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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 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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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

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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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 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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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

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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Comments: Late Capitalism reveals itself to be like Late Feudalism
The Most Urgent Challenge is Inequality
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 16/09/2012

Growth is a challenge, inequality even more so.  The increase of inequality in capitalist economies is becoming the first real obstacle to socio-economic development.  Because of the great inequality of opportunities, rights and freedoms, the drugged wealth we have created is not fertile, generating authentic development.  How could it be any different, after all?  Only work generates jobs.  If we were to take another look at the journey from the Industrial revolution to today, we would become aware of how preoccupying the index of inequality is in a market economy.  After a substantial decrease in western economies of the nineteenth century, caused by the passage from feudal social and economic structures, to a more dynamic market economy, in the last decades triumphant capitalism is causing inequalities to increase once again, bringing them to almost initial levels. 
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In the USA, the first fortune 500 managers earn on average 10 million dollars yearly, and the 20 wealthiest hedge funds managers (the most speculative investments) gain totally, more than the sum of the incomes of those same 500 managers.  There’s more: today, the inequality present inside the United States is very similar to that in countries which are only now leaving feudal social structures.  Well then, our late capitalism is looking more like late feudalism, as if two centuries of economic development and rights earned, have served for nothing, or too little, in terms of inequality.  Too much market is producing the same uncivil fruits as the absence of markets.  This is an urgent and grave message, also because it contradicts the reformist utopia profoundly associated with the birth of modern political economy, when the development of markets was seen by the illuminati as the main instrument to overcome feudal ways and go towards a democratic society of free and equal people, not foreseen, yet agonized by them.      
In fact, while development of markets also meant development of work and of rights, the economy was overall faithful to its original vocation; but, late generation capitalism, founded upon financial incomes and debt, is bringing the world back towards a rigid polarization between classes which had been believed surpassed.  Why?  First of all the 4/5 of so called absolute poor (approx. two billion people who live with less than 2 dollars a day) are no longer found in what we call ‘Poor Countries’ but in countries with medium to high incomes.  This shows us a new epoch-making fact: the line of demarcation between rich and poor is always less tied to a geographical (North-South) but is shifting more to the interior of every country: globalization has in fact deeply changed poverty morphology.
For this reason, today, the relationship between the GDP of countries and the various indicators of wellbeing and malaise is becoming less significant and useful.  If we take the GDP of countries with medium-high per-capita income (e.g. Ocse Countries) and we crossed them with fundamental indexes for people’s lives such as life expectancy, children’s welfare, mental illness, obesity, crime, youth school grades, and social mobility, we discover that nothing significant comes to the fore, because data is very similar between itself.  Things change dramatically though if, instead of the GDP index we take inequality indicators (among which the famous ‘Gini Index’), because we’ll discover great differences in those fundamental indexes within these same countries.  
In other words, in terms of life expectancy, of health, of human capital, of capabilities, as Amartya Sen would say, there is a much bigger difference between an English office worker and an English woman of Caribbean origins with a casual job and lower education, who lives in London’s poorest quarters and is perhaps a single-mother, than between an English office worker and a Peruvian office worker; a difference which becomes even smaller when we compare an English top manager with one from South America.  Inequality is a grave public malady, of which the entire population of a country suffers, including even the upper class - as much recent data shows- because inequality increases social envy, status mentality, insecurity and the unhappiness of all.
Therefore, coming back to the today of Italy and Europe, those who truly love the common good and work towards true economic recovery, must worry a little less about the GDP and do more about reducing inequality.  If we continue to tax work, gasoline, first houses, raising income taxation (VAT…), and not taxing big stocks and estates, financial incomes, as well as all other kinds (including those of status positions within many protected feudal categories), we will keep looking at the wrong indicators, to confuse effects with causes, to measure things which distract us from the great challenges of the crucial moment we are living in.
Hope resides mainly in young people who have less tolerance for inequalities:  from their indignant non-resignation can begin a new social and economic season, where l’égualité, not only formal but of substance, can once again be one of the greatest values of our civilization.
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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Comments: Late Capitalism reveals itself to be like Late Feudalism
The Most Urgent Challenge is Inequality
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 16/09/2012

