Excellence is not enough. The patient economy that Italy needs
“Excellence is not enough. The patient economy that Italy needs” by Paolo Manfredi read by Augusto Bisegna
For those like me who deeply love the Italian province and the inland areas, if only because they have chosen to continue living in a small village in the Abruzzo hinterland at the foot of Monte Velino, Massa D'Albe, Paolo Manfredi's book, “L excellence is not enough. The patient economy that Italy needs” ed. Egea offers, in addition to an interesting economic and sociological analysis (which starting from Italy and extends to the internal areas of the peninsula), a different interpretation, outside of romantic rhetoric and storytelling on the potential of our territories, to propose a “Plan B” for these areas with slow depopulation and an almost zero economy, in a world that is now living in a “permanent crisis and running at maximum speed”.
We live in a tired country, which seems "overall inadequate for navigation in the stormy seas of contemporaneity", as Manfredi describes it in the first part of his book. It is also his journey through known, but never resolved, evils and imbalances. One above all: the merciless demographics that are redesigning a country with fewer people and older people. Italy is among the first countries in Europe destined to achieve a 100% ratio between active and pensioners by 2050, i.e. one pensioner for every worker. A situation that should make one's wrists tremble and to which are added increasingly marked and growing territorial imbalances. Imbalances which today no longer stop at the historical question of the South, but extend to internal areas and to many provinces which are sliding inexorably towards the periphery of the world. The upheaval of some value chains, writes Manfredi, undermines consolidated production areas of our economy, "without the development opportunities or alternatives, which also exist, being seized." Italy, although small and lacking in raw materials, in fact possesses a "unique concentration of natural and cultural attractions, products, brands and symbols out of the ordinary". Excellences that the whole world envies us but which today apparently travel independently of the country. In fact “the friars are rich but the convent is poor.”
The crisis of the middle class has extended to become a crisis of the middle class, writes Manfredi. A crisis that has repercussions on a cultural, economic and productive level. In this scenario, the Italian province, as a cultural and economic pillar, has lost the identity and importance it had in the post-war period. “Today the problem is not so much the true excellences, which do what they must, that is, excel, but the state of health of that culture broth from which these excellences have emerged over the years and which today is less and less vital”. Not addressing the problem collectively means sawing off the branch where you are sitting. Even that tenuous hope, which arose post-Covid, that a more remote and distributed model of life and work throughout the territory would somehow revalue our wonderful province and internal areas, does not seem to have come true. Because despite good food, social relationships and the low cost of living, to live in a place, people must be able to work without dying of hunger and have services. And what are today the internal areas and their villages were essentially born around an agro-forestry-pastoral economy that no longer exists. For this reason, as Manfredi writes, there is a need, if we want to escape this marginality, to seriously address the issue of modernization and the development model. But if this doesn't start from work, the bet is lost from the start. It is precisely in Manfredi's work that he finds the fundamental key through which the relaunch of the province can pass. “It is work that keeps communities together”, he has made and makes his fortune. The remainders, the romantic landscape of the poet Arminius, the militant anthropology, make sense "where people make a dignified living even in places disconnected from large flows." And to the separatist, conservative and claims-making phenomena, the author puts the idea of the province which must find a ubi consistam by establishing a new and pragmatic relationship, without useless parochialism, with respect to the immaterial economy. The author also criticizes the PNRR, which is too engineering-based and bureaucratic in the processes that generated it. Where there is a lack of "structured processes and stakeholder listening and involvement". The necessary capacity for granular reading of the phenomena, processes and needs of territories, societies and businesses has been lacking and a stereotyped reading of Italy has prevailed. A relaunch "plan" built not through a conscious program, but rather in "terms of an inclined surface on which things flow by inertia, starting from the resource that in recent years has taken on almost magical connotations: tourism. Of course, an important item of our national GDP (from 6% to 13% depending on the perimeter considered) but which in common parlance has taken on the contours of an apparent natural resource that must be extracted and highlighted to exercise its magical powers without taking the rest into account.
But is it really like that? The author highlights the structural deficiencies of the Bel Paese's tourist industry and the damage caused by wild autophagous tourism that eats up the territories it sells. Mirror in some ways of a society "clinging to income", where work is marginal.
It is the mass noble society – so well represented by Luca Ricolfi – and which finds in Manfredi's analysis the same brakes as our society and where even the school is no longer able to intervene positively on these inequalities.
And then what? In the last chapter of the book, the author outlines a "plan B" by recovering the territories that are outside the great "furious flows of the economy", to make them play in a series B championship which still allows them to stay in the game and bring the result at home. Outside the football metaphor is what Manfredi calls "patient economy". An economy that recovers the potential that still exists and is not expressed today for a thousand reasons. A mix made up of people, territories, cultures, sustainable technological innovation and ethical and pragmatic tension – not conservative I would add – to transport our biodiversity heritage into the future. And here the author cites two concrete cases of innovative products born in the province: the Filo&Fibra cooking box in San Casciano dei Bagni and a welder's helmet with digital visor, developed by the Verona workshop Pegoretti Cicli and the ITS Marker of Modena. So nothing to do with more or less happy degrowth, Manfredi specifies, nor with unlikely alternatives to (neo)globalization but an idea of development that respects our biodiversity and is sustainable. Because it does not waste resources, but puts them back at the service of the economy and communities, also using the best of innovation, giving back meaning to the territory, to collaboration and to work.
In community cooperatives "ecosystems" that create value through collaboration, innovation, knowledge and enterprise, one of the possible spaces for action of the Plan and innovation as the keystone of a new local economy. But who to start with? The author indicates in small entrepreneurs, artisans and cooperators, but also in local administrators, the yeast from which to begin to give shape to a new economy. All marginalized but not marginal subjects. Vast program, true. But the alternative?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/leccellenza-non-basta-leconomia-paziente-che-serve-allitalia/ on Sat, 11 Nov 2023 06:04:17 +0000.