centre stage in the economic, social and political world. The environmental issue, but also the relational and social (migration, social inclusion, terrorism...) ones, and other topics that have become central again in the era of the common goods, are all matters of stock, because they are linked to forms of capital, whether present or absent - we now know from many studies how much intolerance and racism are connected to the lack of cultural and artistic 'capital' in people. But there's more. Excessive emphasis on creating flows, including large financial flows that dominate by far among the flows of goods and real services, is producing many serious effects on the stocks of our economies and our planet. We must learn how to properly measure our assets, which, like non-renewable energy, are undergoing severe impoverishment precisely because of the great invasion of income flows (measured by GDP).


Finally, at the root of any development of new measurements, there is a more general cultural and political question that involves the business world directly. As long as the only indicators for the success of companies (especially large ones) are the profits achieved and the indicators consulted are purely economic, and as long as the "social reports" are glossy publications handed over to the stakeholders during corporate parties, without the 'social' data having any relevance in making important choices (the reconfirming or new appointment of managers, members of the board etc.), it will be impossible for our society to value other indicators apart from GDP.

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    [metadesc] => Quella ricchezza relazionale nascosta a fianco del Pil. Nell'era dei beni comuni sono gli stock (ambientali, relazionali, spirituli e sociali) che devono ritornare al centro della scena
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    [text] => 
"Bes" Report/26 - Relational wealth hiding by the side of GDP. In the era of the common goods it is the stocks (environmental, relational, spiritual and social) that must return to the centre of the stage


by Luigino Bruni


published in 


    

pdf


Avvenire

(49 KB)


 on 11/08/2015


BESThe topic of welfare, well-being, public happiness or social well-being has been and still is at the centre of the Italian tradition of civil economy. In recent years there was a significant growth of the debate around the need to go beyond GDP or, according to some, to start using other indicators telling about the other dimensions of well-being as well.


However, in this coupling of GDP with other, non-economic indicators there is a serious risk. The emerging scenario is very similar to what happens in football.

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Besides GDP, there exists a type of wealth that cannot be measured as "flow"
EN - Avvenire Editorials

Besides GDP, there exists a type of wealth that cannot be measured as "flow"

"Bes" Report/26 - Relational wealth hiding by the side of GDP. In the era of the common goods it is the stocks (environmental, relational, spiritual and social) that must return to the centre of the stage by Luigino Bruni published in  pdf Avvenire (49 KB) on 11/08/2015 The topic of we... 
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    [title] => The (il)logical pitfalls of the common good in Europe
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    [introtext] => 
There is no forgiveness for peoples, only for financial institutions


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 15/07/2015


Comunità europeaThe European Community, like every community, is a form of common good. And as the economic science teaches us, common goods are by their nature subject to the possibility of their own destruction. The so-called 'tragedy of the commons' (Garrett Hardin, 1968) is a well-known term for a what happens when the users of a common resource seek to maximize their individual interests, forgetting or leaving too much in the background the deterioration of the common resource caused by their consumption. If - as in the most famous example - the users of the same piece of grazing land only look at their own costs and benefits, they feel induced to bring more and more cows out, and so the final outcome of the process will be the destruction of the pasture.

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The main message of the theory of the commons is the destruction of the common property as an unintended effect: no one wants to do so, but everyone contributes to its destruction.


The Greek crisis is showing us that today the various countries that formed the European Union are likely to destroy the common good built by themselves in the past decades. Every tragedy of the commons, reminds us the Nobel Prize for economics Elinor Ostrom, can only be avoided by changing the cultural perspective: we need to move from the logic of "myself" to that of "ourselves", starting to look at the common good as what is 'good for all' and not as 'good for no one'.


Communities, as the word's etymological root (cum-munus) also suggests, are a mixture of essential gifts and obligations - the Latin word munus means, in fact, both gift and duty. Gifts are not enough, we know that, but obligations are never enough either, because both of them are co-essential. Contracts and rules are only one side of the coin in a community. If the face of the gift is missing, communities implode, collapse and destroy themselves. It is the face of the gift that is missing from the Europe of our days, a gift that used to be rather central to its creation in the post-war era. Rules have occupied all the available space. And so the founding pact is being reduced to a mere contract, and in contracts, unlike pacts, there is no room for giving gifts, causing communities disappear and clubs be born.


