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Commentary – Beauty brought about the Economy and Civility in Italy. Let’s protect it and start producing it again.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on March 17, 2013

Beauty’s civil and economic virtues are vital for us. Beauty is necessary to renew the economy and labor market, to establish new schools and universities, and to guarantee care for those who didn’t choose to be poor. The old and new kinds of poverty afflicting the poor can only be overcome through the beautiful poverty of St. Francis. Although the Italian economy and civil life “produced” (artistic, musical, urban…) beauty, it was beauty that first brought about the economy and civil life.

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Anything made in Italy has been precious for centuries. Artisans and workers of all periods have made this true. They grew up surrounded by cathedrals, piazzas, valleys, seas, and mountains, and were thereby nourished by beauty. So we must realize that it is not only raw material, capital, and labor that are inputs for our economy; Dante, Pinocchio, Fellini, stories, landscapes, frescos, churches, are the basis for national production. Beauty becomes translated into designs, cars, shoes, outfits, foods.
Food and wine tourism attract people to, for example, Umbria and Sicily. In such places one will not only “consume” accommodations, food, and wine, but will “eat and drink” the beauty accumulated over thousands of years of culture and in the landscape (one should bear in mind that although the entrepreneur sells this product, part of it's price isn't his; this is also true considering taxes). Economic value was created when people started adding value to products through beauty; when producers learned how to express beauty they translated it into products, goods, the economy, and welfare. Today we continuously consume beauty but are no longer capable of producing it, other than in very small quantities. We should start creating beauty once more so that goods and labor may flourish again. Beauty cannot be planned for in business schools or political forums; it is the fruit of graciousness. Grace (Charis in Greek) is the root of beauty (also gracefulness) itself, and it inspires love for places, cities, and regions.
It may not be as obvious today as in the past, but beauty is essential in maintaining good schools and universities. Currently they lack not only of economic and financial resources, but also beauty. Our children and youth should receive their education and develop their personalities in the most beautiful places. However, these places are in the hands of banks and speculators while students are crowded together in forgotten, decaying buildings. I just don’t know how one can teach, let alone how students can encounter and get to know Socrates, Pythagoras, and Leopardi, in such an ugly environment.
Clear-sighted people working in schools know that classrooms, walls and yards speak and teach as well. They are “colleagues” who communicate in a non verbal language just as vivid as ours. Children are aware of this and have learned it from fairy tales and cartoons where grasshoppers, animals, and plants also speak, and where houses can open their eyes and smile. Evidentially children aren't simply incomplete grown-ups; they have something more than the adults, though this is eventually lost in time. Such an approach to beauty is necessary if true child-adult reciprocity is to be fostered. However, in schools today this is what happens: A child reads a poem of Ungaretti and a few minutes later runs outside, wishing to experience the mystery of poetry in real life (either one lives poetry in one’s own flesh, or it’s useless, it can even be harmful). The scruffy and decayed recreation space they play in doesn’t allow the student to learn the desired exercise in freedom and truth. Thus, the next day the teacher has to start again from scratch, a task worthy of Sisyphus. In short, a school is good if it’s beautiful.
Demand for beauty is even more urgent among the poor. In times gone by the population of a town, including the poor, would frequent the most beautiful places, namely the cathedrals and churches. It's stunning to think that Giotto’s and Caravaggio’s frescos decorated the rooms that offered shelter to poor, simple, humble and illiterate people. The harsh burden of a short life filled with struggle was eased by the gift of art. Artists and patrons handed the poor part of the richness that was once taken from them.
Of course back then there was also a lot of opulence and private wealth that was not shared with the poor. Today however, despite the French Revolution and democracy, even less beauty (wealth) is shared than before. Wealth is now produced by the financial market and then concentrated in fiscal paradises, in invisible and extremely private real-estate, or other assets. Towns are not at all made more beautiful by mansions of millionaires. People don’t see them, let alone live in them. They represent an uncivilized kind of wealth; they are neither in nor for the city. Thus, the luxury and pomp confined within their walls aren’t true to beauty. The inhabitants themselves won't enjoy its beauty as long as it remains hidden to others, mainly to the poor. “You chose to be condemned for life to enjoy only what brings joy to all”; the concept in this lovely verse by David Maria Turoldo is actually true for everyone. “In my cooperative”  a civil entrepreneur once told me “there will be very competent hairdressers, because” he continued “if an old lady breaks her thighbone, as long as she doesn’t feel beautiful she will not be cured, she might even let herself die”.
