Pull the strap
In the comments to a previous post Marco, our friend the paradigm of the idiot savant (it's not an insult: it's a neologism ), a character who regularly reappears in this blog under the guise of the Piddino engineer who thinks he is arguing in the economic sphere by a meager and unhinged cherry picking on Wikipedia of theories that seem to him supported by the principle of authority, basically told us that the French are better off than us (note well: no one had said the opposite! The idiot savant 's comment was inserted following a subordinate concession of idivev : "France will always be etc.", that is: admitted and not granted that France is… But the idiots savants , as we will see better in the climatic case, are uncomfortable with elementary grammar…). However: Marco told us that the French are better off than us because "the average net salary in Paris remains 30% higher than in Milan" (strictly without source, without considering that France is not Paris and Italy is even less Milan , etc. But the characteristic of the idiot savant is precisely that he knows: since his certainties are enough for him, he does not deem it appropriate to substantiate the truths that he magnanimously dispenses with the citation of sources).
Oh well, this was one of the two premises of the speech I wanted to give you today. We come to the other.
A little while ago the president of a/simmetrie, Benedetto Ponti, relaunched on Twitter a graph by Nicolas Goetzmann (who I don't know who he is), in turn relaunched by Philipp Heimberger , who we know who he is: he was a speaker at one of our events on European rules ):
The message is that French food consumption (monthly data in millions of euros at constant prices) has returned to the level of 2007. Given that wages in Paris are 30% higher because sucuggino (i.e. the cousin di Marco), we are left with only one line of interpretation of this data: evidently the French are very worried about the costume fitting, and therefore, even if they sail in gold, they prefer to accumulate it to swim in like Scrooge McDuck, rather than spend it in Bourgogne and Camembert (which ruin the line and by the way they should have red Nutriscore, or at least I hope…).
Here too, as in the case of the idiots savants , the source is missing, and I damned my soul to find it (with the opportunity, I remind you, if you believe, to support with your 5×1000 a/symmetries , a think tank that the sources cites them). They will probably be national sources, because neither in Eurostat nor in the OECD have I found a breakdown of household consumption expenditures at this degree of granularity: in Eurostat and the OECD, for example, there are expenditures for food consumption, but annual, while quarterly ones they are distinguished only between non-durable, semi-durable and durable goods (and there are no monthly ones).
I don't exclude that you may find something by looking better (maybe you will succeed), but I was interested in making a quick international comparison, and I did it with what I found, i.e. this :
Now, for the benefit of idiots savants , I would like to point out that the one shown above is an index, which therefore informs us about the dynamics, not about the level of the phenomenon: but, if you are interested, there is also the figure in volume (millions of euros at constants:
on which, if we were passionate here by the theme raised by the "cuggino de sucuggino" (i.e. by Marco), or "are the French or the Italians richer?", at least two adjustments should be made: the conversion in per capita terms, and the correction for purchasing power parity (because I think it is hard to hypothesize that Giambellino's life costs as much as the faubourg Saint Honoré). A true economist, however, will tend to be more passionate about dynamics than statics. After all, even for a politician, the current trends are much more relevant than the starting points, for the simple reason that whatever the starting point, the mandate that the politician receives is to improve it, so the most relevant becomes: are we getting better or worse, and by how much? A dynamic, not a static question: where are we going?, not: where are we?
However: as far as dynamics are concerned, the two graphs basically say the same thing.
In particular, starting from the end: it is confirmed that the expenditure on non-durable consumption (which therefore also includes tobacco, clothing, etc.) of French households is significantly underdeveloped, in line with the trend of its subset (food expenditure, those shown in the graph of the friend of the friend of the friend). The latest quarterly figure for 2022 is 83 billion, a cousin of the 83.1 in the third quarter of 2001 (a big leap backwards).
Interested in Italy?
