The overtakings (again on the French debt)
Just over six months ago I told you about overtaking :
I only intervene to correct the title: there were actually two overtakings. Today the salmon Völkischer Beobachter , through the mouth of Marco Fortis , lets us know that:
and so yes, in fact there were two overtakings: while I was explaining to you the reasons for a possible overtaking of our public debt on the left by the French one, I was overtaking on the right a colleague comme il faut , who half a year later discovers what you knew half a year before!
On the other hand, when you overtake you do it because you want to save time, or even out of an irrepressible inner drive, the one that my friend and teacher Giampiero Di Federico scolded me the only time I had the honor of being accompanied by him in the mountains, annoyed by my competitive approach: "Albè, you're like the Alpine troops of Pinerolo: never anyone in front!".
A diachronic nec pluribus learn that we add to the synchronic one.
The fact that I arrived first reconciles us in some way with that pseudoscience that goes by the name of bibliometrics:
With four points of h- index more despite my six years younger (which today are twenty years more perceived thanks to the after-effects of the second stroke of the witch in two months…) and the abrupt halt of my career seven years ago (bad luck! I became President of the Commission…), let's say that the cold and often misleading objectivity of the bibliometric data entrusted me with the task of saying the right thing ( do the right thing ) at the right time, which in science is before, not after, given that the progress is made, precisely, of overtaking!
However, I would not like these considerations to sound disparaging towards my colleague (as an economist) Fortis, who instead I invite you to read when you meet him, because if what he says is not entirely right, he says almost nothing wrong, so much so that he has attracted the attention of the drindrini, who accuse him of nothing less than " distorted narratives on the economy ". Sus Minervulam docet , one might say. Tactically, therefore, Fortis is our friend as he is the enemy of our enemy, and the highly balanced positions he takes (and which you can easily find in the Salmon Völkischer Beobachter ) on issues such as the role of SMEs in the Italian industrial ecosystem, the international projection of the Italian economy, and, as you can see, also the sustainability of our public debt, actually make us like him, and arouse our amazement in seeing that the main enemy of SMEs gives him space in his house organ ! But anyway: they too and above all (the "confcosi") need to rebuild their virginity…
The fact that it has a more limited academic production than ours, in other words, is not necessarily a sign of a lesser brilliance of analysis, in fact, quite the opposite! It seems to me more like the result of a choice, that of dedicating oneself to the wonderful world of public or private corporate governance . Although a board member has more time than a parliamentarian, if he wants to do his job well he doesn't have as much time to dedicate to research. Life is made up of a plurality of objectives and results: I started fiddling with the h -index and the "theoretical paper " when this type of argument was used by idiots to denigrate me, I certainly don't want to be the idiot who denigrates today, on the contrary! I hope it is therefore clear that my reference to bibliometrics (like those at pieiccdì or pirreviù ) was absolutely ironic. It very rarely happens that indications of academic rank coincide with the concrete interest and originality of a scholar's contribution, and we have had infinite examples of the opposite, starting from the now mythological " scalable tobacconist " of good memory!
(… yes, I know that the term used was not literally "tobacconist", dear cock-punchers, starting from my friend Carlo, but I cannot get the Fellini-esque image of the prim Luigi climbing up the protruding breast of a Romagna tobacconist from my head and it provides me with such intellectual satisfaction that it more than compensates for the annoyance caused to me by your mosquito-like cock-punching …)
I would therefore say that if someone must have the right to the platform in "authoritative" newspapers, much better is someone like him, who, as you will have seen if you know him or will see if you know him, argues with data, in a plain and rigorous way. Reading it, however you put it, is a pleasure.
I only have one atrocious doubt left: a person with this clarity of vision cannot help but understand what the root of the problem that afflicts us is.
So why didn't he ever say it?
Once upon a time I would have been ferocious towards behavior that I would have judged to be indicative of sloth and conformism. Now I have learned to see things with a more open mind. We must take the good from everyone, without demanding our excellent, which perhaps is only ours (and therefore not excellent). I, from being explicit, have gained (perhaps) more than I have lost, and in any case it was my choice, which no one forced on me and which I would not impose on anyone. Already now, in the role in which I am, being more explicit would make my political action less effective, and in fact that the euro is and remains a gigantic problem I only say it here, in the blog that does not exist, so that no one knows, because no one should know, which is why this blog does not exist and the Sunset of the Euro never existed.
But you know that I know it, and I know that you know that I know it.
And in my opinion Fortis knows it too.
That's enough, especially if this, as I think Fortis also understands, is today more of a problem for France than for us.
Everyone has the right to live in the world they want: even Macron!
"Whoever wants the end wants the means to achieve it", remember?…
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/2025/05/i-sorpassi-ancora-sul-debito-francese.html on Wed, 07 May 2025 12:49:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.