Growth is a challenge, inequality even more so.  The increase of inequality in capitalist economies is becoming the first real obstacle to socio-economic development.  Because of the great inequality of opportunities, rights and freedoms, the drugged wealth we have created is not fertile, generating authentic development.  How could it be any different, after all?  Only work generates jobs.  If we were to take another look at the journey from the Industrial revolution to today, we would become aware of how preoccupying the index of inequality is in a market economy.  After a substantial decrease in western economies of the nineteenth century, caused by the passage from feudal social and economic structures, to a more dynamic market economy, in the last decades triumphant capitalism is causing inequalities to increase once again, bringing them to almost initial levels. 
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Comments- The total refusal of vulnerability, the spread of contracts, the pacts crisis
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 24/06/2012

The biggest difficulty we face in order to come out of the crisis doesn’t lie in the choices made by the institutions, or in politics in Europe, but in our lifestyles which in these last few years have undergone a radical change.  This is the reason for the difficulty in finding a way, because while we complain with words, our behaviour increases day by day that very model of growth against which we raise our voices and which brings much suffering to many (although not to all).  This is perhaps the greatest paradox in this phase of Capitalism.
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Let’s take insurance companies as an important example.  In looking for the common good, it is evident that insurance has an important function:  the possibility of being able to insure oneself against risky and uncertain events generally betters the wellbeing of people and the common good.
A hypothetical world without insurance would be worse from all points of view and would be worse especially for the most fragile parts of a population.  But, as in all good things in life,  knowing  the right measure is crucial, and being able to pinpoint the limit or critical point of no-return in order to keep that good from becoming evil.
Regarding this, we should reflect more on that rising phenomenon which we could call “World Insurance,” that is, the progressive and rapid enlargement of the area of social life covered by insurance contracts.  We don’t see this only with auto insurance, which in a few years has gone from a simple RC to coverage for vandalism, unforeseen atmospheric events, or to the need of a technician in order to mount snow tires in the case of a sudden snowfall.  We also see it much more often in the fact that teachers have to insure themselves against any possible accident during school trips and many other events.  ‘Well……’ someone might say that, with these insurance policies we are able to do many more things than if we didn’t have this coverage.  Attention though! “I say,” because during this process, as well as raising the not so little cost for families, it tends to wear at the interpersonal relationships, and create always greater insecurities which will later cause other contracts to be proposed to us and so forth.
But there’s more.  If a citizen knows that that particular place in social life is covered by insurance, data, as well as our experiences, tell us that there is likelihood the insured will increase the number of claims, court cases and conflicts.  As long as we are talking about vehicles, all of this, even though serious (as insurance companies know well), deal with areas not always central or crucial to our lives.  But if this phenomenon (suing, demands for damages, moral suffering, etc…) begin to extend and include the areas of health, school, and civil life, its effects could become very serious, as is happening and can be seen already.  Let us not even mention the logic that lies at the base of the ‘’derivative titles” that come from it (one of the major causes of financial instability) which are sophisticated forms of insurance (or better, bets) where profits are made over people’s tragedies.
Finally, insurances’ hyper-coverage produces another effect which enters into the heart of social and relational life.  Some years ago a fire destroyed part of a home belonging to a friend of mine.  A few friends began to arrive with offers of help, but as soon as they realized he was insured, they  happily returned home, knowing that ’someone else’ would take care of it.   What a pity, given the time that would have been  spent with one’s friends in rebuilding  a home,  which could be an investment of relational capital, which then produces fruit in other areas of our lives, a capital which the hypertrophy of insurance today tends to attack and reduce.  In this way, our social capital (as well as financial) diminishes, increasing solitude, and the market steps in to offer new contracts for other unstable events (one day we will insure ourselves against not being respected enough, or loved enough by colleagues and family members!?), precipitating us in a social trap in which the effects are much more serious for the poorest who will suffer along with everyone the deterioration of civil patrimony, but who don’t have the possibility of insuring themselves financially.
What to do then?  I see two paths, one internal and the other external to the insurance world.  We should not forget that insurance came about as an instrument to protect those who are most fragile and vulnerable: at least, that was the original intent.  There is the need today to re-launch a new season of insurance ethics, in the wake of the Nobel laureate M. Yunus, who is now inventing insurance for the poorest, with premiums of only a few dollars.  Insurance societies should by nature be civil enterprises, that is, without intent to profit, simply because the contracts they sell have to do with a primary good, to protect against a bad and devastating vulnerability, and make it more liveable; a good that is fundamental to every person and it is not just to speculate on fundamental rights of people. This is not rocket science (science fiction?) (as one would say today of those leading huge insurance companies) but liberty and democracy.
 
