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Editorial – At the root of the attack against the solidarity networks
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 30/04/2019
One the greatest moral novelties of Christian and European humanism is having freed the poor of the guilt of their poverty. Ancient times had left us with an idea as legacy, the very deep-seated and widespread idea, that poverty was nothing but a divine curse, well-deserved due to some fault committed by either the person in question or his or her ancestors. The poor hence found themselves condemned twice: by life and by religion (the book of Job constitutes in fact one of the ethical heights of ancient times precisely because it is a reaction against the idea of poverty as a source of guilt), and the rich felt secure, justified and doubly blessed.

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In Europe, however, it wasn’t the cities or States with their political institutions to liberate the poor from their curse. In fact, ever since the days of the Roman Empire and all through medieval and modern times, citizen statutes and laws were much more attentive in identifying the so called voluntary and hence guilty poor and beggars, in order to then chase them out of the city walls. We should not forget that the political history of European cities is also (and at times, above all) a history of the exclusion of the poor, the Jews, the migrants, the heretics and the vagrants, because they did not possess that “trustworthiness” required to become part of the club of the markets of the new cities. Thank God, however, European institutions were not only constituted by the political institutions in the bourgeois and merchant cities: the institutions born from religious faith were present as well. Christianity had brought along a great innovation regarding poverty. A religion founded by a man who was not rich and with a large number of impoverished apostles and disciples, who dared calling the poor “blessed”, in a religious and cultural context which discarded and cursed the poor.
And who in his life did everything to show the sick and poor that they were not guilty of their sickness and/or their poverty (think of the man blind from birth, the paralyzed man, the lepers…). The early Church continued this ethical revolution, and Saint Ambrose could hence write: «It is not true that the poor are cursed» (Naboth’s Vineyard). But he had to say it with force for he was well aware that he was going against the current mentality. Centuries later, this great religious and social innovation lead to Francis and the mendicant orders who lived an displayed an idea of poverty as a means of liberation and happiness which then continued to irrigate the second millennium. And hence the basis of the many social charisms of modern times, who see the poor not as cursed people, but as images of the poor and suffering Christ.
There is a process of erasing the stigma of curse at the root of the many hospitals, schools and orphanages that have formed the basis for European welfare. And while the politicians of yesterday and today argued and argue about the various categories of poor (voluntary and involuntary, deserving and underserving…), these social charisms told us and still tell us that a poor man is just a poor man, and that it is his objective condition of need that makes him a fellow human being and as such deserving of help. The Samaritan does not help the man who has fallen victim to brigands because he possesses any special merit, but because he was a victim and he was a human being, a man (“A man was going down…“). Blame and guilt have never been good keys to understanding or curing poverty, because each time the analysis of where the blame lies begins we always end up finding a source of blame condemning the weak.
The charisms, not the political institutions of the cities or later of modern States, were the ones to overcome the terrible distinction between the good poor and the accursed poor, and to have the “hospitals” where the guilty poor were locked up and submitted to veritable forced labour and social reintegration, very well-known in many European cities of the past, closed. Without that different view on poverty and the poor held by hundreds and thousands of priests, lay people, nuns and monks, Europe would have been very different and certainly much worse for the poor – and hence for everyone, because the condition of the poor and their social consideration still constitute the primary indicators of the morality of a civilization.
These last few years, this diverse European culture of poverty has plunged into a deep crisis. There are many reasons behind this, but a decisive factor has definitely been and is still caused by the culture of business, which is becoming the dominant culture in every aspect of Civic life. An economy based culture, of predominantly Anglo-Saxon nature, that in the name of meritocracy is reintroducing the archaic thesis everywhere of poverty as a curse and fault. Why? The logics of economy are at the root of ancient religions, which are born from the merchant concept of exchange between men and their divinities.