The real possible and sustainable solution for the Greek crisis would have been a solution with con-doning, that is, a partial gift of the debt, because in Greece's current economic, psychological and social situation it is unthinkable that the debts of a dimension generating other debts through new loans with ruthless conditions could be repaid. In fact, the most shocking paradox of these years of financial and economic crisis is seeing the register of gift applied to financial debt, while it is being denied to the peoples and citizens - how many trillions of debts of the financial institutions have been actually condoned?


Today, the great mistake of Europe, or better say some of its most powerful rulers, is thinking that they can solve a crisis of the pact by resorting to the register of the contract only. From every big crisis the way out is through a good combination of rules and gifts, never through the mere tightening of the rules. Gifts are reinforced through education to the rules of accountability, and rules are humanized when they are accompanied by the gratuitousness of the gift. But to be able to give gifts to those who have made mistakes (and the Greeks have) it is first necessary to reckon and trust that the people and the citizens will have the moral energy to start over and become worthy of a new trust. Any real trust is above all a gift, because when trust is based solely on contracts, the contract ends up destroying the trust that it was meant to re-create.


Rules without forgiveness, obligations without gifts are unable to maintain the common goods, especially the primary ones underpinning our fragile democracy.
We reached Pluto, we have made some extraordinary and wonderful progress in science and technology. This crisis is showing us that in terms of the relational and ethical ability to handle huge community crises we are still too similar to the people of the Neolithic Age, and we have also probably lost some of the skills and wisdom that the Christian Middle Ages and modernity left us in heritage.


Oikonomia, that is, the rules of the house, is not enough to build a good polis. In Europe today there is a need of gift giving and for-giving, a word alien to capitalist economy that nobody dares to evoke around the tables that count, because it has been worn out, weakened and reduced to gadgets and private philanthropy by us. But without recovering this great word that is of a foundational importance in communities, we are destined to witness an inexorable decline of the common land that would still have the resources to feed us.


Download  article in pdf 

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    [text] => 
There is no forgiveness for peoples, only for financial institutions


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 15/07/2015


Comunità europeaThe European Community, like every community, is a form of common good. And as the economic science teaches us, common goods are by their nature subject to the possibility of their own destruction. The so-called 'tragedy of the commons' (Garrett Hardin, 1968) is a well-known term for a what happens when the users of a common resource seek to maximize their individual interests, forgetting or leaving too much in the background the deterioration of the common resource caused by their consumption. If - as in the most famous example - the users of the same piece of grazing land only look at their own costs and benefits, they feel induced to bring more and more cows out, and so the final outcome of the process will be the destruction of the pasture.

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The (il)logical pitfalls of the common good in Europe
EN - Avvenire Editorials

The (il)logical pitfalls of the common good in Europe

There is no forgiveness for peoples, only for financial institutions by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 15/07/2015 The European Community, like every community, is a form of common good. And as the economic science teaches us, common goods are by their nature subject to the possibility of the... 
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Laudato Si' (Praise be to you) - is far from being anti-business. But as we peruse it let us allow ourselves to be led gently through the metaphorical woodlands of the encyclical where the Holy Father Pope Francis’s spiritual economy is buoyant.


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 24/06/2015


The cries of many victims, of many who have been 'discarded', raises a question of justice which weighs heavily upon our capitalist system;  a question that is all the more serious because it is no longer being seen or heard. Pope Francis is the only figure of authority on global moral issues, who due to his particular charism, is giving recognition and ear to today's pressing ethical question (corporate social responsibility), in the face of which he is not afraid to raise radical questions (generated by his fraternal concern and love -  agape ). 


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No other 'world organisation or body' exists that is as free as he is from powerful economic and political forces, a freedom that not even the United Nations or the European Commission can lay claim to, let alone politicians at national level, who continue on in their practice of "selling a poor person for a pair of sandals - (Book of Amos), as indeed Italy is at risk of doing with its introduction of new gambling laws.