By the same logic, the latest quarterly figure for 2022 is 78.9 billion, a cousin of 78.4 in the first quarter of 2015. So it can be said, without saying falsehood, that for us the leap back induced by the energy crisis, with annexed inflation scenario, is only seven years, while for the French over 20. By virtue of this dynamic, to date, if we measure well-being in terms of spending capacity for non-durable consumption (excluding cars, household appliances, etc., which in any case contribute to procuring a little well-being), parameterizing the volumes of expenditure to the population we have that in France per capita expenditure is 83 billion divided by 67.8 million, i.e. 1225.5 euros per quarter, while in Italy it is 78, 9 billion divided alas only 59.1 million, i.e. 1334.9 euros per quarter. Marco's cousin would have no difficulty demonstrating to us with a peer reviewed model that, even if it doesn't seem like it, the French per capita expenditure is 30% higher than the Italian one (because in Paris, etc.). On the other hand, the data (but data, as we know, are not needed by those who hold the Truth) establish that the per capita expenditure of French families on non-durable consumption is 8.1% lower than that of Italian families . If you turn to data, rather than idiots reviewed by idiots (i.e. by their peers ), you understand why people are on the streets in France and not here (and I repeat that I am sorry that people have to go on the streets and they are not I am happy that this is happening in a country that I love: however, I am happy when certain phenomena can be traced back to economic rationality: it helps me to think that I have not wasted my first half century).
After that, maybe we should zoom out, and we can do it in two ways: with indices or with absolute values. It is advisable to do it both ways also to help you understand something that idiots savants (yes, you understood it: it is the cultured term to indicate anthropological piddini) normally escape: what information the indexes provide.
Indeed, if we look at the first graph, we note that taking 2005 as 100, in the last quarter of 2022 the non-durable consumption of Italian families is 85 and that of French families is 98 (therefore Italian consumption decreased by 15% and of French households by 2%). The question therefore arises spontaneously: but if the decrease in our consumption is seven times that of French consumption, how come we didn't go to the streets?
It's not so strange, or, to be precise: it's not strange that we're not going to the streets now (since, as already mentioned, in absolute terms we are better off than the French, after their latest crash).
The point is that, as you can see from the second graph, in 2005 (in fact, from 2000 to 2009) our households' consumption of non-durable goods was higher, and not just a little, than that of French households. In short: we led a more comfortable life, as someone will recall (certainly not the Awanagana "scientists" who come to smash my gingers on Twitter with their chin still smeared with the regurgitated ricotta, poor little stars…). In numbers, considering the values of the population on 1 January 2005, in the first quarter of 2005 in France the per capita expenditure of households on non-durable consumption was 84.7 billion divided by 62.7 million, i.e. 1,350.7 euros per quarter ( more or less where we are now), while in Italy it was 92.8 billion divided by 57.8 million, i.e. 1,605.6 euros per quarter. In short: in the first quarter of 2005 (a year that I choose only because it is the reference of the Eurostat indices) the Italians spent (per capita) 18.9% more than the French in durable consumption, but above all they spent 20.2% more than the same Italians spend today .
In short: it is true that we have taken a big plunge since before the global crisis, but it is also true that we were much better off than the French, so today we continue to be a little better off than them, and in dynamic terms today the impoverishment caused by The latest crisis is much less dramatic than what French families are unfortunately experiencing.
It is therefore not strange that now they go to the square, as I said.
What is strange is that while we were being slaughtered by austerity (and don't tell me you can't see when it happened) we didn't go down to the square. But even this is not so strange: the butcher of the time explained well how it went , and the climate of that period is summed up by this image that has rightly become iconic :
There's nothing wrong with maintaining relaxed relationships with your opponents: I did the same with Camusso when I met her (perhaps also because I was distracted by something else). In not fighting them, and in the reasons for not fighting them, however, the voters could see something bad, and they have seen it.
Now, as then, I am in opposition to this stuff here, now as then, giving you the numbers and reasons for my opposition, but now, unlike then, with a little more room for maneuver to eradicate the bad plant that has infested, compromising our well-being in a way that is difficult to heal. We are working on it, but in the meantime, I repeat: irrationality, after damaging those who have suffered it, is turning against those who wanted it. It is not Schadenfreude . I would rather define it as using the opponent's strength: the only resource of those who engage in combat under conditions of inferiority.
I owed you so much (or rather, I owed so much to Marco's cousin, who will now petulantly come back to the rescue…).
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/2023/05/tirare-la-cinghia.html on Wed, 10 May 2023 14:48:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.