The second pathway is more a cultural one than an ethical one:  we must react to that dangerous dream of wanting to build a common life ‘with relational risk 0’, because this dream can swiftly transform itself into a nightmare. Civil life is made of contracts (including those devised by insurance providers), but is primarily comprised of pacts (family, citizenship, and work), and a pact cannot avoid a certain vulnerability, since pacts are made of trust, and true trust is always open to risk and betrayal, otherwise it doesn’t do any good or serves too little.  But this dominant culture no longer understands what risk means and that suffering is inevitable in living alongside others ( as families well know), and so runs after a monstrous and naive dream of a world without vulnerability, an illusion which makes the individual truly vulnerable in the face  of monumental  suffering.
Only by welcoming and making space for the small vulnerabilities of life in common, will we be (as happens in homeopathic medicine) able to protect ourselves from the big vulnerabilities of our existence; if instead we refuse to welcome the small and ‘good’ vulnerabilities and wounds, we will be very defenceless in the face of the big vulnerabilities which devastate us once on the scene. The good insurance contracts are subsidiary to the pacts, the bad contracts substitute them, deteriorate them and in the long run destroy them. Today we will come out of this crisis with more pacts, with less bad contracts and more good ones, also in the insurance industry.
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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Comments- The total refusal of vulnerability, the spread of contracts, the pacts crisis
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 24/06/2012

The biggest difficulty we face in order to come out of the crisis doesn’t lie in the choices made by the institutions, or in politics in Europe, but in our lifestyles which in these last few years have undergone a radical change.  This is the reason for the difficulty in finding a way, because while we complain with words, our behaviour increases day by day that very model of growth against which we raise our voices and which brings much suffering to many (although not to all).  This is perhaps the greatest paradox in this phase of Capitalism.
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Comments - Beyond the GNP, with civil capitals
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 29/04/2012

Mario Draghi has also launched an appeal for a «pact for growth,» Angela Merkel is also becoming convinced that it’s a matter of necessity. It is becoming increasingly clear to many – and thank goodness, also to many influential people – that to base ourselves solely on the «fiscal pact» is not only too little, but runs the risk of further deteriorating the economic situation of the more fragile European nations. Growth, therefore: but growth of what? Without embracing the radical thesis, and at times naive (above all, in the  therapies that it proposes) of the so called de-growth, we need to be aware that the most important question on growth is really «of what?». When we think of growth, we normally think of growth in GNP.
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And we error, because, even if we never say it, this crisis was also generated by a mistaken growth in the GNP. In these last decades, in fact, the GNP has grown too much and badly, since it grew – and grows – at the cost of the natural, social, relational and spiritual environment, augmenting the hypertrophy of speculative financing. In Italy and in Europe in crisis, the GNP has since grown thanks to an abnormal growth in the public debt  - it is too comfortable and irresponsible to make the GNP grow by increasing the cost of public administration.

