“Mass noble society” – the title of a book by Luca Ricolfi from a few years ago – remains the most focused formula to describe Italy in recent decades, once the creative drive of reconstruction and the economic boom has exhausted itself. A society rich enough to be able to guarantee one of the most advanced levels of well-being in the world; and sufficiently advanced to boast extraordinary excellence in the most diverse fields: from Made in Italy to scientific research up to the arts and sport. But also devoted to consuming well-being rather than creating development, exploiting every smallest space (from public bonuses to tax evasion, from neglect of the environment to the exploitation of work, immigrant and otherwise) to get by without addressing the structural issues that development brings with it. Individual advantage against the common good, with the outcomes becoming more evident every day.
The problem is in fact that, in a world that runs ever faster, the noble mass society tends to slide along the inclined plane of decline. In addition to the chronic problem of public debt – which today exceeds 135% of GDP – Italy is seriously behind in terms of education: according to the OECD, ours is the European country with the highest number of “illiterates”. functional”: 28% of the population is unable to understand and use the information encountered in everyday life, due to insufficient skills in reading and understanding text and in calculation. And the demographic winter looms over everything, which risks transforming us from a country with one of the highest life expectancies in the world to one with the lowest fertility rate.
The fact that Italy’s GDP, supported by public debt and the Pnrr, has been slightly higher than the European average in recent years is not enough to think that our problems are being resolved. On the contrary, the involutionary signals are strengthened. I’ll mention two.
The first is the slow but continuous collapse of one of the pillars of Italian social integration, represented by the National Health System. In recent months, the NHS crisis has been repeatedly denounced by various authoritative sources. Last but not least, the appeal from a few days ago, signed by 14 eminent scientists. But the landslide shows no signs of abating: partly due to budget constraints; partly due to the errors inherited from the past; partly due to the management problems of a fragmented and politicized regional healthcare system.
A second worrying signal is that which comes from the world of youth. For several years now, a significant portion of well-trained and brilliant young people have been leaving the country in search of opportunities that they cannot find here. A trend that areas of the South become the loss of an entire generation. At present, young people find it difficult to think that Italy could be an interesting place for their future.
In this way, the noble mass society is destined to transform into a classist society, marked by deep fractures. With a relatively large but minority and declining share of wealthy people, concentrated in the northern regions, and a growing share of the population trapped in paths of impoverishment: elderly people, women, low-skilled adults, immigrants. Especially in the south. With the probable increase in social anger. And with all the possible implications on the stability of democracy.
The problem arises from the fact that the noble mass society is incompatible with the new historical phase in which they are living, characterized by high instability and economic, technological and political conditions in profound and rapid transformation.. A change destined to affect the less than virtuous balance that the country has developed in recent decades.
If not even the shock of the Pnrr was enough to move the country, it means that the inertia is profound. To make a change, we need a courageous policy which, instead of agonizing day by day, knows how to pose the central question: a pact for development that rewards all those who generate economic and social wealth to the detriment of the many who simply scrape by and extract resources from the surrounding context.
April 19, 2024
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