The first homo oeconomicus was the homo religiosus, who interpreted faith as a trade, as a giving and in turn receiving from the divine, as debit and credit to be managed through offerings and sacrifices. The Bible and later Christianity have fought with all their might to liberate mankind from this economy based idea of God. With the cultural weakening of Christian-Hebrew religion, the ancient idea of the economy god has resurfaced today on our secularized horizon, and with it the idea of blaming, of merits, of demerits, of new kinds of sacrifices and new idols. We have awoken in the “twilight of the gods” enchained by a religion of idols which brings back the archaic idea of the poor as being guilty. But its greatest stroke of genius lies in being able to present it as a moral innovation, as a higher form of justice, simply by giving it an evocative name: meritocracy.
We understand the recent attack against the solidarity networks and the world of the tertiary sector in Italy (it would be useful to read and reread the interview with Zamagni published here on Sunday the 28th of Aprile) without taking the ideological project of meritocracy and the business culture which fuels it too seriously. Meritocracy is becoming an ethical legitimization of the moral condemnation of the poor, which first interprets the lack of (certain types of) talent as a fault to be blamed for, and then condemns the poor as undeserving and finally discards them together with those who take care of them.
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Editorial – At the root of the attack against the solidarity networks
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 30/04/2019
One the greatest moral novelties of Christian and European humanism is having freed the poor of the guilt of their poverty. Ancient times had left us with an idea as legacy, the very deep-seated and widespread idea, that poverty was nothing but a divine curse, well-deserved due to some fault committed by either the person in question or his or her ancestors. The poor hence found themselves condemned twice: by life and by religion (the book of Job constitutes in fact one of the ethical heights of ancient times precisely because it is a reaction against the idea of poverty as a source of guilt), and the rich felt secure, justified and doubly blessed.

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    [title] => Let's save the Black Friday natives
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Commentaries - The religion of consumption and its sacrificial rites
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 23/11/2018
If anyone still has any doubt that our capitalism has become something very similar to a religion, they just have to take a good look around on the web and the big shopping malls today and then try to figure out what's really going on. In the places where Black Friday is celebrated what is happening is something very similar to a religious phenomenon, with many traits in common with the functions of traditional religions.
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Even this capitalism has a growing need for rites, liturgies, churches, festivals, processions, songs, sacred words, priests and communities; just like any other religion it wants us to cross the threshold of the temple to enter another time in which to enjoy non-ordinary dimensions of life.
But, if we look at it more carefully, we realize that from each of these 'sacred' elements one or more essential components have been amputated. It is precisely this amputation that distances consumer capitalism from 'real' religions (particularly from the Jewish-Christian biblical horizon), and brings it closer to the idolatrous cults typical of the first archaic religious forms, without having the purity of the eyes of ancient people. And so, in the twilight of the gods of traditional religions, contemporary man finds himself in a world freed from the biblical God and repopulated by an infinite number of idols that are less interesting than those of Egypt or Babylon.
To understand this, let's think of the discounts that make up the centre around which the ritual of Black Friday revolves. Even if doubts are raised about their 'truth’ every year, discounts are generally real. It is so because real discount is an essential element of the cult. Discounts must be real, because there is no religion without some form of gift, grace and sacrifice. With one fundamental difference, however, that reveals much of the sacred nature of this day. In traditional religions it is the faithful who offer gifts to their God, in the capitalist 'religion' it is instead the enterprise - god who offers 'gifts' to his faithful. The direction changes because the sense of worship is the opposite. In fact, in the religion of consumption, the idol is not the commodity but the consumer, whom businesses try to retain (or, to use another religious word, make faithful to themselves) with their discount-sacrifice. It’s a gift without gratuitousness, and therefore not religion but idolatry.
But that's not all. The gift of this day is a homoeopathic gift, that is, the like that cures the like. This concept is also very archaic. With the homoeopathic kind of gift you take a very small part of the disease you want to cure and you put it in your body in order to immunize yourself from it. Capitalism knows very well that the true and free gift would be subversive and destabilizing for corporate and financial balances, also because it has no price, it is not for sale, it cannot be encouraged; and so it sterilizes it by introducing 'giftlings’ into its body. In its essence, Black Friday is therefore the great operation attempted by the market to immunize itself from gifts by means of discounts, to try to keep authentic gratuitousness far from its temples.