Today we have no guarantee that re-launching our GNP means also to increase the number of jobs and the wellbeing of people, since if the growth would continue to be guided and drugged by financial speculation, and therefore by income, the life of Italians would certainly continue to worsen even with a few extra points in our GNP. As we know it today, the GNP is not an indicator of human wellbeing in general (and this we know), but neither is it a good indicator of economic wellbeing in the era of finance (and this is less known).  If we want to measure the good growth well, we need to reform the GNP and, above all, to compare it to other indicators, which however – and this is the point – need to be indicators of stocks and not of flows (as is the GNP).

In what sense? The concept of «Gross National Product» was born in the 1700s in France (with Physiocratics), with the genial and revolutionary intuition that the economic strength of a nation does not measure its capitals or stocks but the annual income (therefore a flow), since a nation is not rich because it has mines, oil and forests, but only if it is capable of putting these capitals «into income», which depends on many factors (persons, technology, culture…). And from there we arrived to the 1900s and the birth of the GNP, continuing to think that for the wealth of nations, the flows and stocks are what count. However, today that beautiful ancient idea risks being misleading. 
Even though wanting to leave its value to an indicator of flow (a new GNP), it is more urgent that the stocks and capitals return to occupy the core of the economic, social, and political scenario.  The environmental theme, but also the relational and social ones – dramatically central – are formed by stocks and not by flows, capitals accumulated throughout millennia (or millions of years, in the case of the environment), that today the race to increase income flows is damaging and deteriorating. 

If we want and we must re-launch growth, then we have to concentrate on the growth and the maintenance of these forms of capitals: if they were not strengthened, maintained and in many cases recreated, the economic flows would not start up again; or, even if they were to start up because drugged by the finance market or European funds, they would continue to fuel the crisis of our time.

It would be enough to think of the impoverishment of those ancient civil capitals that are called neighbourhood relationships, or of proximity, and of that “productive correlation” of territories that until recent times have generated the many experiences of cooperation and of industrial districts of “Made in Italy.” The deterioration of these capitals is determining the progressive sterility of our civil fabric, which is not able to generate other flows, nor cultural, nor spiritual or economic. 

In order to be able to rebuild, and soon, these indispensable capitals, we first need to know how to see them, and then perhaps to measure them, giving life to new measuring tools of stocks or, better yet, of patrimony, a word that better denotes because, if meant as patrum-munus, that is, the gift of the fathers, it symbolically reminds us that we have received these patrimonies as a gift from passed generations, and therefore we have to protect and develop them, if we do not want to be remembered as the first ungrateful generation in history, the one that broke the big chain of inter-temporal solidarity.

And we cannot allow ourselves this, in order to today re-launch the good economic growth.
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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Comments - Beyond the GNP, with civil capitals
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 29/04/2012