A number of commentators, self-professed supporters of the free market economy, claim that the Encyclical Laudato si'  is opposed to it ; that not only is it a statement against modernism, but a reflection of the Pope's own Marxist views, going almost as far as predicting a global environmental catastrophe. But far from it. In fact, it does just the opposite.  Pope Francis focuses on reminding us that both markets and business enterprise are precious allies of the common good as long as they do not become the 'only rule'; or that the 'part' (the market) does not try to become the whole (life itself).  The global market is a necessary part of the life of society which contributes to the common good (there are many examples quoted of responsible business owners and technology being used at the serving of the economy and providing employment).   However, it is not the full story, nor the most important.


Pope Francis also seeks to remind all participants of the global economy of their vocation to reciprocity and "mutual benefit". It is on this basis that he criticises companies who exploit (all too often) people and land;  by doing so, they negate the very nature of what the global economy is supposed to be, increasing their wealth at the expense of impoverishing other weaker players.
 
On a second level, Pope Francis raises an issue that has been systematically neglected:  the notion of "efficiency", globalization’s new "in-word", as being solely about technology and therefore ethically neutral, cannot be upheld (34).  The calculation of cost-benefits (cost justifications), which underpin every 'rational' decision by companies and public administration, depends precisely upon what we choose to include in the costs and perceive in the benefits.  For decades we have considered companies 'efficient' who neglected to include in their costs any damage done to the sea, rivers or atmosphere.  The Pope invites us to enlarge our calculations to all types of species, including them as part of our cosmic fraternity,   extending this reciprocity to all creatures, giving them a voice in our economic and political budgets.


But there is still a third level.  Even after acknowledging "mutual benefit " as the fundamental law of civil society, extending it to include our relationship with all living species and with the earth, it cannot and must not be regarded as the only law in respect of life.  Though important, it is not all there is.  Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, refers also to “duties of power". We have a responsibility towards creation because technology is new form of power, the outcome of which can have unilaterally serious consequences for other living creatures to which we are all linked.  The universe is filled with living things and this calls for responsibility. Moreover, there are times when moral duties come before benefits; the concept of "mutual benefit" does not cover the full spectrum of responsibility and justice.  Even the best market, if it becomes the only criteria, may grow into a monster.  There is no economic logic that convinces us to leave forests intact for those to come in thousands of years’ time, and yet we have moral obligations towards the future generations who will inherit and inhabit our earth.


The question of 'ecological debt' (51), is one of the most significant and most prophetic passages of the whole Encyclical. The widespread indiscriminate accumulation of national debt can bring entire nations to their knees (as in the case of Greece), and hold many others to ransom.  Much aggression is used in the name of debt and credit.  Yet a great 'ecological debt' exists between North and South, between the 10% of humanity which has increased its wealth, whilst burdening everyone with the cost to the atmosphere, and continuing to contribute to "climate change".  


The term "climate change" is itself misleading, as it is ethically neutral. The Pope, instead, speaks of "pollution” and the deterioration of that common good which is our climate (23). Climate deterioration contributes to the desertification of entire regions, having a direct impact on poverty, causing deaths and the migration of peoples (25). It is this 'debt of ecology and justice’ that we fail to take into account when we close our borders to the many thousands who arrive because we have burned their houses as a result of our actions. This ecological debt seems to count for nothing in the political world order, there is no Troika to condemn one country for polluting or causing the desertification of another country and so the 'ecological debt' to which the great and the powerful are increasingly indifferent, continues to rise.


Lastly, a word of advice, to whoever has yet to read this wonderful encyclical, do not be tempted to read it sitting at your desk or relaxing on the sofa.  Go out into the middle of a field or into the woods, to begin your meditation on this canticle of Pope Francis. The earth he speaks of is real and tangible, filled with the sights, sounds and scents of an earth that is loved.  Then, go to a poor area on the margins of society, to conclude your reading, surrounded by poor people, and look at the world with its rich and greedy living, with poor beggars on its doorstep and embrace at least one of them, like Pope Francis.  It is from such places as these that we will learn once again to be 'in awe' (11) of the marvels of the earth and of fellow human beings. Perhaps then we will understand and pray the words "Praise be to you".


 

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Laudato Si' (Praise be to you) - is far from being anti-business. But as we peruse it let us allow ourselves to be led gently through the metaphorical woodlands of the encyclical where the Holy Father Pope Francis’s spiritual economy is buoyant.


