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A Critical Point - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/7
by Luigino Bruni 
Published in Avvenire on November 10, 2013

There is a social and economic law which is as important as it is forgotten. It is what Luigi Einaudi called "the theory of the critical point", which he defined as "fundamental in science, both economic and political" (Lessons of Social Policy, 1944), which he attributed to his countryman Emanuele Sella (an economist and poet who also wrote a treatise on "Trinity" economics). The idea is the existence of an invisible but real threshold, of a critical point, after which a positive phenomenon turns negative, changing in sign or nature. Today we could apply the law of the critical point to finance, but also to taxes (if they exceed a threshold and so end up penalizing the honest people who pay them).
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Einaudi wrote: "it is reasonable that every family would like to possess a radio. But the radio can become a perfect instrument of mental degradation for mankind. The transition from the radio that entertains and educates and makes one forget the pain to the radio that is the cause of the mental degradation of humanity is gradual". If we change the subject of his idea and instead of 'radio' (which nowadays is one of the most creative and critical instruments of the media) we put 'TV', the logic of his analysis becomes very meaningful and up-to-date, which can also be extended to all comfort goods.
In the early stages of development, the availability of goods that increase the comfort is important for general welfare. The examples are many. Just think of what has been the invention of the washing machine for the welfare of our grandmothers and mothers: this comfort product became an ally for improving the standards of their and everyone's lives. Or the introduction of pay-TV that allowed you to see the football game from your warm and cozy home, without any risks. Something similar happened later with the advent of social media, but also with mobile phones, comfortable cars and big houses. But there are many studies now that tell us that the effects of comfort goods on welfare are changing their sign, or nature, once you get beyond a critical point. Pre-cooked food is very useful when you are late and have twenty minutes to prepare dinner, but if over time this becomes the only food in the fridge, and the joy of preparing a (healthy) meal - maybe together - is lost, it is likely that your life is deteriorating in quality. It is great to spend a bit of time on facebook, especially if you can chat with someone you have already met off-line. But if the daily hours spent surfing the Internet become six or eight, the effect of new media on welfare changes radically. And if the "consumption" of football on the couch at home were to grow to the point of emptying stadiums, the well-being that we gain from watching it on TV becomes very little as it is being played to very few spectators, which would ultimately lead to the end of that sport (and market).
But why - and this is the crucial question - should we fall into such traps, and not stop before passing the 'critical point'? The reasons are many. The first one is presented to us by Einaudi himself: graduality. The turning point is reached and passed bit by bit and unnoticed, or noticed too late. A second explanation is called "salience": there is a strong tendency in us to see the comfort goods better and the others like the relational or civil goods less. When we calculate the relative weight of the different types of goods in our happiness, we tend to overestimate the merchandise type of goods and underestimate the non-market goods. The latter ones are the most ordinary and everyday ones (like family relationships, or democracy) and we see them less, they are less salient (outstanding) - except when we eventually realize their value and price, once we lose them. Finally, there is our capitalist market: there is a whole industry, becoming fiercer and fiercer, which is rationally oriented to sell comfort goods, while no one is paying for adverts that encourage us to invest in relational goods or freedom. In this regard it may be interesting to watch "Spot impossible (Impossible spot)" (on YouTube) by my friend and colleague Stefano Bartolini.
