Avvenire Editorials

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    [title] => The Economy of Francis
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Commentary – Idea and action for a culture that includes embraces

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on March 24, 2013

logo_avvenire

St. Francis' name evokes many meanings, including some related to the economy and finance. If we want and are willing to listen, he will reveal an essential message on how to truly and completely overcome our crisis. St. Francis of Assisi loved “mother poverty” and due to this he inspired important theoretical and practical economic changes. In fact, the Franciscans gave birth to the first school of economic thought, started banks, and began other finance traditions (the famous “Monti di Pietà” pawnbrokers were the predecessors of Italian popular solidarity finance).

[fulltext] =>

However, people don't always remember that popular community banks only managed to flourish after two centuries of deep and systematic philosophical and cultural reflection on the economy, currency and the market.

Olivi, Scoto, Occam and many other Franciscan professors were doctors of economics. They were aware of the great commercial and urban revolution under way, which later was called civil humanism. An intuition arisen from the Franciscan charism inspired them to study and deeply reflect on the res novae, i.e. the great changes taking place at that time. They studied economics moved by their love for the people, for the poor.

Therefore, the first thing St. Francis and his charismatic movement teach us is that research and science contain moral and civil implications. Since the world economic crisis, it has become more clear that this economy and finance (only based on short term profits) produces disastrous results,  such as an inhumanly built economic system (Cyprus is one of numerous examples). While the crisis moves on claiming new victims, universities around the world continue teaching economics and finance based on the same principles that caused this crisis in the first place. The economic books, dogmas, and the imperialist arrogance of economists remain unchanged despite the crisis; top PhD courses still follow the same program they did in 2007.

People truly committed to the common good are in love with “mother poverty” (common good is measured first of all by the living conditions of the poor). St. Francis urges these committed people to invest significantly in research on today's res novae, i.e on labor, on the management of enterprises, the economy, and finance. In fact, these activities suffer mainly from a “lack of reflection” and books and conferences aren't enough. Following in the footsteps of Monti di Pietà, we should create institutions in order to change the world.

People who embrace religious charisms usually see things first and look further ahead than the rest of society; they are the ones who, in their times, founded universities on the cutting-edge of cultural innovation. Since today these charisms are missing, our culture and science can't fulfill their civil, scientific, and cultural missions. We are in dire need of new research institutions and universities, ones where different ideas are taught. As a matter of fact, most of today's “sanctuaries of knowledge” are funded by the (distorted) financial market. We need new schools to produce high quality social and economic thought and for these popular schools to disseminate and reinforce the theoretical with practical application. Where are these schools? If we don't create them the crisis and unemployment will continue. We need to live up to St. Francis and the Franciscans, who worked to improve their society through many initiatives, including new ideas and science.

Another message from St. Francis is what he taught us about poverty. It's connected to his first message. In fact, “science” is a fruit of the Spirit and the Spirit is the “father of the poor”.

Poverty isn't counted among words that are solely negative, such as deception, slavery, racism, and others. After St. Francis' life (i.e. after Christianity was consolidated) there was more than one type of poverty, which crossed a broad spectrum, from the victims of poverty to the blessing of those who choose freely to be poor in order to help others in need. As long as the characteristics of freely chosen poverty are not embraced, a simple and selfless life style, communion, and brotherhood, our culture is not capable of combatting new and old kinds of involuntary poverty. St. Francis reminds us that no one can see nor fight against bad poverty before loving its good form.

Rich politicians and officers, who fly from their conferences on poverty to opulent vacations, are usually responsible for implementing the governmental or private programs fighting poverty. As long as this remains the case, poverty will continue to be (uselessly) studied and chosen as a theme for research and conventions; through this approach it will be neither seen nor understood, let alone healed. Only poor people can cure the poor, and therefore charismatic movements are needed. Through philanthropy the capitalist system has increased the number of institutions for the poor. Despite these entities there is no genuine encounter between helper and helped.

St. Francis embraced the lepers of Assisi and cured their bodies and souls. An embrace is the first part of the cure. Our culture is immune to brotherly relationships and teaches us to avoid embraces. St. Francis warns us not to fall into this trap. On one hand, in the institutions created to “heal” poverty, the number of professionals to assist and to cure has grown more numerous (which is good), but, on the other hand, the embraces have grown scarcer. Brotherhood is another beautiful Franciscan word. It can be measured by the inclusion of the poor in our communities. It turns out that the creation of specialized agencies to take care of the poor is often inversely proportional to their inclusion. The commitment of these institutions to “cure the poor” is an excuse to keep them as far away as possible from our pristine and immunized cities.

Let us listen to St. Francis' historic teachings; they are a message for the future.

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

Translated by Cristian Sebok

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Commentary – Idea and action for a culture that includes embraces

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on March 24, 2013

logo_avvenire

St. Francis' name evokes many meanings, including some related to the economy and finance. If we want and are willing to listen, he will reveal an essential message on how to truly and completely overcome our crisis. St. Francis of Assisi loved “mother poverty” and due to this he inspired important theoretical and practical economic changes. In fact, the Franciscans gave birth to the first school of economic thought, started banks, and began other finance traditions (the famous “Monti di Pietà” pawnbrokers were the predecessors of Italian popular solidarity finance).