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 24/06/2015


The cries of many victims, of many who have been 'discarded', raises a question of justice which weighs heavily upon our capitalist system;  a question that is all the more serious because it is no longer being seen or heard. Pope Francis is the only figure of authority on global moral issues, who due to his particular charism, is giving recognition and ear to today's pressing ethical question (corporate social responsibility), in the face of which he is not afraid to raise radical questions (generated by his fraternal concern and love -  agape ). 


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Laudato Si' (Praise be to you)
EN - Avvenire Editorials

Laudato Si' (Praise be to you)

Laudato Si' (Praise be to you) - is far from being anti-business. But as we peruse it let us allow ourselves to be led gently through the metaphorical woodlands of the encyclical where the Holy Father Pope Francis’s spiritual economy is buoyant. by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 24/06/2015... 
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    [title] => Corporate crises: saying “we” helps to start over
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    [introtext] => 
Rules to overcome the difficulties


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 15/04/2015


Azienda 300So many people talk about economic recovery and GDP nowadays, as if GDP alone was capable of telling good tidings to us. The reality of our economy, however, says that businesses are suffering and will continue to suffer for a long time, and so will the world of work, too. And it is not only for the lack of markets and sales that they suffer. In fact, a common cause of suffering and failure can be found in some typical errors in the management of workers during the crisis. When going through long and difficult phases, in fact, we are more likely to commit many serious mistakes in the relationships between the ruling class and workers.
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There are more and more big companies that, facing a crisis involving a reduction in the personnel (do not forget that reducing the personnel during a crisis is not a dogma, but - almost always - a choice), move entirely along the level of the “political”: ownership meets trade unions, offers a business plan and the crisis is translated into contracts “politically”, in other words by deciding how many workers to sacrifice for survival – workers who are never considered or heard intentionally.


Other companies, however, when it comes to lay-off, follow the way of the market applying individual incentives and monetary compensation for those who are 'removed'. In both cases, the main subject is missed: the community of workers, because in the first case they are represented and mediated, in the second there are only individuals (often brought into conflict with each other). A company, however, is neither a small parliament nor a set of separate individuals, each one of them tied by a contract with the ownership: real businesses stay alive if they are able to create a living organism of virtuous relationships between all the various components of the organization. When a company enters a serious crisis, there are some basic rules to follow if you want a real worker involvement in seeking solutions and trying to overcome it, sometimes leaving it stronger and better than upon entering.


The first basic rule is called timing: to deal with a crisis it is a fundamental to intervene in time, not when the process is already advanced and severe. Good leadership should anticipate the major crises, and then figure out the right time for taking action, seizing the early weak signals to anticipate the explosion of the crisis. And then you have to start listening to the workers at the beginning of the crisis (whether it is external or internal) and not at the end, when communication perhaps only serves to inform them of the solution already decided on at other levels. The instances of “involvement” by the workers in this terminal phase, apart from not being beneficial, do nothing but exacerbate suffering.


The second rule: if you want to listen to workers, they have to be really heard. An environment of trust has to be created in which workers can say and offer their thoughts, and perceive being really heard. It is a process that requires its spaces and places, and above all takes time (you cannot have a few one-hour meetings to start talking about a serious crisis). Fake involvement is more harmful than a non-involvement. Real workers should be heard, possibly all of them, not just their representatives. The third rule: workers should be approached with a discourse at its starting point, and still completely open, saying that many solutions are possible, involving workers in seeking solutions. I have met some workers who were capable of heroic acts (significant reductions of salary for years in order to save a few jobs), such that their management had not even imagined. And that's because they were taken seriously at the beginning of the crisis, seen as the great value of the company and not only as the main problem. It is clear that in these cases the language used and the choice of words is very important.


A fourth principle is called subsidiarity. Any treatment of a crisis that aims to really get to a cure (many corporate crises these days, unfortunately, just want to get to the sale of companies to investment funds or to liquidation), must presume that the people who can point to possible ways of solution are especially those who are in an everyday contact with work, and not just the members of the Board of Directors who are almost always distant and therefore “incompetent” in that particular job, even if they are responsible for the company's strategy and finance. Without a close collaboration with those actually working inside the enterprise, good and true solutions will not be found, because the most valuable competence is the one in the hands and minds of those who actually do the work and not those who only know it as a story told by the managers or represented by numbers.