True beauty is therapeutic. Hideous surroundings may avoid cure or even cause death. When poor people are helped and offered shelter in an agreeable environment they will be capable of giving the first step out of their unfortunate condition. Beauty brings out the best in us. Beauty therefore is not a luxury good but is a necessary good that should go hand in hand with dignity and poverty. Let’s fill our cities, companies, and schools with beauty so we will not run out of the spiritual and symbolic strength to start again.
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial menu. 
Translated by Cristian Sebok
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Commentary – Beauty brought about the Economy and Civility in Italy. Let’s protect it and start producing it again.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on March 17, 2013

Beauty’s civil and economic virtues are vital for us. Beauty is necessary to renew the economy and labor market, to establish new schools and universities, and to guarantee care for those who didn’t choose to be poor. The old and new kinds of poverty afflicting the poor can only be overcome through the beautiful poverty of St. Francis. Although the Italian economy and civil life “produced” (artistic, musical, urban…) beauty, it was beauty that first brought about the economy and civil life.

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Comments – More Democracy is Necessary
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 03/03/2013

A referendum is being held in Switzerland today to put a break on remunerations for managers of societies quoted on the stock market.  This is a good occasion to reopen the topic of the incomes of so-called  ‘top managers’ here in our country as well ,and on that matter and much more importantly, as it lies at the root of the first problem , of economic democracy.  How about in Italy, or in Europe?  A reason for the absence of this type of initiative, or, as we hope, only lateness, is the inability of Europe, and more so of Italy, to propose in past decades a different business and economic culture.
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Today business schools are all the same: at Harvard, Nairobi, San Paolo, Berlin, Peking, or Milan, the same things are taught, the same texts are used, at times even the same slides downloaded from the internet.  I have seen courses given on ‘Social Business Responsibility’ in classes where directors of cooperatives were sitting beside managers of speculative investment funds, because, as they explained, “Business is business”.  Therefore, it does not surprise us, but rather, saddens us to see a progressively shorter distance between the culture and the incomes of great cooperatives and those of capitalistic businesses, a resemblance that would certainly cause founders of the cooperative movement to turn over in their graves. They had imagined and brought about different enterprises also because they were able to covert the principles of fraternity and equality into paycheques, and not only to mention them in the premises of their statutes.
Yet, Italy and Europe had, and still have, a bit of another way to do business and society, another ‘capitalistic spirit’, which in Germany is called ‘social economy of the market’, in France ‘social economy’ in Italy ‘civil economy’, and in Spain and Portugal ‘economy of solidarity’.   A social cooperative is not a philanthropic institution (charity), but a matter of reciprocity and of productive inclusion, it is a ‘doing with’ before being a ‘doing for’.   A banking foundation is not   an American foundation, and small to medium family businesses,  as the load-bearing axis of our economy, have neither the culture nor the tools that anonymous corporations have, even if many of these businesses of ours have lost themselves in trying to follow those strange models.  In Italy we also had the glorious tradition of the Enterprise Economy, today on the way towards extinction, which was a happy attempt to convert a communitarian and relational model into organizational culture, where the aim of the enterprise was not the maximization of profit, but the balance between all the components of a company, in which the founding principle was “Satisfaction of human needs” (Gino Zappa, 1927).
The economic crisis is also fruit of a managerial culture that has revealed itself inadequate, certainly because of a mistaken or an insufficient legislation, but also from a form of thinking that begins in universities where economy is taught and it continues on into the masters; a wrong formation which is also at the base of justifications for those superstar salaries.  Current economic curriculums, all over the world, are more and more stripped of all their humanistic and historical dimensions, deluding themselves that by reducing economic thought to numbers, tables, graphics and algorithms (ever more simplified), one can form people capable of thinking and of being creative, of true innovation or of coordinating individuals whose anthropological and spiritual mystery remains such even as they work.  Yet, future jobs will come about, certainly in Italy, arising from culture, art, tourism, relationships, and to do these jobs well it is very useful to know the history of culture or of art, more so than techniques of budget balancing , evaluation and control.
We need then to open public debate on these crucial topics which cannot be left to ‘those in charge’: we have done so these past years, and the results are visible for all to see.  Modern democratic culture has put politics and governing of the state at the centre: great.  But the world has changed a lot and today we know, or should know, that good government passes also, and always more, through good governing of markets, businesses and organizations.  There is one Parliament (in Italy), but the administrative councils of banks and businesses are thousands: the quality of our lives, our dignity and freedoms depend also from these and we cannot continue to ignore this.  Economic democracy will be the challenge of the XXI century, if we wish to avoid reducing the democratic area into ever less relevant sectors of people’s lives, if we wish to feel like kings on election-day and lowly subjects on following days of many non-democratic rulers. The XX century created and maintained confines between areas of action of democracy and those kept by other non-democratic principles.