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The Economy of Francis

The Economy of Francis

Commentary – Idea and action for a culture that includes embraces By Luigino Bruni Published in Avvenire on March 24, 2013 St. Francis' name evokes many meanings, including some related to the economy and finance. If we want and are willing to listen, he will reveal an essential message on how to t...
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    [title] => Sister Beauty
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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

logo_avvenire

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.

[fulltext] =>

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

logo_avvenire

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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Sister Beauty

Sister Beauty

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 establ...
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    [title] => Our children, foreigners
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Commentary – The Cyclops' era: hostility in the labour market.

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 10/03/2013

logo_avvenire

It is crucial that we rediscover the virtue of hospitality. This is particularly true when looking at today's youth who have become increasingly like foreigners in their own societies. Adults do not try to understand the youth, do not provide opportunities for them, take out debt in their names without their consent, and stand idly by watching the degradation of their spaces, especially schools. The world is rapidly changing and if, as adults, we clearly see the end of a system, it's not difficult to imagine how absurd and awkward the status quo would seem to a young person in their teens or twenties. History has shown us that some generations decay faster than others; ours is one of them.

[fulltext] =>

It works but it didn't give us money”, a boy around ten years old cried out in a metro station in Rome. He was intentionally correcting his mother who with a rough “no” had answered a man's inquiry: “does the ATM work?”. The fact is the mother and the boy were both correct concerning the machine, from their own perspective: an instrument for getting cash (mother) versus a colorful touch-screen with plenty of buttons (boy).

In the civil sphere similar dialogues happen far to often at school and work with much greater consequences. In these interactions, mutual understanding, communication, and respect for one another don't come easily. Records are straightforward in pointing to the fact that young people are strangers and foreigners in their own land: the youth unemployment rate is 43%. This is a number that should prevent us from sleeping, but we sleep soundly since we're so used to such negative news. Above all we're forgetting that a young person is more than one family's child; they are society's responsibility as well.

This sort of universal filiality (and brotherhood) is the essence of the golden rule of hospitality, present in the historical roots of our culture, where guests and foreigners were considered sacred and offered gifts. The great civilizations of the past believed that no one is actually a stranger nor a foreigner. Terence is famously quoted describing this truth by proclaiming: “I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me”.

There's something of me that lives and resides in every human being and, to some extent, in the whole of creation; the same goes for something of them in me. It's as if in every genome of a living creature there are traces of all the others. I think this relates to what St. Francis wanted to tell us through his uniquely beautiful and moving “Canticle of the Sun”. The true nature of hospitality isn't altruism, but reciprocity: “Remember that you were once foreigners” (Book of Exodus). Apart from everything else, strangers (who as such are fragile and vulnerable) should be treated with hospitality owing to the simple fact that we all are strangers at one point or another. Our grandparents were once strangers and likely so will our children; it's part of the human condition. Our culture is in dire need of hospitality-reciprocity and young people suffer the most from its current absence. Just as the elderly, youngsters too need it to live well or, now more than ever, to simply stay alive.

Today youth entering the labour market share the experience of when Ulysses met Polyphemus. The latter was the Cyclops, which Homer used to represent barbarism as he was hostile as opposed to welcoming. Instead of offering gifts he gave stones instead of bread and scorpions instead of eggs; then he devoured his guests. We are watching too many young people be devoured by years of unemployment. This idleness is neither chosen nor deserved and day by day it consumes their finite youth and human capital acquired through study. Others are devoured by the type of work, imposed by huge companies, banks, and capitalist consulting groups that abandon the graciousness of hospitality when hiring young people. Young employees are used, squeezed, and deprived of the time need to develop; they receive no gifts, only obligations. They are devoured bit by bit.

The “lucky” ones who make it to one of these jobs, like in a cave end up obstructed by enormous boulders. The heaviest stone is the crisis we're living in. It coerces them to accept or not to abandon – once the true nature of the job is revealed – perverted jobs in order to live and avoid hunger. Thus, instead of “welcoming gifts” it's considered normal for large companies to offer long term contracts that require young workers to work a certain number of years in exchange for the “gift” of a master degree paid by their employer. These practices are almost a kind of slavery.

I'm certain that with this sort of servitude, tying people to a company through a degree, human dignity will not flourish. It cannot grow without the water of freedom and the light of graciousness. Without free and flourishing people the complex economy of today and the future will be one where not even enterprise profit and growth will be reachable. A new working culture based on hospitality must be constructed. Enterprises should seriously invest in the first years of their young employees and they, after receiving so much, will learn how to give as well. In times like these when the “citizen's income” is constantly and, in many cases, appropriately mentioned, we should not forget that institutions and civil society owe the gift of work to the youth of the world. We must offer them better studies and give them the opportunities to work and, if possible, work well.

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

Translated by Cristian Sebok

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Commentary – The Cyclops' era: hostility in the labour market.