 It is not by coincidence that Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the memorial of the great abundance of the first harvest when the ‘pilgrims’ (the first settlers - the tr.) arrived in the New World. It is therefore a feast of gratitude and gratuitousness, which the next day tries to neutralize nowadays. We must do everything so that it does not really happen. Because on the day in which gratuitousness is definitively expelled from the markets and the enterprises the whole economy will implode. The magnificent economic system lives and regenerates every day because millions of people give their businesses more than they should give as per contracts and incentives. And they do it simply by working, entering every morning into offices and shops as whole people, and therefore also with their ability to donate and to donate themselves, because this is where much of our dignity and freedom is played out. The main defence against the constant, tenacious and growing war unleashed against gratuitousness therefore lies above all in trying to preserve our moral and spiritual capacity to distinguish gifts from discounts. We must save this distinction especially for today's children, the 'natives' of Black Friday, because on the day they begin to confuse the gift with the discount they will find themselves in an infinitely poorer world. The price of gratuitousness is infinite; no discount can reduce its value.
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    [text] => 
Commentaries - The religion of consumption and its sacrificial rites
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 23/11/2018
If anyone still has any doubt that our capitalism has become something very similar to a religion, they just have to take a good look around on the web and the big shopping malls today and then try to figure out what's really going on. In the places where Black Friday is celebrated what is happening is something very similar to a religious phenomenon, with many traits in common with the functions of traditional religions.
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Nobel Prize for "contract theory", simple and disastrous
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/10/2016
The culture of contracts is the big winner of our time of too many poor on the losers' side. It grew from the ashes of the culture of pacts, which had been the backbone of the family, civil and political edifice of the past generations. Until a few decades ago, the reign of the contract was important but delimited, because much of people's life was ruled by the register of pacts (family, friendship, politics, religion, work...).
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Pacts and contracts have lived together for many centuries and they were complementary tools for social life. Until the point when the globalization of markets and finance as well as the emergence of an ethos - where each bond is experienced as a snare for the individual - decreed the gradual transformation of all the pacts into contracts. The pact is (was) a community and symbolic fact. It does not originate from the register of personal interest only but has its constituent elements coming from gratuitousness, forgiveness and collective bonds and interests. Weddings, unions, cities, constitutions, work - these were pacts and not contracts; and as long as they "live", they still are. The postmodern individual likes contracts very much because they appear as "human relations without injury", that is, relationships with very low "activation" and "exit" costs that are certainly lower than the costs of the pacts.
And so contract is replacing pact very rapidly in the family, at schools, in health care, in the "labour market", presenting itself as the only truly liberal and civil tool for regulating human relationships, possibly all of them. So upon learning about the rewarding of economists Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström yesterday, we can understand why the committee for awarding the Nobel Economics Prize explained their choice by saying that their work in contract theory now covers a constantly expanding area, "from bankruptcy legislation to political constitutions."
The economic theory of contracts has in fact now become a universal grammar to design human relations not only in businesses, but also at universities, in politics, and in more and more forms of organizations. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences seems to know this very well. But what they may not know, or do not say, is that contract theory is profoundly changing our way of being together in the world, and not for the better. In fact, it conveys a very clear vision of man and an increasingly intrusive and influential ideology which is based on certain dogmatic axioms that are far from being ethically neutral. The main and most powerful one is the theory of incentives, according to which if you pay a human being in an adequate and sophisticated way you can get almost anything from them.
And so all the other non-monetary and not self-interested kinds of motivation of human beings should not be taken seriously because they are neither credible nor reliable. The worker or the citizen - according to this economic theory - does not work well because they attribute a value to work well done in itself, but only if they are appropriately remunerated. And after decades during which economists have continued to think, write, and teach all this, it is more and more difficult to find someone who thinks that the first motivation that drives a person to work well is their work ethic or sense of duty.
A side effect of this newly awarded contract theory is presenting all human relationships as free relationships between equals (as contracts, in fact, are). Therefore, we are living the eclipse of the great theme of power, which is declined as simply a matter of the right incentives. Everything is simple, too simple. A simplistic approach founded on the big weak point of a strong anthropological reductionism, of which contract theory is the highest expression.