Finally, the main mistake to avoid is dividing the community of workers. The true skill of those who must manage a crisis in a difficult enterprise is not to divide, but to keep compact the whole community of work, to create a climate similar to that experienced by sailors facing a storm. But in order to do this it is necessary that the logic of “we” and not only the logic of “I” should prevail, which is possible if managers are able to make each worker feel like the centre of the solution and treat them as if everything depended on them. It is a rare and difficult skill, especially in our financial capitalism. Each of us is a mix of motivations, interests, vices and virtues. It is the organizational culture, especially in times of crisis and with a key role of managers that supports the emergence of the best or the worse in us in the workplace. Every good process of involvement of employees is always very risky and needs good and just eyes, the ability to watch the workers, all workers as something positive and beautiful, and not as lazy and opportunistic. If the entrepreneur, the manager or maybe the unions themselves presume that workers are just slackers and opportunists it is certain that they will find confirmation of their hypothesis, if only because it will create a climate of distrust and negativity that will extract the less cooperative and more selfish part from the people. The first wealth of every business and every organization is the people in it, their skills, their moral energy and their hearts. Crises can be overcome if you have the wisdom and courage to start from this old, great and often overlooked truth.


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Rules to overcome the difficulties


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 15/04/2015


Azienda 300So many people talk about economic recovery and GDP nowadays, as if GDP alone was capable of telling good tidings to us. The reality of our economy, however, says that businesses are suffering and will continue to suffer for a long time, and so will the world of work, too. And it is not only for the lack of markets and sales that they suffer. In fact, a common cause of suffering and failure can be found in some typical errors in the management of workers during the crisis. When going through long and difficult phases, in fact, we are more likely to commit many serious mistakes in the relationships between the ruling class and workers.
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Corporate crises: saying “we” helps to start over
EN - Avvenire Editorials

Corporate crises: saying “we” helps to start over

Rules to overcome the difficulties by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 15/04/2015 So many people talk about economic recovery and GDP nowadays, as if GDP alone was capable of telling good tidings to us. The reality of our economy, however, says that businesses are suffering and will continue t... 
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    [title] => Care: the Secret to Success
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An Interview with Canadian Political Scientist Jennifer Nedelsky


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 4/10/2014


Icare 300 ridCanadian political scientist Jennifer Nedelsky, professor at the University of Toronto, is one of the most innovative voices in the debate on the issues of care, rights and social relations. She is convinced that in our time there is a big priority that, however and unfortunately, remains much in the background of the life of democracies: the profound rethinking of the relationship between work and care, and thus between men and women, the young and the old, the rich and the poor. In fact, it is a critical issue in a world with more and more elderly people, and with elderly people who, thank God, live longer and longer. Without a collective and serious breakthrough in the culture of care in relation to the culture of work, democracy and equality among people are basically denied. I've known professor Nedelsky for a few years (and that explains the informal register of our interview); this time I met her in Italy at the Sophia University Institute of Loppiano (Florence). I asked her some questions on issues that I believe should be placed at the centre of the political and civil life of our country today.

    [fulltext] => 
Why do you think there is something wrong with the purchasing of care services in the market, using money so that the richer people can “buy” assistance from poorer people? At the bottom of the market, after all, there is the encounter between different people with different “goods” that can be exchanged for a mutual benefit.


I'm not absolutely against the “care market”. In my kind of system it would be possible to buy a certain amount of care, because in my vision people, for example women, would have more free time for their children and also to work. My proposal is that each person should dedicate some time to care for themselves and for others. What differentiates my approach from others (I'm thinking of those who propose a salary for housewives) is that I wish that all adult citizens (men and women, from all walks of life and from all social classes) were engaged in activities of free (i.e. unpaid) care. I would want them to be able to provide for their own care instead of “buying” someone in the market to do it for them, and I wish they would also take up the care of their family, their parents, and even their communities. For at least 12 hours per week.