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 10/03/2013

logo_avvenire

It is crucial that we rediscover the virtue of hospitality. This is particularly true when looking at today's youth who have become increasingly like foreigners in their own societies. Adults do not try to understand the youth, do not provide opportunities for them, take out debt in their names without their consent, and stand idly by watching the degradation of their spaces, especially schools. The world is rapidly changing and if, as adults, we clearly see the end of a system, it's not difficult to imagine how absurd and awkward the status quo would seem to a young person in their teens or twenties. History has shown us that some generations decay faster than others; ours is one of them.

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Our children, foreigners

Our children, foreigners

Commentary – The Cyclops' era: hostility in the labour market. By Luigino Bruni Published in Avvenire on 10/03/2013 It is crucial that we rediscover the virtue of hospitality. This is particularly true when looking at today's youth who have become increasingly like foreigners in their own...
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Comments – More Democracy is Necessary

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 03/03/2013

logo_avvenire

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.

[fulltext] =>

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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Comments – More Democracy is Necessary

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 03/03/2013

logo_avvenire

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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The Market is also a Public Thing

The Market is also a Public Thing

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 income...
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Comments –Lenten Christian Culture and its Civil Nature

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 17/02/2013

logo_avvenire

Lent also has a civil nature, which reveals itself to us if we read its words in the light of this crucial phase of our public life.  These words are articulated and go to form a true and proper message of a change of route, of a conversion.  The first word is repentance, a strange word in our culture, yet a fundamental one in order to be able to truly begin again after every personal and collective crisis.  After having made mistakes, especially if serious and collective, in order to restart and go speedily on our journey we need, first, to repent, because if we lack the awareness of having done wrong, we cannot find again the road to walk on.

[fulltext] =>

The first expression of every repentance is a feeling of pain, of sorrow, of regret for having done things that are not good, that brought harm to ourselves and above all, to others.  We have seen many things that are bad and serious, in these years of crisis, and we are still seeing too many.  But one does not see or glimpse remorse in leaders of financial speculation, in the culture of top management of big businesses, companies and banks, and even less in our political parties.   Without civil repentance, accompanied by some gesture, as in all true repentance, we will not have the strength to restart.

For these civil and economic errors and sins, the (very necessary) trials through civil courts cannot exhaust the rites of repentance, excuses or of reconciliation.  When the manager of a great bank or company commits crimes, there is need of something more than just the sentence given by the courts (when one is given): there is also need for these entities who have betrayed the trust and hopes of all shareholders and of the entire country, to be able to repent, to ask forgiveness and pardon of the people.  The reparation and restitution of the civil and penal code are much too poor for these kinds of crimes which hurt the symbolical and ethical codes of the community.

The second word is humility; a fundamental virtue for a good life, a word totally out of use in a culture that rewards the hypertrophic ‘I’ and no longer has eyes for appreciating the virtue of humility.  Humility comes from earth, from that humus that was root one time of humility (humilitas) and of man (homo), a semantic richness that is also found in the Hebrew language where man and earth are called adam and adamah.  Humility is a word that founds the human, because it tells us that great things in life are such because of their smallness, because they  are a little less, a dwindling, because they are earth and dust.

This ancient tie humility-man-earth reminds us that humility is virtue when it comes from having touched dust, earth, ash: one becomes truly humble and truly man/woman when one falls, when one feels the earth and the dust, and then gets back up.  This is the humility of Job, but also of those who work and know the earth, of those who in front of a mountain or a rock, experience their own infinite smallness, and from that contact with the earth rediscover also their own infinite dignity.  We cannot become humble by ourselves (this is narcissism), but it is the others, life, the earth and the dust to humiliate us, which can then help us to continue on our way.  The failures, individual, economical, and political of these past years can become an occasion to do better, but it is necessary first, to want to experience humility, which is absent from all the programs, the promises and above all from the words and tone of these pre-election days.

The third word is fasting.  Our century is obsessed with diets, but no longer knows fasts, because fasting is not a matter of counting calories or of losing weight, but is another pivotal point of a good life: temperance.  Fasting is educating one’s desires, passions, heart, spirit, and intelligence.  In order to appreciate and then cultivate fasting and temperance people are needed who are able to see the values in such things as limit, moderation, and sobriety.  In reality, if we take a good look at our people beyond the television shows, we become aware that there are ever more people leading temperate lives, who give due value to limits (in the use of resources, time, work, profits, consuming…), who moderate their own needs, who enrich them by diminishing them.  I meet many of them, and more every day, but they are not spoken about in the public sphere, because they don’t make for good audiences and don’t bring votes.