Amongst non-democratic areas the most important and relevant one was that of capitalistic enterprises.  The new era of common goods is forcing us to profoundly rethink the border of democracy if we don’t wish to lose it, or to smother it into a tiny region, perhaps to become irrelevant one day.  The market and businesses are not a private matter: they never have been, (think about workers’ and business owner’s syndicates).  This crisis however, had told us with great force and clarity that economy, finance and the market are also a truly ‘public matter’, with its delights and its crosses, for which we have the right and the duty to occupy ourselves , not just because it is us who will be paying all the consequences of bad government.  We must then invent new tools of economic democracy which cannot be the same ones used by political democracy.  We must think them on a Global scale.  But we must do it soon, for it is far too important.
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    [text] => 
Comments – More Democracy is Necessary
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 03/03/2013

A referendum is being held in Switzerland today to put a break on remunerations for managers of societies quoted on the stock market.  This is a good occasion to reopen the topic of the incomes of so-called  ‘top managers’ here in our country as well ,and on that matter and much more importantly, as it lies at the root of the first problem , of economic democracy.  How about in Italy, or in Europe?  A reason for the absence of this type of initiative, or, as we hope, only lateness, is the inability of Europe, and more so of Italy, to propose in past decades a different business and economic culture.
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Commentary – Labor and education in the course of our lives.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on February 10, 2013

We must urgently rethink the relationship between the workplace and the schoolroom; labor is hardly ever present in the education of young people. In a traditional society this may have been appropriate since labor was always present in the lives of children and young people. Those who lived in the countryside could count on having to work after school and sometimes in the morning before attending school. Even those who lived in the city were surrounded by various trades, professions and toys that mimicked the occupations of grownups. School, therefore, was a short and valuable period of escape from a (hard) labor dominated world.
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Today the situation has been reversed. Labor is gradually vanishing from modern urban culture and even the games our children play, and it has been replaced by finance, Internet-mediated relationships and, above all, consumption. A ride through the supermarket while sitting in a shopping cart is the first “economic” experience our children go through. Among the youth, friendship and labor during the crucial years of development have all but disappeared. Thus, when the time comes to start looking for work or finding an occupation, they are at first puzzled and often become unemployed.
Would it be too difficult to allow our students to engage in some form of labor a few hours a week during high school (at least in their senior years) or during the long months of summer vacation? The real obstacle, more serious than organizational or safety problems (the courtyards of our high schools have become extremely unsafe), can be traced to the deeply rooted idea that manual labor is not suitable for character development. A good education consists of studying literature, history and mathematics, not of working in a crafts workshop, an office, or a factory, let alone a farm. We have not yet freed ourselves, despite St. Benedict and Civil Humanism, from the vulgar idea that manual labor is impure and only suitable for servants and slaves. Young people carry this animosity towards labor into university, where working is considered unimportant and often pushed into the background. Many university students today do “odd jobs” for a living, but only a few engage in the profession they have chosen to pursue after graduation. During the past few decades, when the economy was thriving and prosperous (perhaps excessively), it may have made sense for people to study for twenty-four or twenty-five years and only start working after graduation. However, in view of the current stagnation of the economy (which is bound to continue for a while), a young person who spends four or more years preparing to practice a trade is very likely to discover that the conditions in society and the economy are not conducive to being able to get a job and actually practice that trade.
A sure sign of an economy or society in recession is that the present generation destroys rather than creates job opportunities for young people. In other words, young people who do not enter the labor market while attending university are at risk of never joining the workforce. If they are able, perhaps belatedly, they may find themselves in very unfavorable circumstances; while they dedicate themselves to their studies no one created good job opportunities for them. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that the years spent acquiring a university education are not simply preparation for a future (and uncertain) job. University students must seek for actual employment, not just “odd jobs”.
I realize this means going against the trend of recent decades that reduces and standardizes education programs. As a result, education has come to be regarded as a kind of fee people must pay in order to work under better conditions tomorrow. Instead, we should develop more flexible study programs that incorporate labor rather than replace it. Such programs may last many years because the goal is not just to earn a piece of paper, but to gain knowledge and learn. In a society as complex as ours, we learn much of our knowledge through labor.