Then there is another area touched upon by Einaudi's writing: "A society of obedient people soon becomes victim of a tyrant or of employees and mandarines. What Saint Benedict, Saint Francis and the other great founders gave to the monastic orders was called the 'Rule'. As long as the convents were poor, only men who were ready to sacrifice entered. So the monastery prospered, and the donations of the faithful flowed in; and many wished to devote themselves, their family and property to it. But wealth gives birth to corruption. ...Everywhere, at a distance of more or less one hundred years after foundation, we are witnessing the same thing happen". Here the passing of the critical point produces the distortion of an element that in time turns into its opposite (subjection, accumulation of wealth...). This is an expression of an ancient golden rule: the vicious behaviours are often nothing more than primitive virtues which have been perverted for wanting to save the form and not the substance that had generated them - this is how prudent savings turn into greediness, or the justly earned profit evolves into parasitic revenue. To take an example: the founder's unconditional and to-the-letter fidelity in cultural or spiritual movements was, in the first generation, vital and essential for the birth and growth of those experiences. But at some point it triggered a self-destructive mechanism that blocked the vital need of renewal and reformers, up to the point that it died away in the name of the ancient virtues (loyalty) that gradually mutated into vices (immobility). The monastic movements, Franciscan or Dominican are still alive after many centuries because they were able to generate many creatively faithful reformers.
There are, in fact, steps to be taken in order to avoid, prevent or at least manage these crises, which sometimes become real 'death because of passing the critical point'. A first basic rule is to raise individual and collective awareness in times that are still happy that the critical point exists and that it can be passed without noticing it. Knowing that you can easily fall into these traps is the first antidote that can save you, especially if it is part of the rules of governance and institutional foresight. But even more important is the presence, or the introduction of a jubilee culture. Among the people of Israel every fifty years all the goods were returned to their original owners and debts were erased. If the movements and communities born of idealism were to return to their initial poverty, demobilizing and putting into circulation their assets accumulated over decades, and if they were to end up back "in the streets", they would find that prophetic power for themselves that they have naturally lost in the meantime; and there, in the suburbs they would meet many others who are in search of the same ideals that are no longer in the places of ordinary life of their times.
Finally, it is not difficult to see that we have already exceeded some critical points in the West, probably without even realizing it, or without listening to those he used to say or shout it out -  also because when the critical point is exceeded, it disappears from the visual horizon of civilization and is left behind. We have passed it, or we are very close to it as regards the natural environment, the spiritual capitals, the use of water, the use of public land, many tissues of community, the use of incentives, controls, competition, or keeping up injustice in the world. We have certainly gone beyond the critical point as regards outer life (consumption, goods, technology), and so our great hunger for and inability of interiority, meditation and prayer in which we have fallen gradually are all seen as normal. The same happened to immunity. The well-known modern conquest of spaces and moments of private life that used to be immune to people of power and bosses has turned into a 'culture of immunity' where there are no more hugs and getting close, which is slowly killing everyone and everything; and a whole lot of loneliness is flooding our cities and our lives. We are getting used to suffering alone, dying alone, growing up alone in closed rooms, with no friendly people but a lot of demons around who rob us of our children.
To talk about these major civilian issues is a first decisive step to become aware of this, and not to exceed other critical points on the horizon. To stop and turn back even: in some rare but glaring cases people have been able to do so.
 
