My first century
(… a few days ago, the arduous task of ecclesiarch took me to a village in the hinterland, where I paid my last respects to the centenarian father of one of you. Here we have always shared everything, even the most painful moments. The fact of not existing gives this blog a privacy that obliterates any suspicion of inappropriate ostentation—the kind typical of the journalistic "crocodiles" that so annoy our Daniele! When such a long life ends, on the one hand, we console ourselves by thinking that, after all, it was a life fully lived, but on the other, we are dismayed by the thought that, for the same reason, the memory that is dispersed is all the more profound and precious. However, faithful to the Goofynomics manifesto, let's see the glass half full: Abruzzo is quite full of centenarians, even if it doesn't have the highest incidence of centenarians in the total population:
And this, when you're 63, gives you a clear indication. I was surprised, however, to see Tuscany in fifth place—even though my great-grandmother died at 99. Perhaps by transplanting Tuscany's weeds into good soil like Abruzzo's, we can hope to beat Molise's record, because I want to see how this story ends… and that's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about!… )
In Roccaraso, I presented the data you've been familiar with here for some time, the ones that impressed some managers at #goofy12, motivating me to write this post . As I told you in the previous post, not only you, not only public managers, but even some Lega administrators have understood the gravity of the situation. Because the fact is, when we say that "in 2023, Italian GDP will have returned to 2007 levels," we're not saying we've emerged from the depression! We're saying we've lost sixteen years of growth, and therefore that we'll have emerged from the depression when we've recovered the position we would have had if we hadn't lost sixteen years of growth!
Of course, no one knows exactly what this position is: by definition, it is a counterfactual that can be estimated in various ways and is subject to uncertainty. For fun, we can use the deterministic trend as a model for estimating this counterfactual—that is, the straight line that best fits the data in the period before the crisis (i.e., the period 1950-2007)—and then extend it into the relative future (from 2007 onward), as I've shown you several times:
I'll make two or three quick considerations here (which I'll work on calmly, and which you can obviously skip).
First, I'm well aware that the deterministic trend, no matter how well it fits the data, is not , in principle, the most appropriate time series model for representing real GDP. We've known this since at least 1982, that is, with the two Charlies paper (9,049 citations in Scholar, the most cited economics paper of the postwar period, in my opinion). I've begun to explain which model was the most appropriate here , but this isn't the time to delve into those details again.
Second, even if the deterministic trend is not an adequate model, it would still be good practice to extrapolate it by calculating its statistical variability. We might discover, perhaps, that the range of possible GDP values forecast for 2026 with the information available up to 2007 is so wide that it also contains the value we have actually arrived at.
I promise I'll regain my EViews license to show you some estimates made with the right model, and in any case with the appropriate dispersion indicators (projection confidence intervals), but for now I'll leave these (appropriate) refinements aside, limiting myself to observing that so far what we know is that with 603 billion we could rejoin the growth train from which we disengaged with the 2008 shock. It goes without saying that this is an impossible hypothesis (especially with an austerity minister like Giorgiettiiiihh!11!1!), so we can put it another way: what should the economic growth rate be from now on for me to be able to celebrate (in Pizzoferrato) on my hundredth birthday, in the near future 2062, seeing GDP rejoin the train of its historical trend growth?
The answer is in this graph:
and it is…
(… the first person to guess correctly will get a 50% discount at the next #goofy, where someone who knows what they're talking about will be present… )
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2026/01/il-mio-primo-secolo.html on Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:32:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.