Labor of any kind is mastered through experience, not in a classroom or by earning a master’s degree in a business school. This has important consequences for labor. My mother had to stop going to school when she was in fifth grade, but those five years of schooling grew within her; they became a jealousely treasured asset that bore fruit and shaped her life and her children's. Today, however, research shows that after only a few years of labor much of the knowledge gained during one's studies is lost. People are far more ignorant after ten years of labor than immediately after graduating from university. This is because we have built a civilization of laborers that regard education as an instrument to be acquired at a certain stage of life (youth). This instrument is then used only to find a job; the labor market (for adults) is separate from school and education.
This is especially true in large companies, which hire capable graduates and submit them to an unbearably demanding work environment. Such companies do not provide the time nor space necessary to cultivate our humanity outside the company, much less inside. Therefore, we are producing one-dimensional people whose sole motivation to study is to stay relevant or enhance their performance, which misses the most important characteristic of education: graciousness. We need to re-humanize the postmodern workplace by filling it with culture, art, beauty and graciousness. It must be an environment where people can flourish in every way while working. They need to have time to study beautiful and difficult things, even at forty or fifty years of age, so that they do not reach retirement exhausted and ignorant. It is necessary to bring more of the workplace into the classroom and vice versa.
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni are available through the Avvenire Editorial.
Translated by Tomás Olcese
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Commentary – Labor and education in the course of our lives.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on February 10, 2013

We must urgently rethink the relationship between the workplace and the schoolroom; labor is hardly ever present in the education of young people. In a traditional society this may have been appropriate since labor was always present in the lives of children and young people. Those who lived in the countryside could count on having to work after school and sometimes in the morning before attending school. Even those who lived in the city were surrounded by various trades, professions and toys that mimicked the occupations of grownups. School, therefore, was a short and valuable period of escape from a (hard) labor dominated world.
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Fourth appointment with comments by Luigino Bruni on ‘Economy and Advent’
Comments – A Time to Understand the Precious ‘Liturgy’ of Relationships
by Luigino Bruni
Published  in Avvenire on 22/12/2012
Christmas is a time for gifts, but it should be, and is, a time for presents.  Gifts and presents are different human acts, they live alongside each other, but they should not be confused one for the other.  In regaling something to someone (giving a gift), (a word which comes from regal, an offer to or from the king), the dimension of obligation prevails (which the Latins called munus).  Gifts are often given (though not always) to absolve oneself of an obligation, normally good ones, towards family members, friends, colleagues, suppliers, clients, individuals in responsible positions, etc… 
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Upon visiting someone, especially on a holiday, if you do not bring a gift, you do not fulfill a sort of obligation, you break a good social convention. For this reason, the practice of gift giving conserves something of the archaic custom of ‘offerings,’ of cultural ‘sacrifices.’
Gifts are foreseen, regulated by social conventions, and in some cases expected (in many regions, wedding gifts are regulated by very rigidly observed, detailed rules, even while deeply indebting one).   It is no surprise therefore that an economist, Joel Waldfogel, showed, with data at hand, that Christmas gifts  destroy medially 20% of the value of gifts given because, if people could choose their own gifts instead of receiving them from others, their satisfaction would be higher.  
Therefore, this economist proposes to give money to friends and relatives – and this already happens habitually with sons, nephews, nieces, and relatives, since giving money becomes an easier way for those giving and those receiving.  Not bad, especially in the case of a wedding, when the young couple often have need of money to start up, as long as we do not call these practices, ‘presents.’
A present is another thing, its nature is different, it has another price, another value.  It is a matter of gratuity, it is a relational good, that is, an act whereby the main good is not the object given but the relationship between the giver and the receiver.  A present is not foreseen, it can be expected at times, it always exceeds, it is not tied to merit, it is surprising.  It is costly, and its main ‘currency’ is the attention, the care, and above all, the time taken. A present is an experience of ‘getting up hurriedly’, and ‘making’ oneself move towards the other.
Giving gifts is easy, one can get dozens in a pair of frenetic afternoons of shopping.
To give a present is more difficult, and this is why one gives and receives few of them. For a present one needs to invest time, to have deep empathy for the other, to be creative, make an effort, even risk ingratitude.  When a present is also expressed with something given, that present will forever be filled by that act of love, that relational good from which it sprang and which is always cause of rebirth.  When I won an important job contest, an older friend and colleague of mine gave me a fountain pen: he had it inscribed with my initials, he wrote a beautiful card (in content and form), and invited me to supper with his family in order to give it to me.  That pen was not a gift: it was a sign, a ‘sacrament’ of an important relationship, which is relived each time I use the pen. 