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial
Translated by Eszter Kató
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    [text] => 
A Critical Point - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/7
by Luigino Bruni 
Published in Avvenire on November 10, 2013

There is a social and economic law which is as important as it is forgotten. It is what Luigi Einaudi called "the theory of the critical point", which he defined as "fundamental in science, both economic and political" (Lessons of Social Policy, 1944), which he attributed to his countryman Emanuele Sella (an economist and poet who also wrote a treatise on "Trinity" economics). The idea is the existence of an invisible but real threshold, of a critical point, after which a positive phenomenon turns negative, changing in sign or nature. Today we could apply the law of the critical point to finance, but also to taxes (if they exceed a threshold and so end up penalizing the honest people who pay them).
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Poverty - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/5
by Luigino Bruni 
Published in Avvenire on October 27, 2013

Poverty is an essential dimension of the human condition, it is one of those "first words" in everyone's life. A major fault of our civilization is to consider it a problem that is typical only of some social groups or peoples, the ones that time and again become the "contractors" of poverty. And so we would like to immunize ourselves more and more against the poor, expelling them like scapegoats to stay outside the boundaries of our civil society. We do not know poverty anymore and we do not recognize it, because we have forgotten that we are born into absolute poverty, and that will end his life in no less absolute poverty.
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But if we look at it more carefully, we could realize that our whole existence is a tension between wanting to accumulate wealth to bridge this radical anthropological poverty, and the awareness that grows with the years as we realise that the accumulation of goods and money is only a partial answer, and altogether inadequate to the need to reduce the real vulnerability and fragility from which we come, to defeat death. This awareness is at its highest when (and if) we think about how we finish our existence, naked as we arrived upon entering, when riches and wealth will pass away, and only the rest of ourselves - if any - will remain here.
This is the intuition behind the choice of those who decide to decrease the role of money and goods in their lives because they realise that the decrease effectuated on some goods enables the growth of other goods generated by that new, different type of poverty, which is a poverty by choice. This is the ethical and spiritual journey of Jesus Christ ("Though he was rich...he became poor that ye by his poverty might be rich"), which was later adopted by Francis, Gandhi, Simone Weil and many other giants of humanity and spirituality. By their poverty, which they chose themselves, they have enriched and continue to enrich life on earth, especially that of millions and millions of poor people who have not chosen, but only suffer their poverty.
These great lovers of liberating and prophetic poverty are joined by many other men and women of yesterday and today (and tomorrow). A lot of them are found among the poets, nuns, missionaries, responsible citizens, even among journalists, businessmen and politicians.
Without choosing to become poor of power, wealth or ourselves, we cannot fight long and exhausting battles for justice that may lead us to dedicate our entire lives, or even to die for those ideals. Only these of the poor can give their lives for others because they do not consider it a possession to be jealous of. Whoever is not able to give their lives for their ideals thinks mighty little of those ideals and their own lives, too.
Iranian economist Rajiid Rahnema offers an insight to the complex semantics of poverty when on one of the pages of his great work he distinguishes the different forms of poverty: "The choice by my mother and my grandfather who was a Sufi like the great poor of Persian mysticism; that of certain poor people of the neighbourhood where I spent the first twelve years of my life; that of women and men in a globalizing world of modernization, with an income that is insufficient to enter the race of needs created by society; the one connected to the unbearable hardships suffered by a multitude of human beings reduced to cases of humiliating misery; and lastly, the one represented by the moral misery of the classes with property and some social environments in which I came across in the course of my professional career."