The civilization preceding ours was governed by fasts, because the hardship of life was supportable only by educating passions, intelligence and will:  poverty can, and has become, a life that is good and worthy only if accompanied by fasts, which multiplies the value of having little food, and the feasting of the poor.  It is also the lack of a Lenten culture that is decreeing the death of the ‘carnevale’ in our country (and the boom of Halloween, which is its opposite), Carnevale can be lived when it is preceded and attended by fasts, food and feasting.  Fasting, in the end, nourishes and reinforces, it doesn’t reduce the will to live, nor does it reduce the generative side of life: not by chance did the great Greek philosophy indicate in Penia (indigence, lack) the father of Eros.  Every form of creativity, from art to family to business, requires one to desire that which one doesn’t have or is not yet.  The root of every true crisis is the extinguishing of the desire for what isn’t yet.

 

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Comments –Lenten Christian Culture and its Civil Nature

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 17/02/2013

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Lent also has a civil nature, which reveals itself to us if we read its words in the light of this crucial phase of our public life.  These words are articulated and go to form a true and proper message of a change of route, of a conversion.  The first word is repentance, a strange word in our culture, yet a fundamental one in order to be able to truly begin again after every personal and collective crisis.  After having made mistakes, especially if serious and collective, in order to restart and go speedily on our journey we need, first, to repent, because if we lack the awareness of having done wrong, we cannot find again the road to walk on.

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Three Words to Restart (and a Right Desire)

Three Words to Restart (and a Right Desire)

Comments –Lenten Christian Culture and its Civil Nature By Luigino Bruni Published in Avvenire on 17/02/2013 Lent also has a civil nature, which reveals itself to us if we read its words in the light of this crucial phase of our public life.  These words are articulated and go to for...
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Commentary – Labor and education in the course of our lives.

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on February 10, 2013

logo_avvenire

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

logo_avvenire

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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Bridging the Gap Between Labor and Education

Bridging the Gap Between Labor and Education

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 soci...
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Comments - «Politics»: May it Find Morality and Itself

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 02/01/2013

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«Economy» has been the reigning word in 2012.  The first word of 2013 must be «Politics» if we want the year ahead to be better for the economy too.  There is, in fact, the extreme need to invert a tendency in place for some decades, the one that brought us to use increasingly economic logic in areas that had nothing to do with the economy, such as school (‘educational opportunities’, debits and credits), healthcare, culture,  and politics.  It isn’t rare to hear important Italian journalists speak of political parties today as «competitors», of political «supply» and «demand» (what would be the ‘price’ of equilibrium?). 

[fulltext] =>

But most of all, in this country there is a pervasive feeling of disenchantment which brings too many to believe there can’t be any citizens, much less politicians, motivated by the common good and not by private interests only.  The pan-marketing of these last decades has increased the ‘average cynicism’ as well, convincing many among us that the logic of interest is the only realistic true one, and that all the rest is mere chattering.

Many of the economists have used and are still using economic categories and logics (that is, of the markets) to explain just about anything, from why religious orders make their members wear habits and pronounce solemn vows (to raise «barriers at the exits», as happens in industries), to the behaviours of politicians and of the electorate.

The first economists to apply economic logic to politics were the Italians between the eighteen and nineteen hundreds. Among these Maffeo Pantaleoni, who sustained that choices of fiscal and economic politics depend on «the average intelligence» present in Parliament.  Amilcare Puviani, then, with his ‘Theory of financial Illusion’ retained that the fiscal system of a country is accepted by the masses on the base of a double illusion: that tributary pressure is less than the real one and that internal revenue is used for goals of common good, and not for the private interests of the dominant class.  Wilfred Pareto, the most genial economist ever, continued this tradition, adding to it the important element that human beings are normally moved by passions and interests, but have the invincible tendency to give a logical «varnish» to their actions.  In the case of politicians, the «varnish» is the common good or ideal, while the real motivation is power.

This economic approach to politics is pervasive and dominating, and yet it only picks some dimensions of reality, not all of them, and often leaves out the essential, among which the very fact of the popular vote (it is known that according to official economic theory the ‘rational’ elector should not vote).

I am convinced that but for a few exceptions (one of these is Albert Otto Hirschman, recently missed), economists do not serve well the common good when they treat politics as a market.  Rather, they commit a serious error full of consequences. A  humanistic interest (maybe) works when I must choose a car or an airline ticket, but less for a job, and far less and badly, for choices where symbols and ethical dimensions are concerned, such as political ones.  Some weeks ago a colleague of mine said:   «I belong to the American leisure class and I have every economic interest in voting for a conservative program.  But I don’t do it, choosing to go against my interests».  Dominant economy has great difficulty understanding this kind of choice, which is, instead, very crucial especially in moments of crisis.

Today there are many citizens who go beyond their economic interest in continuing to keep their company going so as not to lay off anyone, to pay taxes knowing they are the only ones to do so, to believe and keep investing in politics and to vote out of civil duty, notwithstanding.  Italy has already had happy moments when politics, at every level, has been something more and different from the search for private interests of electors and elected.

Men, and more so women, are capable of acting for bigger interests than private ones, to deny it would be negating the humanity and dignity of a person.  The decades from which we are (perhaps) coming out of, have undermined the virtue of hope in being able to change:  but it is from this hope that, at an anthropological level, and therefore political, we can and must start again.  Taking the road of good politics, certainly depends on the «average intelligence» of the next eventual Parliament, but depends also, and above all today, on its «average morality».