There are some signs that can help one distinguish a present from a gift.
1. There is no present without a personal and accurate note to accompany it.
2. The form counts as much as the substance: in a present, the ‘how’, ‘when,’ and ‘where,’ the present is given count as much as the ‘what’. 
3. Delivering the present can never be anonymous or hasty: it is essential to know how to waste time, as is the presence of both the giver and the receiver. 
It is a visitation, a looking at, and observing of one another.  The opening of the present, the facial expressions, the words spoken in the giving and the taking, are fundamental acts in the liturgy of a present, which is not altruism, not donation, but is essentially reciprocity of words, looks, emotions, gestures.  Touch is the first sense of a present. 
Gifts are meant for maintenance of relationships, but they do not heal them, transform them, re-create them.  A present instead, is a fundamental instrument, if not an indispensable one, for healing, reconciliation, starting over.  There exists in fact, a very deep rapport between present and forgiveness, and this, in many languages.  In English for example, to forgive, is not, to forget.  Since real forgiveness is not getting rid of a burden while forgetting the pain received.  It is a giving, not a getting, it is believing once again in a wounded relationship, where one says to the other (or at east to oneself): “I forgive you, I still believe in our relationship, I am ready to forgive you even if you were to hurt me again.”   There is no forgiveness without donation, and no donation without forgiveness. 
This for-giveness evidently has need of gratuity, of agape, and if these forgiving’s are missing, personal and social life cannot function, it can’t generate, it can’t be happy.  The Italy of today must overcome the culture of ‘condoning’ (which is opposite of giving), while it has extreme need of presents and for-giveness, at all levels, particularly in the public sphere: this, thinking about the tragic topic of jails and of their inmates.
A present is, then, a very serious thing, a political matter, it founds and re-founds civilization and life: we would not have survived our own birth if someone had not given us attention, care, and love.  No institution or human community is born and reborn without presents.  Let us take advantage of these last days of Christmas to transform some gifts into presents.
It isn’t impossible, and it can often give an anthropological and spiritual turn to a celebration, an encounter.  A forgiving, a new beginning. 
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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    [text] => 
Fourth appointment with comments by Luigino Bruni on ‘Economy and Advent’
Comments – A Time to Understand the Precious ‘Liturgy’ of Relationships
by Luigino Bruni
Published  in Avvenire on 22/12/2012
Christmas is a time for gifts, but it should be, and is, a time for presents.  Gifts and presents are different human acts, they live alongside each other, but they should not be confused one for the other.  In regaling something to someone (giving a gift), (a word which comes from regal, an offer to or from the king), the dimension of obligation prevails (which the Latins called munus).  Gifts are often given (though not always) to absolve oneself of an obligation, normally good ones, towards family members, friends, colleagues, suppliers, clients, individuals in responsible positions, etc… 
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Second Appointment with Comments by Luigino Bruni on ‘Economy and Advent’
Comments – This is a time for preparing a new harvest
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 09/12/2012

Maybe it is because of the sharp sting felt over the Imu (home tax), for over 2 and a half million Italian citizens who had to sell gold and jewellery in order to make it to go on or perhaps it was the daily spectacle of the institutions and politicians who are just not able to rise to the gravity and seriousness of the times.  For this reason and for many others, this is an advent time marked also by tears.  Yet, one can, and must, hope in a new harvest, even in our Italy: «Those who sow in tears, will reap in joy».
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Who knows how many tears over man’s work, and above all women’s, have generated the prayers, the songs, the cries that have been gathered and watched over from that psalm, and from others. Tears are part and parcel of work, they are served daily during meals, so much so that if work did not know tears, that is, sweat and effort, it is probably not work but something else, certainly not something better.  Putting out effort while working is simply part of the human condition.
For this reason, one who does not experience the effort of work because of having incomes and privileges, is denied or denies himself out of self- deception of one of the ethical and spiritual experiences truest of the human condition.  One who is working knows he has really started to work not so much when he receives his first paycheck, but the day he first felt the effort, the hardship, the difficulty of work, and rose above them.  If we stop before the line of fatigue we do not enter in the territory of work, and therefore, we do not gather its best fruit, since felicitas is not the absence of suffering and effort, but its salary.  Notwithstanding the utilitarian culture that wishes to convince us that the objective of good societies is to ‘minimize pain’ and to ‘maximize pleasure’, in reality there exists ‘good pain’ and some ‘bad pleasures.’