The motivational, symbolic, relational and spiritual complexity of people is left in the background. Oversimplified men and women are depicted, real contracts are designed to the measure of these "economic gnomes", and finally we end up also believing that we are really such as the economy sees us - an economy that chases the old utopia of reducing human relationships to a technical matter, and therefore to something ethically neutral, universal and abstract.
And also something useless, if not manipulative. So the real question becomes: are we sure that today, while we continue to pay for the disastrous consequences, it was appropriate to reward the leading representatives of this economic and financial theory, presented as a simple "toolbox"? Perhaps, if we want people to get back on friendly terms with economic theory and economic theory to be proven a friend of the people, we need more humanist and less technical minded economists. Scholars who, if asked the question: "What motivated you to become an economist?" may give similar answers to the one that the great (and forgotten) Achille Loria gave almost a century ago: "Human suffering."
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    [text] => 
Nobel Prize for "contract theory", simple and disastrous
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/10/2016
The culture of contracts is the big winner of our time of too many poor on the losers' side. It grew from the ashes of the culture of pacts, which had been the backbone of the family, civil and political edifice of the past generations. Until a few decades ago, the reign of the contract was important but delimited, because much of people's life was ruled by the register of pacts (family, friendship, politics, religion, work...).
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Commentaries - Work, its non-places and value
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 01/05/2016
A great utopia of our capitalism is the construction of a society where there is no more need for human labour. There has always been a spirit of the economy that dreamed of "perfect" enterprises and markets to the point where you can manage without humans beings. Managing and controlling men and women is much more difficult than managing docile machines and obedient algorithms. Real people go through crises, they protest, they enter into conflict with each other, they always do things other than those that they should do according to their job descriptions, often they do better things.
    [fulltext] => 
Simply because we are free, spiritual beings, and therefore always excessive in relation to our tasks, contracts or incentives. A truly perfect market would then be the system of techniques, controls, incentives and instruments that are finally able to ensure maximum efficiency and maximum production of wealth, reducing everything to the point of eliminating human presence from the new cities of the new economy.
Today, thanks to the extraordinary achievements of automation and digitization, there is a serious danger of that ancient utopia coming true. In fact, if we look closely at the climate that reigns in big companies, we can notice that the objective that lies behind the rhetoric of a certain type of managerial culture (which says exactly the opposite) is standardization, predictability and formatting the behaviour of workers, to depotentiate the charge of freedom that cannot fit in technical rationality. They would want work performed without workers, work without people, extracting only the part that's perfectly oriented to the objectives of ownership from human action. Reduced to its barest essence, this is the nature of the increasingly sophisticated ideology of incentives, which is the new religion of post-modern capitalism.
But when work is reduced to technique and performance, when organizations become so rational as to "build" workers who imitate the logic of machines, nothing remains of the primary anthropological activity that is human labour, or of its mystery. And if men and women lose their ability to work they lose a lot, too, almost all of their dignity, of their having been made "a little lower than the angels" (Psalm 8; the word-by-word translation of the Italian quote is: "little less than Elohim"). The realization of the utopia of labour-without-humans would then only be a realisation of the perfect dehumanization of life in common. And to continue to live, we would be forced to emigrate en masse to other lands and other planets where it is still possible to really work.
This Labour Day may therefore be the right moment to remind us and to remember what work and the workers really are. We should remember, for example, that if we really want to get to know a person we have to watch them as they work. That is where they are revealed with all their humanity, that is where their ambivalence, limitations but also, and above all, their ability to give freely and exceedingly can be found. We can party together, go out for dinner, play soccer with friends, but nothing compares to work as an anthropological and spiritual window that reveals those around us to us. It is not uncommon that we thought that we knew a friend, a parent, a child, until one day we happen to see them working and suddenly we discover that we had never really known them, because an essential dimension of their person had been veiled from us, one that was only opened up while we watched them work: as they were repairing a car, cleaning a bathroom, teaching a lesson, preparing lunch. All of us are present in the hand that tightens the screw, in the pen that writes, in the rag drying: it is here that we encounter our humanity and that of others. And, almost always, a new appreciation and a new gratitude for work are born and we see and discover them as a gift. Few organisations actually give more joy of the work well done, and so very few (if any) give more misery of bad work, even when we cannot do otherwise. We all have grown up watching the grown-ups work.