We should not forget, either, that behind the “care market” there is also a question of power between people and regions of the world, where whoever is richer can pass work that he does not like on to the poorer ones. Democracies have struggled for centuries to reduce or eliminate the possibility of a powerful few having poor people at their disposal. Today, however, we are reintroducing something like that in a “neo-feudalism” where money has taken the place of blue blood, having the same function of dominance over people. Let's go back to “your” hours of care: those weekly 12 hours would be spent in the family, but, as I understand, also away from home.


Yes, and I am thinking and talking about all types of care. If at a given moment of your life you have important responsibilities (towards your children or elderly parents...) maybe in those years, your care will be donated exclusively (or almost) inside the family. But when these obligations are over, you are free to take care of others within the larger circle of the community to which you belong.


Would you want this “care-for-all” to become mandatory?


Every norm is mandatory, although the forms of enforcement and application vary according to the type of norm. What I think is very important is that the norm that I propose (“part-time care for all and part-time work for all”) should not be imposed from above by the state and its laws, but become effective as a result of the powerful mechanisms of esteem and social judgement. Let me give you an example, and I am not choosing it randomly: because of the social norms about the man-woman relationship in force today, women do a tremendous amount of unpaid work at home, and this is only because of social norms that are very effective and fundamental in our lives. It shows that all the norms “oblige us” and not only the ones dictated by laws. Let me give you another example: in our days, if a man in his thirties attends a party and says he has never worked and does not intend to look for a job either, he admits something that generates a strong negative social judgement, while only one or two centuries ago such a social condition was a sign nobility and social esteem (and envy). I want a world where if you're a person (man or woman) and you show up at a party and introduce yourself saying “I've never done any care work for myself or for others”, you end up simply ashamed because you get strong disapproval from others. And the same should happen to you if you say, “I do not have time to cook, to iron or to take care of my parents or my community because I have a very important job that keeps me completely busy.” We should soon get to say that these lives of “all work and no care” are socially immature and as such they do not deserve our respect. And so we should overcome them the same way as we have surpassed the idea of ​​nobility associated with high income and no work.


It seems clear that such a cultural change should begin not only from the family but also from school.


Yes, I think a lot about schools. I am convinced, for example, that before graduating, every young person should be able to plan their weekly menu, know its costs, know where to go shopping and how to cook the goods they buy. Every adult should be able to do these things, and not only entrust them entirely to the market or to women, because no one has the right to think that there are others who can do these things in their place.


In your books you propose some major changes in the workplace.


Certainly. I think there are two main aspects that are deeply intertwined. The first concerns equality between the sexes. We are living in a time of great stress for families. But there is something that is not emphasised enough: the policy makers are, in general, people who have not done, and are not currently doing any jobs of care. Generally they have no idea about it...


...one would say it is because they are rich or because they are male, or both.


... They know nothing of these fundamental dimensions of human life. So they make policies of care and welfare without having a daily experience of it. So we have to eliminate or reduce the “gap” between those who actually engage in care and those who legislate on it, and then readjust both the workplace and the norms around care. As for work, I wish that no one worked for more than thirty hours per week. And as for care, no adult should do less than 12 hours of care per week. Everyone must provide care, and no one should stay at home unemployed, and everyone must have a paid job that, even if it is part-time work, has to be seen as a “good” job (with full rights, proper wages, etc..). For this reason, the term “part-time” should be revised and it should not be understood as it is understood today, but as a new way to experience work, a new “full time job” for all, along with care. But, I repeat, I believe in a culture change. If you say to someone, ‘My work as a doctor or engineer is really important and I have to work 80 hours a week,’ people should say, ‘You are not a good doctor’ or ‘you are not a good engineer.’ Too much work (and no care) should change from being considered an element of estimation to be seen as a factor of blame..


It's like saying that we would need to change the idea of ​​“social esteem”, which should become a much broader concept than mere professional respect. We should respect workers who are also people with a capability to do anything else besides work, and especially to take care of themselves and others. I fully agree. But don't you think there are jobs that by their nature require much effort and many hours of work to achieve excellence (medicine, science, politics, priesthood, sport...)?


My system would allow you to reach excellence, absolutely. If you are a scientist and you are conducting a complex experiment, you can and you have to work even 12 hours a day and 90 hours a week. There are many jobs that require very intensive periods. But then you have to catch up and take some days off. My thirty hours are an indicative average for the long term. But no one should be able to say, ‘My work is very important, and someone else has to wash my socks.’


