What is and what is not in the Draghi report
What are the main points of interest that emerge from the Draghi report
From an overall look at the Report on the future of European competitiveness presented on Monday by Mario Draghi, a couple of points of interest emerge, connected to each other and useful for framing some ongoing dynamics.
First of all, if you look more closely at the financial gigantism of the proposal, the aforementioned 800 billion in investments per year, you realize that it is not just a question of public spending. An expense, however, which is still treated almost as if it were.
The invoked mobilization of public and private capital, in fact, on the one hand postulates the construction of a modern continental capital market, the delay of which is rightly accused, with specific proposals ranging from the banking sector to pension funds; on the other hand, however, it tends to assume that such capital, finally freed from the bottlenecks that hold it back, must necessarily flow towards the uses among which the report breaks down the fateful figure of 800 billion.
And if there is no lack of indication of some instruments – the use of the community budget as a lever to direct private capital towards sectors considered strategic through the recognition of guarantees – we also note how the convergence of savings on goals decided from above with the very idea of free movement of capital which is the basis of the Single Market.
In other words, there is no discontinuity with respect to the wave of security dirigisme, based on concerns of strategic autonomy, which now seems to be the hallmark of a historical phase that promises to be long and bumpy, nor was it perhaps appropriate for there to be presence of real and pressing concerns. When we encourage such a common effort, however, we reveal that we trust more than in the effectiveness of this or that public finance instrument, but in the existence of public and private decision-making bodies united by identities of views, strategies and interests. . Quantitatively restricted and substantially interchangeable realities, which share a culture and a universe of values that are not necessarily representative of the feelings of a society from which they are often, even physically, separated.
And this leads to the second idea that, unlike most emulators, both enthusiastic and unaware, Draghi proves he is able to grasp: the social consequences of deglobalization.
After the rivers of sociology poured for years, albeit belatedly, on the repercussions of globalisation, between successful metropolitan globalized bourgeoisies and workers expelled from the production process in the rust belts or simply ignored in the countryside, one could naively think that the reverse process is destined to marginalize those fractures, resulting in a sort of revenge for the defeated.
If a good morning starts in the morning, however, you should expect some nasty surprises. In fact, it is not the direction of the process that really counts, but who leads it.
We really think that the digital and energy transitions and investments in highly specialized sectors, sometimes understood more as an instrument of foreign policy than of economic policy, are destined to reward someone who is not an equally highly specialized worker, or a territory that does not Is it a metropolitan area with adequate infrastructure?
The truth is that we are addressing, once again, the same highly educated and well-educated metropolitan classes, the same territorial realities of the large centres, which emerged victorious from the previous phase.
And that, after a long phase in which the production structure was able to lick its wounds and restructure itself into structures compliant with the global dimension – between 2010 and 2022 in Europe the jobs supported by non-EU exports went from 23 to 31 million – a new twist in the opposite direction, rather than filling the gaps dug by globalisation, risks deepening them: if at one time the fathers lost their jobs due to Chinese competition, the children now risk losing them due to Chinese retaliations against our restrictive trade policies.
This is why the report's mention of the need to preserve social inclusion, together with the criticism of the "insensitivity of policymakers to the social consequences of globalization, especially its effects on labor income", represents a significant element.
The limit, if anything, is to decline this social attention almost exclusively in terms of empowerment and active politics. Which is certainly useful for broadening the social basis of consensus for the new season as much as possible, but it only solves the problem to a small extent. Co-opting a few of the excluded, through professional growth, will never be able to absorb the field of those who will remain on the margins of the process, because they cannot all become engineers or artificial intelligence experts, nor is it useful and expected for them to become so.
Not only the success of the report's proposals but also the direction and the arrivals of a historical phase of which we have probably only seen the beginnings so far.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/rapporto-draghi-investimenti-inclusione-sociale/ on Sun, 15 Sep 2024 02:39:05 +0000.