I "got to know" my grandfather Domenico when, as a child, I saw him in his workshop building a small stool for me with his own hands. Only there did I realize what his big, callous and expert hands really were, and it was from then on that I really got to know him. The only thing I have left of him now is that cutty-stool, kept in my studio next to my books, and his spirit is perfectly and entirely present in those pieces of wood, because one day I saw him incarnating in that object, built as a gift to me.
A severe form of poverty of our children is not being able to watch the work of adults anymore, because too many jobs are becoming abstract, invisible, confined in far away non-places, inaccessible especially to children and young people. What work will they create tomorrow if today they live immersed in a thousand shows, but are deprived of the sight of work being done, which is the greatest show to see on this earth? A great gift for our children is to give them a chance to see real and concrete work, to begin to see the world from there.
There are few more real human and spiritual experiences than walking through cities and watching people as they work. Therefore, there is no better way to celebrate work than starting to watch it again, seeing it, recognizing it, and then returning with feelings of thankfulness. Our esteem and appreciation – on a personal and collective level – for work and for workers is the first and real reform the world of work needs. And maybe, on this day of non-work, let's read a few pages of the classics of the Italian civil tradition about work again: "There is no work, or capital," Carlo Cattaneo wrote, "that doesn't begin with an act of intelligence. Before any work, before any capital there is intelligence that begins the work, and first impresses the character of wealth on it."
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    [text] => 
Commentaries - Work, its non-places and value
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 01/05/2016
A great utopia of our capitalism is the construction of a society where there is no more need for human labour. There has always been a spirit of the economy that dreamed of "perfect" enterprises and markets to the point where you can manage without humans beings. Managing and controlling men and women is much more difficult than managing docile machines and obedient algorithms. Real people go through crises, they protest, they enter into conflict with each other, they always do things other than those that they should do according to their job descriptions, often they do better things.
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Commentaries - the Evil that We, Too, Are Feeding
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 17/11/2015

Wars have always been fought by many poor, young and innocent people who were sent to die by a few rich, powerful and guilty ones, who did not die in the wars that they themselves wanted and that were fed by their interests. This ancient and deep truth is less obvious but no less true today. We are really in a world war, which is different from the wars of the twentieth century but no less dramatic. A war about which no one knows when and where it started, when, where and how it will end. It is a liquid war in a liquid society. The interests at stake are (almost) invisible, we do not know who wants it, who benefits from it, who does not want it to end.
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This inability to understand, which is present in all complex wars, is particularly strongly felt in this war, which should, however, not prevent us from the effort of thinking, and then fighting especially against the spread of false and ideological theses flooding in the aftermath of the massacre of Paris.
A very popular thesis locates the main, if not the only, reason for this war in religion, and in the inherently violent nature of Islam in particular. This thesis is as widespread as it is wrong. The Quran has its own ambivalence about violence, as we know. There are passages where it calls for a holy war. But there is also a version of fratricide between Cain and Abel in it that even more than the Judeo-Christian Bible, powerfully speaks of nonviolence. In the Quranic account, the two brothers are talking to each other in the fields. Abel senses that Cain is about to raise his hand against him to kill him, and tells him, "Even if you extend your hand to kill me, I am not extending my hand to kill you." (the Holy Quran, al-Ma'idah: Sura 5,28). Abel is presented as the first non-violent person in history, who dies so as not to become himself a murderer. In the Quran there is also this. As in the Bible there are the Benjamites, the daughter of Jephthah, the pages where we praise God because he smashed the heads of the enemy's children on the rocks, and there is the Lord of hosts, or Jesus who said he came to bring "not peace, but a sword."(Matthew 10). The sacred texts of religions were written in times when war was ordinary part of life ("at the time when kings go forth to battle," 2 Samuel 11). At the same time, the great religions - and Islam is among these few - have developed a wisdom literature (think of the Sufi tradition) that offered symbolic and allegorical readings even for the toughest and most archaic pages. In some periods the brightest pages of the Quran (and there are quite some) exerted such a great light that would obscure the dark ones. At other times violent steps were taken by those who, in the name of religion, were simply seeking power and wealth. Today, Islam is going through a difficult phase. Fundamentalist sects use pieces of the Quran to brainwash young people, victims and perpetrators of a nightmarish, mad dream in which they have fallen. They are but prey, fallen into the trap of the hunters of 'martyrs' to be used for purposes where the Quran is simply the snare. To combat this disease that has now sunken into the heart of Islam and is undermining it from within, it is necessary to strengthen its immune system to support the body, which as a whole is healthy but is suffering. It is the same body that has to expel the virus that has entered it more decisively and resist against those maddened cells that are making it weaker, inflicting a lot of pain on it. But all lovers of life must help Islam to manage. In the era of globalization, it cannot do it alone.