And this is where a crucial discourse opens up on the different types of poverty which has been silenced too much. The bad type of poverty (such as the last four mentioned by Rahnema), the type that should be urgently eradicated from the planet, is first of all an absence of "capital"that stands in the way of the generation of "flows" (including the work and a proper income for it) that would allow us to carry out activities that are essential for living a dignified and maybe even beautiful life. If we look at the many and growing forms of unwanted and suffered poverty in which people find themselves trapped (they are still too many in the world, and still too many women, too many children and great many girls), we realize, or we should realize that situations of poverty, insecurity, vulnerability, fragility, failure and exclusion are the result of lack of capital. However, it is not the lack of financial but rather, relational capital (broken families and communities), health, technological, environmental, infrastructure, social, political, and even more educational, moral, motivational and spiritual capital; a hunger for philia, agape.
In order to understand then what kind of poverty a person identified as poor (because they have less than a dollar or two a day) is experiencing the first step should be to look to their capitals, and to see if and how they become flows. The intervention, then, should take place at that level. And this way we could find out - if we look careful enough - that living on two dollars a day in a village with drinking water, which is free of malaria, with a good basic education is a type of poverty that is very different from that of the person who lives on two (or even 5) dollars per day but does not possess those other capitals, or owns less of them. As Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has been teaching us for decades now, poverty (the bad type of it) means not be in the - social and political - positionto be able to develop one's potentials which thus remain stranded in the very low funds (capital) not allowing for the journey of life to be long enough or not to be too rough and painful. Therefore poverty, every type of poverty, is much more, and something quite different than the absence of money and income. This is what we can see in some dramatic cases when we lose our job and we do not find another because we are not in possession of the "capital" that would be fundamental (not just high education, but also to have learned a craft over the years).
The capital of persons and that of peoples, and so wealth and poverty, are always intertwined with each other. Some capital, wealth and poverty are more crucial to human flourishing, but, except for extreme cases (even if they are highly relevant), no one is poor to the point of not even having some form of wealth. Perhaps it is this intertwining that makes the world a less unjust place than it appears at first sight. At the same time one should be careful not to fall into the "rhetoric of happy poverty" which can often be found in those who praise the needs of others while looking at them from the comfort of luxurious villas, or pass by in armored cars on the outskirts of the cities of the southern hemisphere taking part in the so called - and sometimes quite dubious - "social tourism". Before we can talk of the nice type of poverty we must look into the eyes of the ugly types of it, and possibly get a taste of it, too. But the awareness of the ever-present risk of falling into the bourgeois rhetoric of praise of beautiful poverty (that of others, never known or touched), should not go so far as to delete an even deeper truth: every process leading out of the traps of poverty and need always starts by recognizingthe dimensions of wealth and beauty present in the "poor" that you would like to help. Because when you do not start from the recognition of this heritage which is often buried but real, the development and "empowerment" processes of the "poor" are ineffective if not harmful, because there is no respect for others and their wealth and so there is no experience of the reciprocity of wealth and poverty either.
There are many types of poverty of the "rich" that could be cured by the riches of the "poor" if only they knew, met or touched each other. And if we do not start to get to know and recognize poverty, all forms of poverty, we cannot go back to generating good economy, which always rises from the hunger for life and future of the poor.
 