Good pains are those that are borne of the cultivation of virtues and work, the bad pleasures are the greater part of what are shown us today as easy hedonistic joys without any effort.
Every excellence, whether in science or in sports, in the arts or in love, requires decisive moments of ‘tears.’  A culture which does not esteem and give value to the work effort, cannot understand or appreciate even the best of harvests, and confuses them with false ones (as in those numerous profits which transpire with injustice, of raided environment and human lives). But not all efforts and ‘tears’ of work are good.’ The ones from slaves and servants are not good, as well as all those which are not accompanied by the hope of a harvest, as it would be when one does not see a ‘child’ at the end of ones’ ‘labour.’ Tears shed by those workers – and there are yet too many in the world – who labor without rights, security, health, respect and dignity.  Or the tears of the very many who have no work because they have lost it, or worse yet, because they have never been able to get one; a suffering that increases during holidays because when there is no work, feast days are more painful than weekdays.
Tears without bread or salt (without salary...) are just tears.  That ancient song about work though tells us something else more important: in order to hope for a harvest it is not enough to cry, one must keep sowing while crying.  If I think about the youth, the students; to sow in tears means to study well and to study hard, difficult things.  The university world in these last two decades of deep ethical crisis has produced too many degree programs without (or with few) tears, presented and chosen because of their light loads, which generated and are generating few ‘harvests’, and too many unemployed.  A young person is formed by studying difficult things, above all, by studying well, and by studying more in times of crisis, as reciprocity towards the community which allows him/her to study notwithstanding the few means available.  Studies done on objective wellbeing of people already tell us with extreme clearness that one of the main determinants for happiness (and of depression) is feeling competent in one’s work, and competence requires discipline and tears, especially by young people.
Even in the world of economy there are many sowers, among whom the entrepreneurs who are investing in times of crisis, who suffer but live their suffering as a fertile experience, as a trampoline  to innovate and walk with lighter feet, maybe together with others.  But if we want the effort of the worker and the entrepreneur to bring the joy of the harvest, an essential role must be assumed by the institutions.  The process going from work to harvest is never a private matter, but a social, collective and political one: we can and must sow with seriousness and commitment, but we control only in part the joy of the harvest, which depends also on those we are directly or indirectly tied to.  Therefore, too many sowings in tears do not know the harvest song.  In Italy, the transmission belt tying the sowing to the harvest needs to be rebuilt.
An indicator of the civil and moral quality of a country should be the relationship between the harvest that arrives in the barns and the good efforts of work done: «Although they go forth weeping, carrying the seed to be sown, they shall come back rejoicing, carrying their sheaves».
 All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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    [text] => 
Second Appointment with Comments by Luigino Bruni on ‘Economy and Advent’
Comments – This is a time for preparing a new harvest
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 09/12/2012

Maybe it is because of the sharp sting felt over the Imu (home tax), for over 2 and a half million Italian citizens who had to sell gold and jewellery in order to make it to go on or perhaps it was the daily spectacle of the institutions and politicians who are just not able to rise to the gravity and seriousness of the times.  For this reason and for many others, this is an advent time marked also by tears.  Yet, one can, and must, hope in a new harvest, even in our Italy: «Those who sow in tears, will reap in joy».
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Comments – New Normality; the crisis is pushing us to re-evaluate the sharing of goods and services.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire, 28/10/2012

The "new normal": is what America calls that part of the ex- middle class which, because of the crisis, is changing its lifestyle, doing things that only a few years ago would have been considered abnormal or typical of poorer classes.  Among these new ‘normal’ behaviours are to be seen not only reductions in consuming goods and services which only a little while ago were considered established and indispensable, but new practices of sharing, rapidly increasing both in American society, as in all the Western world.  Among these is the great development of time Banks, that important innovation (which started well ahead of the crisis), which consists in giving life to a network of exchanges in which currency, meaning a unity of sums and equivalence, is not money, but time: the offer, for example, of an hour of gardening becomes a credit for an hour of another activity of the same duration, based on both direct and indirect rules of reciprocity (where the debit or credit of A towards B can be exchanged also by C).