The many ‘poverty traps’ in which we have fallen, especially for some regions in the south, cannot be broken except by giving prophetic and trusting strength to politics in itself.  From here, work and a good economy will be able to take off.  An economy is not only the one dominating in the world, and the world.  Italy, before Pantaleoni and Pareto, has had Dragonetti and Genovesi, who thought of and attempted a Civil Economy founded on reciprocity and public happiness.  The year 2013 is also the 300th anniversary of the birth of Antonio Genovesi (we will speak about it more on these pages), and it is an occasion for re-appropriating an economy friendly to politics and the common good.

Let’s work and rise to the test of the passage we are going through (by choosing with our lifestyles and our votes) and leave to Genovesi himself the last word, (from a letter written in 1765): «I am already old, and do not hope or expect anything else from the earth. My aim is to see if I am able to leave my Italian people a little more enlightened than I found them in coming, and also a little more attached to virtue, which is the only true mother of every good.  It is useless to think of art, commerce, government, if we do not think about reforming our morals.  While mankind finds interest in being rascally, we cannot expect big things from daily efforts.  I have too much experience of this».

All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.

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Comments - «Politics»: May it Find Morality and Itself

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 02/01/2013

logo_avvenire

«Economy» has been the reigning word in 2012.  The first word of 2013 must be «Politics» if we want the year ahead to be better for the economy too.  There is, in fact, the extreme need to invert a tendency in place for some decades, the one that brought us to use increasingly economic logic in areas that had nothing to do with the economy, such as school (‘educational opportunities’, debits and credits), healthcare, culture,  and politics.  It isn’t rare to hear important Italian journalists speak of political parties today as «competitors», of political «supply» and «demand» (what would be the ‘price’ of equilibrium?). 

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Word of the Year

Word of the Year

Comments - «Politics»: May it Find Morality and Itself By Luigino Bruni Published in Avvenire on 02/01/2013 «Economy» has been the reigning word in 2012.  The first word of 2013 must be «Politics» if we want the year ahead to be better for the economy too.  There is, in fact, th...
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    [title] => The Essence of Gift
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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

logo_avvenireChristmas 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… 

[fulltext] =>

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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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

logo_avvenireChristmas 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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The Essence of Gift

The Essence of Gift

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 p...
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    [title] => The Strength of Joy
    [alias] => the-strength-of-joy
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Third appointment with Comments by Luigino Bruni on ‘Economy and Advent’

Comments – This is also a Time to Understand ‘Poverty’ in its Many Forms

di Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 16/12/2012

logo_avvenire

Returning to Europe after traveling in Africa, the Philippines, or Brazil, I am struck by how little singing I hear in our own cities, communities, or families.  But, above all, in contrast with what is happening to those younger civilizations, among us, it is the adults and the elderly who do not sing much; and when grown-ups don’t sing it is very serious, because a happy, joyful adult, is a message of hope and life that is launched to all, especially to the young who need, today, to be helped to want to grow up even by the exercise of joyfulness by the adults around them.  Here then, is the importance, civilly as well, of the phrase “Be joyful always.”

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But how can one be joyful in a time of crisis?  To capture it we need first to remember that joyfulness is not an archaic word, but a very current one: it is a word of the future, if it will be better.  It is not only merriment, much less is it pleasure, it is not the merry (cheerful, tipsy), an associated adjective, as in the English language, indissoluble as Christmas (Birth of Christ).  Letitia has a lot to do with relationships: we cannot be joyful by ourselves, we need someone to make us joyful, we need to make others joyful, we need to make each other joyful.  Also because of its nature of gratuity and reciprocity, joyfulness is disappearing from our vocabulary, because, joyfulness is not a word for a consumeristic society, for games and finances. One is not joyful when entering a mall, not even when one compulsively scratches a lottery ticket, or when one makes big profits by incomes and by speculations.  For these experiences or emotions the word joyful doesn’t fit, it sounds off, because it is not an emotion.

To feel true joyfulness we need to receive the news of a new job, of someone getting well again, of a positive diagnosis, we need to return home after a long journey knowing that someone is waiting for us and is preparing something to celebrate with.  There’s need for a graduation day after many sacrifices, of reconciling and hugging again after years of conflict, to wait for and be awed by a baby being born.  Who has no idea of such experiences doesn’t need the word joy, he can be fine with some fun, entertainment, pleasure, happiness.  Joy is then a fundamental word for a time of crisis, of any kind, because it blossoms from good relationships, and it renders them fertile, generative.  For this reason as well, joy has the same latin root (laetus) as (letame) manure, it is that which fertilizes and makes plants fruitful, and what brings up flowers. Joy is like manure in the fields: to make good and abundant fruit it isn’t enough to plow the field (work and talent), there’s also need for that joie de vivre (laetus), both individual and collective, which brings about good results in work.  Joy makes one fertile because, in order to generate companies, jobs, projects, families, and life, there is the essential need to by joyful. The businessperson generates work and riches as long as he remains a little ‘mischievous shop boy’, but innovation stops when he loses this joy.