So what you say is actually a criticism of the current form of capitalism, isn't it?


Yes and no. I wish that my system was applied immediately, not only in a hypothetical different company. I am certainly concerned about our financial capitalism, especially because of its inequality. Think of the growing gap between wages in our major businesses, which is an economic failure, but also a political and moral one. It was not always so. Capitalism has experienced much lower wages for top managers, and there used to be more democracy. So introducing 12 hours off a week for all would also be an effective way of increasing democracy and true equality between people.
But we must realise that our capitalism today is going in the opposite direction: in the USA the weekly hours of work are now 47-48 on average. I would like a cultural change in the family, in business and in politics. But I would like it to happen immediately, by starting right now to educate ourselves to a different notion of excellence, where excellence is being extended to our ability to love, to care for others. Instead of saying, ‘You're an excellent doctor,’ we should start saying: ‘You are an excellent person, because in addition to your work you also take care of yourself and your community.’ Excellence should be interpreted within the framework of life, and not only at work.


It's as if you were to invite us to look for a new, “relational” flourishing of humanity.


Yes, it is a new idea of​​ “success” or “flourishing of humanity” that we need, where work and money are resized, and the criteria for success are many. But I will not give up on work: I myself love my job, and I hope that more and more people will be able to work following their own vocation, and that, together, they will have time to do many other things that they like doing."


 

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    [text] => 
An Interview with Canadian Political Scientist Jennifer Nedelsky


by Luigino Bruni


published in Avvenire on 4/10/2014


Icare 300 ridCanadian political scientist Jennifer Nedelsky, professor at the University of Toronto, is one of the most innovative voices in the debate on the issues of care, rights and social relations. She is convinced that in our time there is a big priority that, however and unfortunately, remains much in the background of the life of democracies: the profound rethinking of the relationship between work and care, and thus between men and women, the young and the old, the rich and the poor. In fact, it is a critical issue in a world with more and more elderly people, and with elderly people who, thank God, live longer and longer. Without a collective and serious breakthrough in the culture of care in relation to the culture of work, democracy and equality among people are basically denied. I've known professor Nedelsky for a few years (and that explains the informal register of our interview); this time I met her in Italy at the Sophia University Institute of Loppiano (Florence). I asked her some questions on issues that I believe should be placed at the centre of the political and civil life of our country today.

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Care: the Secret to Success
EN - Avvenire Editorials

Care: the Secret to Success

An Interview with Canadian Political Scientist Jennifer Nedelsky by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 4/10/2014 Canadian political scientist Jennifer Nedelsky, professor at the University of Toronto, is one of the most innovative voices in the debate on the issues of care, rights and socia... 
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Commentaries - Old Vices Increased by the Crisis


by Luigino Bruni


published inAvvenire on 10/07/2014


Usura rid“Parallel with the intensification of the economic crisis, a greater spread of the phenomenon of usury was observed, evidenced by reports of the doubling of suspicious transactions in 2013 over the previous year.” There are documents like this one – just published by the Financial Information Unit of the Bank of Italy – that every responsible and mature citizen should read, meditate on, and then act accordingly. Usury is a typical disease of any monetary society, since it is the visible phenomenon of the power relations and the power that are hidden under the apparent neutrality of money. The existence of money has many benefits, but it also generates high costs that are growing in intensity and importance with the expansion of the area covered by money within society.

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Usury grows with the marketing of social relations, and, as the Bank of Italy tells us, it also grows in times of crisis, when the demand for money increases for those on the margins or outside of the official circuits of credit. No social system has produced as much usury as our financial capitalism, where being able to buy almost anything for money, money becomes almost everything, and one is willing to do almost anything to get it. Usury, therefore, is an eloquent and infallible indicator of how much "waste" our capitalism produces and fails to recycle, but also of the inability of banks and good and legal channels of credit to respond to the demand for money that comes from the outskirts of the empire (which then leads "elsewhere"). But it is also a sign of how much pain there is behind the crisis of so many businesses and deceitful promises of easy luxury for the poor.