Mario Draghi has also launched an appeal for a «pact for growth,» Angela Merkel is also becoming convinced that it’s a matter of necessity. It is becoming increasingly clear to many – and thank goodness, also to many influential people – that to base ourselves solely on the «fiscal pact» is not only too little, but runs the risk of further deteriorating the economic situation of the more fragile European nations. Growth, therefore: but growth of what? Without embracing the radical thesis, and at times naive (above all, in the  therapies that it proposes) of the so called de-growth, we need to be aware that the most important question on growth is really «of what?». When we think of growth, we normally think of growth in GNP.
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Comments - Banks, Europe, use of resources
by Luigino Bruni
published on Avvenire on 28/12/2011
Finance and the economy are too important to be left with financiers and economists. I believe this could be summed up with the message that comes from the second and conclusive part of 2011. We noticed, and with more force than the first phase of the crisis (2008-2009), that the stock market indices and the “spread” are not distant affairs and are matters for experts, but are able to change the governments, our family budgets, and our life plans. So we all must address this situation, ‘living’ ever more in these places because if they remain inhabited by the citizens for a long period then they become inhuman. This crisis sends us three specific messages. The first relates directly to the banking world. Recent studies (University of Ancona: mofir.univpm.it), revealed that after September 15, 2008, banks have reduced lending to businesses, also to those virtuous.
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This apparent inefficiency depends on the distance of the place where decisions are made and where the business operates. Banks are more distant and do not have the knowledge of the area, therefore the decisions are handled by objective indicators that do not show essential things that become visible only to the eyes of those who live in the area and know the people by name.
The first message that comes to us then is the need to ‘reduce the distances’ between the places of decision making and the places of living. Then a financial policy critique that strongly wanted the concentration of banks of those big, remote, and anonymous that has been the watchword of the last two decades. It is interesting to note that local banks are holding up better to its vocation in the crisis. All this suggests a kind of golden rule: give citizenship rights in everyday small and fragile relationship (waste time with the customers, invest resources in relationships that are not always financially rewarding, etc.), which makes them less fragile when big crises arrive. Instead, do not accept these fragile daily ‘crises’ because they make the institutions more fragile in front of the big crises.
Then there is a second clear message regarding Europe, who is now living the deepest crises since its foundation. If no one will put a hand on a true political union, the Euro will not stand much longer. Today, however, they are lacking the great statesmen of the postwar period, and their place can and should be occupied by citizens. It is up to them, it is up to us all to ask, from the bottom and with greater force, to have a more regulated politics and finance.
Finally, the third message: there is something wrong with capitalism which we have given life, especially in the West. This ‘something’ has nothing to do with finance and perhaps not even with the economy, because it plays on a much deeper level of our culture. The crisis we are experiencing is like a fever, an indication that something is amiss in the body. Because fever lasts for a long time and temperature rises, it should be taken seriously. There are at least two pathologies that are cared for. In the last decades we have robbed the environment, hurt it and humiliated it. Within just a couple of generations we are consuming a wealth of oil and gas that the earth has generated in millions of years, and in depleting these assets we are also hurting the atmosphere. All this says that we have messed up one of the foundational relationship of our existence, that with the earth and nature. And when an important relationship like this does not work, it is impossible that the other relationships work, as shown by the growing intolerance in our cities, increasing solitude, and how the relationship still largely shows the marauding with the resources of the African people, where every day they perpetrate new ‘slaughter of the innocents.’ The second cause of the fever is the growing economic inequality in the world, also thanks to the finance revolution. Without economic inequality, that does not only play on the profitability axis but also on work, the principle of equality is too abstract because people cannot achieve the life they want to live. Equality is the second word of modern triptych, and denying it signifies denying also the other two, for equality, liberty and fraternity have to be together or not one is authentically achieved.
Europe will rediscover itself if it will be able to give life back to Humanism of three dimensions, from which will also bloom ‘public happiness’ at the center of the program of Modernity. As Antonio Genovesi, an eighteenth century economist from Naples, reminds us, “it is the law of the universe that we cannot make our own happiness without making that of the others.”
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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Comments - Banks, Europe, use of resources
by Luigino Bruni
published on Avvenire on 28/12/2011
Finance and the economy are too important to be left with financiers and economists. I believe this could be summed up with the message that comes from the second and conclusive part of 2011. We noticed, and with more force than the first phase of the crisis (2008-2009), that the stock market indices and the “spread” are not distant affairs and are matters for experts, but are able to change the governments, our family budgets, and our life plans. So we all must address this situation, ‘living’ ever more in these places because if they remain inhabited by the citizens for a long period then they become inhuman. This crisis sends us three specific messages. The first relates directly to the banking world. Recent studies (University of Ancona: mofir.univpm.it), revealed that after September 15, 2008, banks have reduced lending to businesses, also to those virtuous.
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Comments - Three fragility and too much indecisions
The right path is difficult
by Luigino Bruni
published on Avvenire on 06/09/2011