Creativity, from economy to the arts, is almost always a fruit of adults who, with great effort, have kept the child alive in them.  Joyfulness is a virtue, which, as any other virtue, needs to be cultivated and guarded all lifelong.  The “perfect joy” then, is born of loved wounds, in ourselves and in others, so that they become blessings, for oneself, or more commonly, for the others.  Finally, in order to know joy one must be poor.  It is to the poor that is given the ‘good news’ because chosen poverty, that is therefore, neither indigence nor misery, is the precondition that permits one to be joyful.  Today, in Italy and in the West there are many, too many indigent people in utter misery, excluded from economic and social life (because of being unemployed for example), but there are always less poor, in the highest truest sense (and too forgotten) of the term.  It is the poverty which the Iranian Majid Rahnema speaks about, which in his beautiful book (which should be given as a gift this Christmas season) shows us a ‘misery’ that ‘makes poverty flee’, that is, a bad poverty (the one not chosen and borne with) which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to live the virtue-beatitude of chosen poverty.  When one lives a life of abject misery, when one has no means to live with or help one’s family live in a dignified manner, one cannot freely choose a poor life.  The good chosen poverty, the only one which brings joy, is called sobriety, gratuity, sharing, and is born of the spiritual and ethical awareness  that the goods we have become wellbeing only and if they are shared, and not treated as substitutes for a relationship with others.

Families know this very well.  Those who do not know this chosen and convivial poverty, is not joyful because he is not able to distinguish joyousness from pleasure, celebrations from entertainment, poverty from misery.  Christmas is a true feast only for these poor.  Let us relearn then to wish one another a ‘Joyful (merry) Christmas.’

All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.

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Third appointment with Comments by Luigino Bruni on ‘Economy and Advent’

Comments – This is also a Time to Understand ‘Poverty’ in its Many Forms

di Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 16/12/2012

logo_avvenire

Returning to Europe after traveling in Africa, the Philippines, or Brazil, I am struck by how little singing I hear in our own cities, communities, or families.  But, above all, in contrast with what is happening to those younger civilizations, among us, it is the adults and the elderly who do not sing much; and when grown-ups don’t sing it is very serious, because a happy, joyful adult, is a message of hope and life that is launched to all, especially to the young who need, today, to be helped to want to grow up even by the exercise of joyfulness by the adults around them.  Here then, is the importance, civilly as well, of the phrase “Be joyful always.”

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The Strength of Joy

The Strength of Joy

Third appointment with Comments by Luigino Bruni on ‘Economy and Advent’ Comments – This is also a Time to Understand ‘Poverty’ in its Many Forms di Luigino Bruni Published in Avvenire on 16/12/2012 Returning to Europe after traveling in Africa, the Philippines, or Brazil, I am struck by how little...
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    [title] => The Good Tears of Sowing
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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

logo_avvenire

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».

[fulltext] =>

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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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

logo_avvenire

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».

[jcfields] => Array ( ) [type] => intro [oddeven] => item-even )
The Good Tears of Sowing

The Good Tears of Sowing

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 c...
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    [title] => Economy and Waiting
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Comments –The Crisis and Our Times

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 02/12/2012

logo_avvenire

Advent - every advent, and every waiting period for salvation - is a fundamental experience, especially in times of crisis.  One does not come out of a crisis if one does not exercise oneself in the art of expecting a saving act, a joyous, and at the same time, painful art.  A salvation which must be wanted, before being wished for.  Ours is an epochal crisis because we lack the desire to be saved, and it is lacking because we don’t have, on a collective level, eyes to be able to see it, or least-ways, to glimpse it.

[fulltext] =>

Before asking ‘how long before daylight?’ one must, of necessity, wish for dawn, and be able to recognize it as it happens.  In these past years too many ‘dawns’ have been announced, because each one sees signs of dawn there where others still see deep night.   Some see it in the increase of the GDP, and hope to see the first signs of an increase in spending (the disease becomes the cure), others see it in an ecumenical, but rather vague, ‘social market economy’, others yet in the elimination of political parties so as to entrust even public things to for-profit businesses, deemed to be truly efficient and responsible entities.  However, all of these ‘dawns’ are neither strong, nor symbolically charged enough, to be able to awaken lofty human passions, and therefore, to gather around them great, collective, popular actions.   And the more time goes by, the further ‘dawn’ appears to be – and the end of night has come.  An awaited for economy for today should contain some fundamental words.  Together with ‘work’ and ‘young people’, on whom not enough is written or suffered, there are at least three words which, if missing from civil vocabulary and grammar, make any waiting period illusory.