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial 
 
Translated by Eszter Kató
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Poverty - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/5
by Luigino Bruni 
Published in Avvenire on October 27, 2013

Poverty is an essential dimension of the human condition, it is one of those "first words" in everyone's life. A major fault of our civilization is to consider it a problem that is typical only of some social groups or peoples, the ones that time and again become the "contractors" of poverty. And so we would like to immunize ourselves more and more against the poor, expelling them like scapegoats to stay outside the boundaries of our civil society. We do not know poverty anymore and we do not recognize it, because we have forgotten that we are born into absolute poverty, and that will end his life in no less absolute poverty.
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Goods - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/3
by Luigino Bruni 
Published in Avvenire on October 13, 2013 
Even if our times are more and more dominated by invisible technology and finance that have no human face, the protagonists of economy are still persons and goods. Every step in economy - from consumption to work, from saving to investing - is an intertwining of persons and goods. And even when people act in the framework of complex institutions, rules and contracts, and even when the goods lose their materiality and seem to be vanishing away, at the end and at the beginning of every economic move we will always find goods and persons. Therefore, in order to be able to write a new vocabulary of economy, parallel to the reflections on persons - as citizens, "consumers", entrepreneurs, workers - it is necessary and urgent to create a new way of thinking about goods, about the objects of economy, and so about consumption and other practices of life. 
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Yesterday, today and tomorrow - the economy is something that is always changing evolving and involving along with persons and goods that are changing, evolving and involving. There is a mysterious relationship of reciprocity between persons and goods. If it is actually true that goods are channelled back to people (the only ones on earth to have freedom and therefore, responsibility), then once the goods are generated, they acquire a life of their own and a great capacity to change our lives, well-being and freedom. This is a formidable law of human existence that the great myths have told us and keep telling us in many ways. In fact, we do not only generate children to modify and radically change our lives forever; the things that we create change us, too, they transform us, they make us better or worse and they do not leave us intact. The world is not the same any more after a baby is born, we know this; but even if in different and ever newer ways, the world is in continuous change because of our artefacts, products, encounters and goods. Through the creation, exchange and consumption of goods we nurture and take care of the world, too.
To name merchandise, the first economists chose the word "goods", which is a term borrowed from philosophy and theology. Good (in Italian: bene), in fact, derives from the moral category of good (buono, or bonum in Latin). And therefore it is good to increase goods because - and if - these are good things, they increase the good in people, in families and in cities, they increase the Common Good (bonum commune). For this reason ethical reflection on economy was originally based on the hypothesis that not all goods and things in the economy are good (good things). For example, the ancient ethical reflection on the vices (lust, gluttony, greed, envy...) cannot be comprehended outside this fellowship of goods and the Good, as well as goods and needs.
However, there is a certain point of the cultural and anthropological trajectory of the West where the individuals are not any more willing to accept to be told by someone (tradition, society, religion, a father...) what the "good" goods and the "real" needs are, what the really useful things may be. The subject becomes the only designated person to tell if something is good for them or not, thereby expressing a demand of the paying market. National wealth has then become the sum of these goods (merchandise and services), defined by single persons and the GNP does but measure these goods. And so our economic richness is populated by a billion different goods, measured only by the monetary meter: antibiotics, tickets to watch Pirandello and Ibsen plays in the theatre, flowers bought to give to our loved ones, relational goods, together with the spending for legal services that are generated by our litigations and crimes, landmines, slot-machines, pornography. It's all about goods, GNP and growth. It's all about labour, some say; but it is not difficult to imagine the human quality of the work of someone, perhaps a woman, who has to do printing in a company in the pornography business to make a living - and make richer those who speculate on those "goods".  Not all labour and not all employment are good things, and they haven't been so either. Goods have lost touch with the Good and without this connection we lose the cultural categories to understand that it is not always the increase of goods that is Good, and that not all goods are good things, that not all growth increases happiness or well-being.  The contrast between our goods and the good becomes visible in all its tragic clarity when we look at our natural environment that is all too often the meeting point of individual goods and the Common Bad.
What ethical criteria have we got today to tell whether an increase in percentage of the GNP is good or bad? We should know and tell how and because of what "goods" has the GNP changed, but we are not capable of doing this. If we admit all this with all the drama inherent in it, we still shouldn't forget that one of the conditions for democracy is the presence of a greater number of goods in the world in comparison with those that are good only for me because in this "reject" there may be and there are also those things that are good for me but not for the others and not for the majority. A fundamental exercise of democracy is to tolerate the existence of more goods than those that we actually like. A 'democratic reject', however, should not keep us from engaging in the posing of difficult and risky questions about the moral nature of economic goods and to convince ourselves about the goodness of our goods and that of others.
There is a last remark, too. There are many goods on earth (and many bad things, too) that are not merchandise. In other words, many things have a value but no price, even in the midst of a very quick transformation of (almost) all goods and bad things as regards merchandise. A new indicator of well-being could then be calculated on the basis of the difference between goods and merchandise, which would give us an idea of how much gratuitousness is able to resist the imperialism of merchandise. But beneath the world of things there is something more. The economic value of goods is only a minimal part of their total value. We generate much more goods than the prices and the GNP are capable of measuring. It is a 'value credit' that may compensate, at least partially, or in its entirety, the debt of many bad things that cannot be compensated for in money because they are too human and painful to have a monetary equivalent.
This surplus value over the actual price regards many goods but is especially true for many personal services, for curing, education, health and research... The total value of a medical visit that helps to find the solution for a serious health problem includes a human and moral value, too, that no fee whatsoever can balance. The economic value of a teacher that helps our children to grow and improve is infinitely greater than their pay. This overflow exists (in different measures) in every type of work and the millionaires make it visible with more clarity by the spotlight of indignation. This is what lends a moral value to that "thank you" that we usually say at the petrol station or to the bar tender after having paid.
We all know, feel and suffer these things. It is also for this reason that workers have a vital need for being satisfied and living well - a need that is almost never fulfilled - that of the other forms of symbolic and relational payments that fill in the gap between their salary in money for the "good of work" and the gift of life in work. This anthropological surplus makes work greater than the salary-merchandise and it does so always and anywhere. When we convert values into prices and goods in merchandise, we should never forget the difference between the value of things and their monetary measures, between work itself and its total price. Recognising it and acting accordingly is an act of economic justice that is the foundation of good social life.
 