It would be interesting and extremely useful to "open up" these data and read the stories that lie beneath them. We would find a very diverse humanity there: entrepreneurs in crisis, too many vulnerable people fallen in the vicious circles of gambling, the scratch-and-win, and in the many traps of the easy credit offered by ambiguous agencies that ruin the more vulnerable families by promising unsustainable consumption – the great disease of our system lies as much in legal as in illegal forms of corruption.


We must not, in fact, forget that the victims of usury are the poor: they have always been, but they are even more now. For this reason it is useful to re-read an original translation of the well-known passage from the Gospel of Luke (6:34), written by Antonio Genovesi in his Lessons of Civil Economy: "Lend to those freely who are in need and short of hope and do so without putting them in despair (mutuum date neminem desperare facientes)" (1766). Genovesi, who was an innovator and heir of the great classical view of money, generally accepted lending at interest, but he posed a clear exception: “given that they are not poor.” In fact, though Genovesi could not even imagine it, over the centuries capitalism has become a system that lends on usury primarily, if not solely, to the poor, putting them more and more into despair. It is mainly those who are short of money, but even more those who are short of relations that are captured and then crushed by the octopus of usurers after they have been isolated. But as long as there are friendly people who listen, advise and protect us, we do not end up in the net of usury. Usury first isolates then makes one feel having their back to the wall and with no escape, and finally it destroys one.


What to do? The cure for usury, this disease of monetary economics, never came from private banks and their income seeking. Some treatments have come from institutions which, under the pressure of the citizens, made and improved anti-usury legislation; but radical cures have mainly come from a different type of banks and financial institutions born with a larger goal than gains and profits. The social and supportive tradition of banks flourished in the second half of the fifteenth century, in the middle of the social crisis caused partly by the boom of the markets and usury. The Franciscan Minors (James of the Marches, John of Capistrano, Marco da Montegallo...) invented the Monti di Pietà, one of the largest financial innovations and economic frameworks of Europe. And they did so as an expression of charitas, civil, brotherly love for their people who asked for bread and good credit. In the face of a serious crisis, those Christians and friends of man did not write treatises, nor did they organise conferences: they were able to generate works, institutions, banks. If we want to reduce usury we should continue to act on institutions and request, as citizens, better laws that are more favourable for the most fragile members of society. But most importantly, associations and movements of civil society should give rise to new financial institutions, funds of micro-financing and new banks.


Our economic and financial system is not in a position of a possible self-regeneration, we see it every day. The same Bank of Italy document tells us that the reports of money laundering have increased six-fold since 2007. Too many enterprises founded by ex-craftsmen practicing civil virtues have been passed into the hands of speculators, and many traditional banks are now directed by managers delegated by a proprietor that only aims to maximise gains, led by algorithms that are too far away from people. There is a large and growing need for the works of the common good. There are some positive signs, but we still cannot interpret them, and we are not able to make a choir out of the individual voices.


Unless there are new initiatives for the common good, we will have to continue commenting on reports of usury and corruption, getting depressed, waiting passively and co-responsibly for the next sad report, or deluding ourselves about the “revival” promised by new guessing games. And the poor will continue to be put in despair.


 Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial

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Commentaries - Old Vices Increased by the Crisis


by Luigino Bruni


published inAvvenire on 10/07/2014


Usura rid“Parallel with the intensification of the economic crisis, a greater spread of the phenomenon of usury was observed, evidenced by reports of the doubling of suspicious transactions in 2013 over the previous year.” There are documents like this one – just published by the Financial Information Unit of the Bank of Italy – that every responsible and mature citizen should read, meditate on, and then act accordingly. Usury is a typical disease of any monetary society, since it is the visible phenomenon of the power relations and the power that are hidden under the apparent neutrality of money. The existence of money has many benefits, but it also generates high costs that are growing in intensity and importance with the expansion of the area covered by money within society.

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We Need a Cure
EN - Avvenire Editorials

We Need a Cure

Commentaries - Old Vices Increased by the Crisis by Luigino Bruni published inAvvenire on 10/07/2014 “Parallel with the intensification of the economic crisis, a greater spread of the phenomenon of usury was observed, evidenced by reports of the doubling of suspicious transactions in 2013 over the p...