As Italians and Europeans we must have the courage to come to terms with the reality. Behind the stock market crisis and markets around the world there is a triple fragility of financial capitalism (too much debt), the European policy, and Italy. For two or three decades this season of globalized capitalism has generated growth through private and public debt and a highly risky creative finance (for the system, not the actors), is coming to an end. Too bad that markets are still not able to choose and take a new path. And that same operation does not succeed, despite the increasingly explicit appeals to the Quirinal, leaders and key sectors of our politics, our union and significant parts of the civil society.
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The call that made us turn is eloquent and strong, but unfortunately it is not systematically listened to, not understood and even misrepresented. Uncertainty and mistrust reigns as supreme, and after a few puffs of oxygen it goes back underwater again, waiting for the next storm.
It has now been two months that the crisis is acute and we have not yet seen a G20 summit, only semi-private phone calls, meetings in two, statements that would be reassuring (which often produce perverse effects). The politics is showing itself incapable of governing the first serious crisis of globalization. The economy and the world have changed, but the categories in which the political, national and global read and act on it (or not act) is outdated and therefore ineffective. There is, of course, a specific Europe crisis, which is experiencing the first great age of the euro fibrillation: market operators are no longer sure that the Eurozone is capable of the future. The empty and useless statements on the Tobin Tax, the proposal to postpone the sender of Eurobonds (which are not realistic because behind the Euro lacks a strong unified European policy), the repeated uncertainties of the European Central Bank, much is said and always more confused and inadequate ideas.
But it is enough to look, at these times, the titles of major newspapers and international websites just to be convinced, if there is still a need that in this European and worldwide crisis of stock exchanges there is a big and heavy question mark on Italy. The uncertainty and constant change of the contents of a maneuver are increasing the negative expectations of the financial operators, who after a couple of weeks of waiting they begin to manifest devastatingly their serious doubts that our country really has the resources, first moral then economic, to do for itself what is necessary. It is really sad to see the hesitancy of our ruling class to immediately start and share those few reforms, perhaps unpopular, but essential, that would give confidence to markets and honest citizens. It is unthinkable to clean up the huge debt without putting real effort on pensions (primarily the question of intra and inter-generational equity), without asking a fair and well-modulated extraordinary contribution to those who can give it because of the possibility and convenience (instead of imagining the alternative that of taxing the remittances of care takers and domestic workers: it is a stroke of genius to ask sacrifices for our debt to those who did not create it and, with their work, make life better for millions of our elderly and children), without a drastic cost reduction, not so much of "politics" (politics is something high and serious), but of political bureaucracies. Not to mention the tax issue, for the family and against evasion, of which so much has been said here already.
We are very late, perhaps too much, and the signals for necessary things to be done are few and weak. But it is in hard times that everyone must demonstrate the ability to act within the limits of power and responsibility one has. Among these uncertain actors there are also of the European institutions, our closest relatives: if Italy is really too big a country to declare default, then some slap on the back and some consoling words at the bedside is not enough. But, as in any good family, relatives are not involved in a concrete way if the one in need does not first demonstrate seriousness and commitment to solve their problems. "Only you can make it, but you cannot go it alone,” recites a nice variation of the subsidiarity principle, one of the pillars of ethical and political Europe.
We need Europe more, but - first - we need Italy more, more government, more political, more civil and economic society, beginning with those who have most at heart the common good. But there is also a need of greater power of ideas: we cannot live this time of crisis waiting for it to pass. Also because it will not pass, unless we indicate and even cry out the need for a “new economy,” to save the civilization  called “market” that it may be able to articulate itself in a just and supportive manner, beyond this capitalism.
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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Comments - Three fragility and too much indecisions
The right path is difficult
by Luigino Bruni
published on Avvenire on 06/09/2011


As Italians and Europeans we must have the courage to come to terms with the reality. Behind the stock market crisis and markets around the world there is a triple fragility of financial capitalism (too much debt), the European policy, and Italy. For two or three decades this season of globalized capitalism has generated growth through private and public debt and a highly risky creative finance (for the system, not the actors), is coming to an end. Too bad that markets are still not able to choose and take a new path. And that same operation does not succeed, despite the increasingly explicit appeals to the Quirinal, leaders and key sectors of our politics, our union and significant parts of the civil society.
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