At the same time, we should not be so naive as to forget that in this war the economic stakes are enormous. It is by no coincidence that the terrorists of Paris came from the poorest Belgian town of Belgium, where youth unemployment is at around 50%. It is not for certain that the first Gulf War of 1991 was originated for the prevention of the spread of fundamentalism.
In recent months there is much talk of the weapons fuelling this war. We must talk about it even more, because it is a decisive element. Just a few days ago a transport of missiles left from Cagliari to the war-stricken Middle East that was produced and sold by Italian companies. France along with Italy is among the largest exporters of weapons of war in the Arab regions, although there is a 1990 law in Italy that would ban the sale of weapons to countries at war. The politicians who shed tears, perhaps sincerely, and declare all-out struggle against terrorism, are the same people who do nothing to reduce the export of weapons, and defend national industries that move large shares of GDP and hundreds of thousands of jobs. A serious international moratorium that would impose a total ban on arms sales to countries at war would surely not mark the end of the Caliphate, ISIS and terrorism, but it would be a decisive move in the right direction. You cannot feed the evil that you want to fight. And this is what we are doing, and for many years now. We do not realize it until some splinter of those wars gets into our houses and kills our children. In fact we know that as long as the economy and profit will be the last words of political choices, such strong powers that no policy can hold in, we shall continue to cry for grief that we ourselves contribute to cause.
Hollande was wrong to speak of "revenge" in the aftermath of the massacre, and then perpetrate it by bombing Syria on Sunday, thereby responding to blood with more blood. This is only the law of Lamech, from before the same 'law of an eye for an eye'. Revenge should never be the reaction of civilized peoples, even after one of the darkest nights of the recent history of Europe. The largest defeat would be to bring back words like 'revenge' in the lexicon of our democracies, which have been eliminated after thousands of years of civilization, blood and pain.
Finally we have to give our serious and decisive support to those who are boldly seeking peace and dialogue in these difficult times. First of all Pope Francis, who cannot be the only one or the only voice to ask for peace and non-violence. If millions were to cry out that the only answer to death is life, and if we were saying this along with many Muslims wounded and torn like us, if we made it heard in the streets, in social media, before parliaments then our 'no' to the production and sale of our arms to those who use them to kill and to kill us would perhaps provide a stronger echo to the prophetic words of Pope Francis. They may have the strength to move even the lower economic interests, which increasingly control and dominate the world, religions and life.
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    [text] => 
Commentaries - the Evil that We, Too, Are Feeding
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 17/11/2015

Wars have always been fought by many poor, young and innocent people who were sent to die by a few rich, powerful and guilty ones, who did not die in the wars that they themselves wanted and that were fed by their interests. This ancient and deep truth is less obvious but no less true today. We are really in a world war, which is different from the wars of the twentieth century but no less dramatic. A war about which no one knows when and where it started, when, where and how it will end. It is a liquid war in a liquid society. The interests at stake are (almost) invisible, we do not know who wants it, who benefits from it, who does not want it to end.
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"Bes" Report/26 - Relational wealth hiding by the side of GDP. In the era of the common goods it is the stocks (environmental, relational, spiritual and social) that must return to the centre of the stage
by Luigino Bruni
published in 


    

pdf


Avvenire

(49 KB)


 on 11/08/2015
The topic of welfare, well-being, public happiness or social well-being has been and still is at the centre of the Italian tradition of civil economy. In recent years there was a significant growth of the debate around the need to go beyond GDP or, according to some, to start using other indicators telling about the other dimensions of well-being as well.
