Italy: a failure? Even no, that’s why (dear Krugman)
Diana Zuncheddu's post
Yesterday a leading New York Times columnist , economist Paul Krugman, compared the United States to Italy.
And why on earth? Because, he explains, it is better to be rich than poor – I summarize – but wealth does not give happiness, aha: this is demonstrated by the fact that in the United States there is a shorter life expectancy than in Italy, that there are in full pandemic from Coronavirus apparently out of control; that there are few vacations and that there is a bad balance between work and personal life.
At the beginning of his reasoning he says: “We crearly have the means to live la dolce vita… (…) I thought it might be worth comparing us to a country that is widely regarded – indeed, in some respects really is – a failure: Italy ".
That is, our country is considered, and indeed is, he says, a failure.
Right then I would have called the foreign minister to have him send a registered letter with a message from an unwelcome person. What a blow to the heart, the two close words – Italy, failure – at the hands of an American.
After that, however, the reasoning changes. He says: yes, they will also be a failure, but they have contained the pandemic much better than us, they have united and have made it; they missed the IT revolution; before the pandemic they had a lower GDP than in 2000, '… but there's more to life than money ”.
He says that to live well we must not die, and in this we Italians perform better than the Americans: we have a life expectancy of 4 and a half years higher. Will it be just a problematic figure for the INPS, which has to pay more pensions?
It always surprises me to read such specific data concerning such large, complex and diverse countries, when compared: the statisticians obviously have to do a really good job, deep down.
Even if we are a failure, being better at living than dying is a good starting point.
Instead of crying on each other and denigrating each other at every street corner, or post, we can start again from there too, in this uncertain and unpredictable autumn that is coming.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/italia-un-fallimento-intanto-viviamo/ on Wed, 09 Sep 2020 05:10:56 +0000.