The first of these is virtue, particularly, civil virtue.  There is instead, an ancient and even glorious tradition which theorizes that from crises, one comes out with vices, not virtues.  But the awaiting is a virtue, since it is cultivated, looked after, and maintained, above all when times are hard.  Three hundred years ago, Bernard de Mandeville, recounted, ‘The tale of the Bees’, where the conversion of the spoiled beehive (a very opulent one) into a virtuous one produced misery for all.  The idea is clear: only vice creates development, because if people don’t love luxury, commodities, hedonism, and games, the economy stalls for lack of demand.  This is also true for a country such as ours in which the economy very much depends, maybe too much, on consuming goods.  Unfortunately, it is an idea very deeply rooted in a good part of the Italian leadership, who make appeals to civil virtues only in referring to tax evasion, without understanding the elementary rule which is at the base of common life: if a ‘progressive commercial’ condemns the “social parasite” and the next one pushes lotteries, the two cancel each other out.  The true fight against evasion is called ethical coherence which then becomes   political and administrative strength.

A second great word on awaiting is ‘relationship.’  Recent data gathered on the increase of litigiousness in our country during this crisis, is astounding.  From apartment buildings to relationships with work colleagues, from traffic claims to ones against teachers and doctors, this crisis is making proximity relationships turn bad – even if, as always happens, in these past years we can see the blossoming of virtuous and productive relations.  The worsening of relationships is a very preoccupying fact, because other serious crises we have been through (we think of the great wars and dictatorships) had, amidst pain, made social bonds stronger, re-created friendship and civil harmony which were essential also for economic recovery.  If we are not be able to cure our ancient and new relational maladies (what is corruption, if not diseased relationships which create diseased institutions, which in turn reproduce even more diseased relationships?), no economy could ever recover, since it is, first of all, a weaving of relationships.

Lastly, a third word is ‘entrepreneur’.  Great teachers on awaiting, have always been and are yet now, farmers, artists, scientists, and above all, mothers.  But also the entrepreneur.  True entrepreneurs, all of them and especially the medium-small, the co-ops, and civil and social entrepreneurs, are suffering greatly today, more than is spoken or told.  During the past decades, these business people have been able to create value from values ‘turning into income’ productive vocations and co-operatives in our valleys and burghs, in the mountains, seas and sea coasts, who today, are seeing their riches and work vanish because of tight credit, because of the lack of system politics, and by the invasion of speculators who take over and often devour their businesses.

The entrepreneur is a man or woman of waiting, because he/she lives only if able to hope (hope is another civil virtue), because if they couldn’t hope on the world of tomorrow being better than today’s, they would do better to enjoy their resources now, or to speculate in search of profits (only unscrupulous speculators can make millions of profits by polluting people and land).  One who generated and grew a business activity knows that the most important moments of his story have been the ones where he was able to await a salvation and hold on to hope against events, against prudent advice from friends (‘why don’t you sell?’), when he had the strength to insist and believe in his project.  The world – and in it Italy – still lives because of people capable of waiting and hoping in a salvation, waiting for a dawn, waiting for Christmas.

All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.

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Comments –The Crisis and Our Times

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire on 02/12/2012

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Advent - every advent, and every waiting period for salvation - is a fundamental experience, especially in times of crisis.  One does not come out of a crisis if one does not exercise oneself in the art of expecting a saving act, a joyous, and at the same time, painful art.  A salvation which must be wanted, before being wished for.  Ours is an epochal crisis because we lack the desire to be saved, and it is lacking because we don’t have, on a collective level, eyes to be able to see it, or least-ways, to glimpse it.

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Economy and Waiting

Economy and Waiting

Comments –The Crisis and Our Times By Luigino Bruni Published in Avvenire on 02/12/2012 Advent - every advent, and every waiting period for salvation - is a fundamental experience, especially in times of crisis.  One does not come out of a crisis if one does not exercise oneself in t...
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    [title] => More time, less Money
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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 Avvenire28/10/2012

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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).

[fulltext] =>

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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Comments – New Normality; the crisis is pushing us to re-evaluate the sharing of goods and services.

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Avvenire28/10/2012

logo_avvenire

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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More time, less Money

More time, less Money

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 ...
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    [title] => More respect for what’s civil
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Commentary – Social economy, a work of charisms.

More respect for what’s civil

By Luigino Bruni

Published on Avvenire, 2012/10/20

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It’s by now clear that mainstream logics in Europe powerfully influence Italy and that people, in our country too, struggle to recognize the reality that is at the same time richness and source of richness for everyone: the civil and social economy. It is affected not only by the critical VAT increase (of 7 percent) on social cooperatives (the major social economic Italian, or probably even continental, innovation over the last twenty years). The recent approval of “betting exchange” and the imminent online slot machines legalization represent an even worse sign, since these radically ‘uncivil’ regulations end up intensifying the social hardship that affects social cooperatives, which have to face it with always less resources. 

[fulltext] =>

The issue about the IMU [Italian property tax] application on non-profit structures and on religious institutions should also be looked at considering the overall misunderstanding as far as social and civil economy is concerned. The matter has actually been at stake for a while, but should be given even more attention and looked at with more proposals.