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial
 
Translated by Eszter Kató
 
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    [text] => 
Goods - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/3
by Luigino Bruni 
Published in Avvenire on October 13, 2013 
Even if our times are more and more dominated by invisible technology and finance that have no human face, the protagonists of economy are still persons and goods. Every step in economy - from consumption to work, from saving to investing - is an intertwining of persons and goods. And even when people act in the framework of complex institutions, rules and contracts, and even when the goods lose their materiality and seem to be vanishing away, at the end and at the beginning of every economic move we will always find goods and persons. Therefore, in order to be able to write a new vocabulary of economy, parallel to the reflections on persons - as citizens, "consumers", entrepreneurs, workers - it is necessary and urgent to create a new way of thinking about goods, about the objects of economy, and so about consumption and other practices of life. 
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Commentary - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life
by Luigino Bruni 
Published in Avvenire on September 29, 2013 

Some people are convinced that the worst part of the crisis is over by now; others believe that the real "great crisis" has just begun. One thing is for sure: we have to start realising that "crisis" is not any more the proper word to describe our times. Actually, we are living in a long transitional period of a paradigm shift that started well before 2007 and is very likely to last for long. Therefore we have to learn quickly how to live well in the world as is given to us today, including the realm of work, too. We need to learn a new vocabulary of economics that is more suitable for us to first understand this world (not that of yesterday) and which is likely to offer us the instruments to act and maybe improve it, too.
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There is a new kind of neediness: we do not manage to understand our own economy any more, we don't understand how we work and how we don't work. If we become aware of this new 'lexical' neediness, and so of this mindset, we will start - or perhaps continue - to write a kind of "Vocabulary of Good Social Life" for ourselves. It is an expression taken from (or given to us) by economist and historian Ludovico Bianchini from Naples who held the same teaching post, only a hundred years later, as Antonio Genovesi. He chose the title On the Science of Good Social Life (Della scienza del ben vivere sociale) for his study in economics(1845). No new word is born out of empty space. A new word always feeds on and develops from old words and makes way for the words of the future. Therefore it is always temporary, partial and necessarily incomplete; it is working material, a toolbox for reasoning and acting.
There are some fundamental words of social life that need to be rethought and some of them even rewritten if we want civil and economic life to be 'good' and, possibly, just, too. Right now we are conducting a very mean economy - also because we are thinking and saying bad things about economic and civil life. There are many words to be rethought and rewritten. Without doubt, the following are among them: richness, poverty, entrepreneur, finance, bank, common good, work, justice, management, income distribution, profit, company's property rights, indignation, Italian model, capitalism, and many more. The new vocabulary is also necessary to understand and so revaluate the specifics of Italian and European economic and civil tradition. In fact, the 21st century is (dangerously) becoming the century of a single socio-economic thought.
We are losing too much biodiversity, anthropological richness, cultural heterogeneity. Not only thousands of living species are disappearing, but also some living forms of enterprises, banks, artisan traditions, visions of the world, entrepreneurial culture, co-operation, professions, know-how's and labour ethics are dying, too. And many of those words that are being born now are very much like those aggressive and parasitic species that speed up the decay of old and good types of plants. There are less and less forms of companies, governing styles, banking types and cultures because they are crushed by the ideology of "business is business". Here, business is only derived from the Anglo-Saxon, and particularly, from the US usage of the term where even banks are all the same: they all gamble with our savings and they all love and serve certain territories, families and companies.
European economy has a long tradition of biodiversity which is a product of its long history, of those many centuries that the type of capitalism that is colonising us right now does not possess. Whoever forgets about this long history and this richness will do enormous and often irreversible harm to society and economics. 
 The 20th century, however, was a century of the plurality of economic systems and capitalisms. This century that seems far in the past now saw several types or forms of market economy unfold. The German social market economy, collectivist economy, the Italian mixed economy - a "mix" that was fuller than the exclusively private/public relationship -, the Scandinavian, French, English, US, Japanese, Indian, South American model, and, in the last flashes of it, the Chinese hybrid model, too. All this variety of market economies, be them capitalistic or not, were later accompanied by great, sometimes enormous, sites of traditional economy that persisted even in our old European continent. All this biodiversity is disappearing in the 21st century.