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In true time banks, the economy is brought back to its original nature of meetings among people, where the exchange of goods and services is subsidiary to relational goods, which today, are more than ever polluted by markets that are too anonymous and impersonal.  Time banks are present even on our territory, normally promoted by associations within civil society, almost always internally woven by articulated orders which in certain cases are taking on forms of real and proper systems of exchange and local development, with group networks of solid acquisitions (Gas), cooperatives, longsighted public administrations, territorial banks, many associations, Caritas, etc. 
In many territories, then, a new spring is being lived today, by ancient traditions of civil virtues and of work, with a more significant participation by women and by the elderly.  These are positive signals of the crisis, which, if extended on a larger scale and sustained by good politics, could become once more the ‘normal’ communitarian, supportive processes which founded our western, Christian culture, and which, in the era of opulence and unsustainable waste have been in large part destroyed.  Behind this growing phenomena of time banks we can glimpse a more general and structural process which can offer elements capable of producing changes of great significance inside our capitalistic economic model.
In order to understand the challenge hiding behind these apparently simple and little known experiences, one must look deeper. First of all at the growing inequality, which should be seen from a perspective that is not stressed enough and is, therefore, undervalued.  It is the radical tendency enacted in our capitalistic system of a progressive widening of the area covered by monetary exchanges.  Already considered ‘normal’ in America, (but not only there), is the paying of an extra fee in theatres and museums so as to skip the line; or (fortunately only in America), the habit of paying students to encourage them to do better in school; not to mention the now normal penetration of monetary logic in health, culture and even in the family, where it is normal to motivate children by paying them to do household chores.
Without entering into fundamental ethical questions relative to the wider use of money in these civil areas (are we sure that avoiding a line-up in a theatre or in a hospital or at an airport because one is richer, is compatible with democracy?), there is a direct consequence of all this on the daily lives of people, above all of the new and ancient poor and of the new normal. If money covers ever more necessities, if, that is, I must pay to obtain goods and services which were once offered by communities (care, education, school, health..), one very evident yet tacit consequence is the worsening of living conditions and the social exclusion of those without money or with too little of it.  For this reason, in a world in which, beyond inequality of income, there is also an increase in use of money for an ever increasing number of activities, some very essential for living, the life of the poor becomes tremendously harder.
Here, we understand then, the civil and economic significance of these reciprocity movements, such as time banks and their surroundings.  An effective method to fight lack of income is to reduce the use of money to obtain goods and services.  If we were able to organize our daily lives making the most of the principle of reciprocity, working at optimizing it, we could handle a significant part of health services, of assistance, but also of jobs and competences, without having to resort to a monied system.  Since many of the new ‘normals,’ the women and the elderly, and the young are in the condition of having less money but more time, and often have competences  not required today by the work market, they could still be useful to others.  Why not then, start up in Italy a new season of local systems of exchange based on the principle of reciprocity?  As citizens, we will re-appropriate  important pieces of associated life, of democracy and, therefore, of freedom, and we will put in motion a lot of creativity , innovation, action, work, newfound trust and civil capital which the lack of, is the real poverty of the Italy of today.
It would be a season not unlike the birth of the cooperative movement at the end of the eighteen hundreds, when during a time of deep industrial and rural crisis, Italy was able to give life to a real economic – civil miracle, creating dozens of new businesses over the entire country. We would have need though, of longsighted politics which would not see these transitions as forms of fiscal evasion, for example, but as an expression of the principle of subsidiarity, which many speak of but few concretize.  From this crisis will come a new ‘normality’: we are finding ourselves in front of an epochal fork in the road between a new normality made of misery for many and super privileges for a few, and a new normality of major sharing, democracy and opportunity for all.
We must then operate and hope so that this second direction is taken.
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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    [text] => 
Comments – New Normality; the crisis is pushing us to re-evaluate the sharing of goods and services.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire, 28/10/2012

The "new normal": is what America calls that part of the ex- middle class which, because of the crisis, is changing its lifestyle, doing things that only a few years ago would have been considered abnormal or typical of poorer classes.  Among these new ‘normal’ behaviours are to be seen not only reductions in consuming goods and services which only a little while ago were considered established and indispensable, but new practices of sharing, rapidly increasing both in American society, as in all the Western world.  Among these is the great development of time Banks, that important innovation (which started well ahead of the crisis), which consists in giving life to a network of exchanges in which currency, meaning a unity of sums and equivalence, is not money, but time: the offer, for example, of an hour of gardening becomes a credit for an hour of another activity of the same duration, based on both direct and indirect rules of reciprocity (where the debit or credit of A towards B can be exchanged also by C).