On Via Tuscolana in Rome a Salesian community of around 20 nuns for decades keeps a primary school and a kindergarten. Many nuns, some over 80, are volunteers at the school assisting the children during breaks or answering the switchboard. I’ve witnessed first-hand parents sleeping by the school’s gate the day before enrolment begins in order not to miss the few vacancies available. Why does this community carry on this school? For two main reasons: as an answer to the neighbourhood’s vital and pressing demands for it, and because for Salesians educational work isn’t an accident, but an essential aspect of their vocation and charism. When these nuns responded to their call as young women, they donated their lives to young people and to their education.

At least the best part of Italy was partly, and during historical periods mainly, founded by religious charisms and to some extent secular ones as well. During the years when the Italian state still did not exist, or its institutions were too weak or still to be founded, Cotolengo, Don Bosco, Don Orione, Scalabrini, Francesca Cabrini cared for and loved the various kinds of poor and outcasts of that time, making Italian society more civil, and the life of many, poor and less poor, possible. Their structures and houses became public assets at times even more significant than fountains, parks, theatres and museums. Most of them still exist as such and make up a part of our country’s heritage. Nowadays hundreds of thousands of children, teenagers and youngsters are still educated and loved by works born from charisms.  

Only a very absent minded look can define a religious order school or a parish cafeteria as a commercial activity. These are direct and immediate expressions of the charism itself and the difference from profit activities is not because, or when, they ‘do not have profit’ (like the newly published standard regulations point out). The fact of having profit or not cannot be the criteria based on which one sees this reality and so many religious and non-religious organizations (cultural, entertainment, sport…) that carry out commercially engaged activities. 

Like this, projects (and polemics) regarding the property tax increase on noncommercial entities (today IMU is at stake, yesterday ICI [the former IMU]) cover much more than just a ‘catholic’ issue (we should also consider how much damage Italy undergoes by looking at everything under the ideological frame: in favour/against the church!): this matter refers also, and above all, to the country’s civil and economical vocation, to our history and our culture. 

It’s also true that many of these charismatic organizations are maintained for years at the threshold of survival: they receive derisory funds from the government and can only live on the gratuitous offerings they can gather. Collect IMU from their properties and from many other communitarian schools and works means not to understand their value, not to appreciate them and make their lives very difficult, even unbearable. What are the consequences? 

These structures will be more and more vulnerable to the market and will be mission deprived, and sold to speculators maybe, who will double the fees causing families to grow even poorer and will impoverish our lands’ culture and history. Is this what we want? Is this what Europe will impose to the national government once instigated by a handful of politicians that appealed against Italy as guilty for helping non-profit activities with public resources?

In the current extraordinary political and governmental phase a tradition decades old unfortunately lives on and actually expands as well: the lack of eyeglasses to ‘see’ the civil dimension in Italy (which is different from the one in England or in the USA). It’s not a coincidence that the first spending review cut was through shutting down ONLUS Agency [Italian social organization], and (we hope) the last one is through undermining the ‘civil’ works, and therefore the poor. It’s not about equity (treating the church and its works like everyone else); it’s about having a concept of Italy, an overview of the physiology of the healing patient. Since the greatest injustice is to treat different realities the same way: not to consider the difference between a business school and a Don Orione’s school or a kindergarten sustained by a parish.

While the press explores the well-known and very much covered stories about the bed and breakfast pensions owned by religious orders but run as a business often by profit groups (which according to present law pay IMU and all other taxes) people are not aware that due to the amendments on regulations explicitly against non-profit, profit activities themselves will increase. Everyone will pay IMU including those operating without profit objectives, but citizens will pay a much higher price, and our country will lose the contribution of century-old works. 

All this is caused by a combination of radical ideological revenge and crave for revenue increase. Not as in France though, there is no political might to increase 20 percent over the IRPEF [income tax] of the super-rich for such income, thus more is demanded from the poor and the increasingly poorer middle class. The past days’ immorality and corruption scandals should be cured by nourishing the immune system, injecting healthy cells to the badly ill Italian body, also due to the charisms’ exclusion from civil life. Italy won’t be saved by the enlargement of the profit market.

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

Translated by Cristian Sebok

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Commentary – Social economy, a work of charisms.

More respect for what’s civil

By Luigino Bruni

Published on Avvenire, 2012/10/20

logo_avvenire

It’s by now clear that mainstream logics in Europe powerfully influence Italy and that people, in our country too, struggle to recognize the reality that is at the same time richness and source of richness for everyone: the civil and social economy. It is affected not only by the critical VAT increase (of 7 percent) on social cooperatives (the major social economic Italian, or probably even continental, innovation over the last twenty years). The recent approval of “betting exchange” and the imminent online slot machines legalization represent an even worse sign, since these radically ‘uncivil’ regulations end up intensifying the social hardship that affects social cooperatives, which have to face it with always less resources. 

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More respect for what’s civil

More respect for what’s civil

Commentary – Social economy, a work of charisms. More respect for what’s civil By Luigino Bruni Published on Avvenire, 2012/10/20 It’s by now clear that mainstream logics in Europe powerfully influence Italy and that people, in our country too, struggle to recognize the reality that is at the ...
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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

logo_avvenireThere 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

logo_avvenireThere 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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The Work that Saves

The Work that Saves

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 whic...