It is always diversity that makes the world beautiful; biodiversity of civil and economic forms make it as gorgeous and rich as butterflies and plants. The Italian and European landscape are part of the human heritage not only because of the hills and forests (connected to the great monastic charisma of the mediaeval ages and therefore to spiritual biodiversity). Our squares and city walls were made beautiful not only by the surrounding vineyards and olive gardens but also by the cooperative companies, thousands of regional banks and cooperative banks that were all the same yet all different, savings banks, luthier (makers of stringed instruments) wokshops and mountain stables, the district enterprises, brotherhoods, houses of mercy, Don Bosco's schools and those of the Religious Teachers Filippini (Maestre Pie), the hospitals of the Handmaids of Charity (Ancelle della carità) next to the public and private ones. Every time such an institution dies, maybe because of wrong legislation or unprepared consultants, our country becomes poorer and we become less cultured, less profound and free and we burn down centuries of history and biodiversity. 
Where there is no biodiversity, there is only sterility, incest, dwarfism - these are the illnesses that the financial type of capitalism is experiencing nowadays. In fact, it is unable to produce nice work and good richness, exactly because it is too much flattened out onto a single culture and on a single active principle (the maximisation of profit in short time). This loss of civil and economic (and therefore, human) biodiversity is a very serious illness that questions democracy itself which is and has always been strictly connected to the fates, forms and plurality of the protagonists of market economy.
And this is where new challenges open up that are decisive for the quality of our present and future: up until where do we want to extend the mechanism of pricing to rule our lives in our towns? Are we sure that the way we are directing our companies, especially the large ones, has got a future? Will workers always be left out of the management of companies? Do we want to continue to prey on Africa or can we start a new chapter, one of reciprocity, in our relationship with those distant, yet ever closer peoples? When are we going to stop stealing the future of our grandchildren by getting indebted because of excessive and egoistic consumerism? Is it possible to extend the system of hotel ranking called "trip advisor" to all market goods in order to create a real economic democracy? Do we have anything to say in the name of Europe about market and business? These and other difficult questions and challenges cannot be processed successfully if we do not learn first to think and talk about them using the proper words.
There have been too much of damages in these past years that are not only economic, caused by those who produce "bad things" instead of "goods" in costs and incomes alike, masking vices to look like virtues. These damages are continuously, albeit not always intentionally, produced. We all - citizens, economics, institutions, media, politicians - have to gear up and create a new economic and civil language that can help us give the right name to things in order to love them and improve them. In all of the renaissance type ages words fade very quickly and no other historical age has made words and concepts disappear as quickly as ours. If we really want to re-create work, civil concordance, cooperation and richness, first we need to know how to say them, how to call them. When one would like to pass from 'chaos' to 'cosmos' (order), the first fundamental human deed is to name things, to get to know them, to look after them and nurture them. However, the most important word we need to learn again to recognise and say the right way is the name of the other. For whenever you forget that most important of words, the first name, you don't manage to call to or name yourself or things in general, including some very important ones like economy. Only if we call them by the right name will they start to give response to us.
 
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial
 
Translated by Eszter Kató
 
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                    [helixultimate_page_title_alt] => Il nuovo lessico del ben vivere sociale
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                    [page_title] => The Vocabulary of Good Social Life
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Commentary - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life
by Luigino Bruni 
Published in Avvenire on September 29, 2013 

Some people are convinced that the worst part of the crisis is over by now; others believe that the real "great crisis" has just begun. One thing is for sure: we have to start realising that "crisis" is not any more the proper word to describe our times. Actually, we are living in a long transitional period of a paradigm shift that started well before 2007 and is very likely to last for long. Therefore we have to learn quickly how to live well in the world as is given to us today, including the realm of work, too. We need to learn a new vocabulary of economics that is more suitable for us to first understand this world (not that of yesterday) and which is likely to offer us the instruments to act and maybe improve it, too.
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