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Comments - WHAT one Does is Important.  Much More Yet, HOW it is Done….
By Luigino Bruni
Published on Avvenire,    14/10/2012
There are 25 million unemployed in Europe, a number that is destined to grow in all probability in the next few years, unless something unexpected happens which is as yet undreamed.  We should stop and reflect more on these flesh and blood numbers which can tell us many things and which could propel us into action to change things for the better. By not stopping on the surface of the phenomenon and getting to the bottom of these numbers, we would realize soon enough that the principal cost of an economic crisis is always the human one, especially in a deep, epochal one as is happening today.  But the principle obstacle we meet with, is the lack of budgeting indexes or a currency able to measure it, to compensate for it, or often, even to see it.  
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It doesn’t enter in the GDP, but it could be partially revealed only by observing real lives of people and the world of work.
The main components of this human cost, invisible but real, are two, both of which increase in times of crisis: Unemployment in the strictest sense, and the suffering born of having to do the wrong jobs in order to survive.  About the first component, that is, unemployment costs, we know enough, but we don’t know everything and we don’t say everything: for example, the damage done in having an increasing number of young people out of work is hardly mentioned.  When this happens, it’s the young people who lose the most for lack of income, and for not being able to invest during their best and most creative years; but the business world also loses much because, in lacking young people among its work force, it cannot truly innovate, it doesn’t have enough enthusiasm, gratuity, need of future and hope.
A country like ours and like many others in Europe, (not in remaining parts of the planet) who leave too many young people out of the production world, do greater, double damage: for this generation (and therefore for all) and for the businesses (and therefore for all).  But there is more, and in order to understand it we must consider the second component of the human cost of unemployment: the deep suffering of those who, not having a job, are forced to accept work that does not correspond to one’s vocation or one’s talents.  Why? And, how?  One day, I met a friend from college-days, with a degree, who worked as cashier in a supermarket.  On seeing me, she turned red, evidently distressed by knowing already, that the job she was doing was not the one she would have wanted to do, the one she had dreamed about, for which she had studied and sweated over for many years.  The first thing I would have liked to say to her, to help her to see, is the ethical value of work, even when it is done ‘simply’ in order to earn one’s living so as not to have to depend on others, and done also to help family members and those we are  responsible for, to live better lives. 
Millions of people go to work for this very reason, and by working in order to live and to help live, dignity is given to the work they do, to themselves, and to society.  All of this could be a lot already; but a job is not only this, because that symbolic being we call a ‘person’ is always in search of meaning in what he/she does.  If the job does not have meaning while I live (therefore direction and sense), still, the job can give a good (wage, salary, social identity), but it will also bring the worker much pain in relationships around him/her, inside and outside the workplace.  There is, however, a possibility (I would have added in that silent dialogue between two ex-classmates), wanting to redeem and give sense to this pain: to try to do well what one is doing.  Rather, I am convinced a sort of aural rule exists: “The more that a job we do is wrong for us, the more it must be done well, if we don’t want to die”.
If we work in the wrong place, if we do the things furthest from those we know would help us bloom and grow, the only way to save ourselves is to do them well.  This is because, if I work badly in the wrong job, I will slowly die inside.  Because there is nothing real that we can grab a hold of in order to live and grow.  To do any work well it’s helpful to think of it as a ‘service’, this word being a not very fashionable one today because life is not fashionable, but which is always at the foundation of every civilization.
Everyone however, citizens, businesses, institutions, must do more for an ever growing number of people (young ones in particular) to have a job, possibly in the right place.  It was these things that I would have liked to say to that friend from the past, and that we should be able to say to all those who, in order to live or survive today, continue to make their work, any work, sacred and worthy.  Sometimes, not so rarely, it may also happen that while we try to do a job well, even if it isn’t liked, one day we might end up enjoying it.
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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Comments - WHAT one Does is Important.  Much More Yet, HOW it is Done….
By Luigino Bruni
Published on Avvenire,    14/10/2012
There are 25 million unemployed in Europe, a number that is destined to grow in all probability in the next few years, unless something unexpected happens which is as yet undreamed.  We should stop and reflect more on these flesh and blood numbers which can tell us many things and which could propel us into action to change things for the better. By not stopping on the surface of the phenomenon and getting to the bottom of these numbers, we would realize soon enough that the principal cost of an economic crisis is always the human one, especially in a deep, epochal one as is happening today.  But the principle obstacle we meet with, is the lack of budgeting indexes or a currency able to measure it, to compensate for it, or often, even to see it.  
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