However, in this coupling of GDP with other, non-economic indicators there is a serious risk. The emerging scenario is very similar to what happens in football.
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After the game, some statistical data are shown on the screen with a number of indicators: the percentage of ball possession of the two teams, the fouls made and sustained, the number of shots on goal etc. But, located on top of the statistics tables, the number of goals is the indicator that dominates: it is the only thing that really matters, and that no statistics on its side can change, not even remotely. Human development, ecological footprint, Bes (short for "benessere equo e sostenibile" - Equitable and Sustainable Well-Being; a category created by the Italian National Institute of Statistics) and other similar indicators today are very much like ball possession and the number of shots on goal, which act only as 'contours' for the number of goals scored (i.e. GDP). How to get people take other indicators of well-being really seriously and overcome the idea that GDP is the only important figure in the economic game of our society?
First, a bit of history. GDP, as we know it today, is a relatively new concept, since it is linked to the development of national accounting starting from the thirties of the twentieth century. Its actual founding fathers (or grandfathers) were the so-called Physiocrats, French scholars of the mid-eighteenth century who were convinced that the economic strength of a country is not measured by its capital (assets) or value stocks (as it had been thought until then, as the wealth of a nation had been largely based on the amount of gold owned by it). Instead, they said that what really mattered in terms of wealth was flow, i.e. income. Since then we have more or less all been thinking that a people is not made "rich" by its wealth of land, raw materials, coastline, museums, cathedrals, cultural or human capital, but by the ability to "turn over" those capitals in order to 'make them profitable' and generate new types of flow.
Today we know, and in Italy we see more and more, that if a people is not able to ensure that its funds are used in productive ways, it remains poor, even if its citizens are sitting on top of gold mines. The annual flow of new wealth is also a creation of the physiocrats: it serves to tell us how rich a national community is. So before doing away with GDP, let us treasure this value in its DNA: a person, a community, a region remains economically poor if it is not in the (institutional, cultural and political) conditions to transform its capital into income. But when a country - despite the capital - can no longer produce revenue, the income kills the profit, and societies start to decline. Other indicators or more sophisticated economic indicators are very useful in these cases, but let's not forget that without a flow indicator, we cannot measure our ability to value our capitals, to see if we are enhancing or depleting them over time.
For this reason, I believe that a major task in terms of more sophisticated measurements of the economic and social development of a country would be not to rely on GDP only but to consider some additional, but equally trusted and relevant indicators that year after year are capable of grasping the state of health of our capitals, especially that of our social, environmental, cultural, relational and spiritual capital. Despite the important lesson of the Physiocrats, it is still true that revenue (flow) is born by capital (stock), and if capital deteriorates or expires, revenue decreases and eventually disappears.
In the era of the common goods that we dramatically entered with the third millennium, stocks are expected to return to occupy centre stage in the economic, social and political world. The environmental issue, but also the relational and social (migration, social inclusion, terrorism...) ones, and other topics that have become central again in the era of the common goods, are all matters of stock, because they are linked to forms of capital, whether present or absent - we now know from many studies how much intolerance and racism are connected to the lack of cultural and artistic 'capital' in people. But there's more. Excessive emphasis on creating flows, including large financial flows that dominate by far among the flows of goods and real services, is producing many serious effects on the stocks of our economies and our planet. We must learn how to properly measure our assets, which, like non-renewable energy, are undergoing severe impoverishment precisely because of the great invasion of income flows (measured by GDP).
Finally, at the root of any development of new measurements, there is a more general cultural and political question that involves the business world directly. As long as the only indicators for the success of companies (especially large ones) are the profits achieved and the indicators consulted are purely economic, and as long as the "social reports" are glossy publications handed over to the stakeholders during corporate parties, without the 'social' data having any relevance in making important choices (the reconfirming or new appointment of managers, members of the board etc.), it will be impossible for our society to value other indicators apart from GDP.
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    [metadesc] => Quella ricchezza relazionale nascosta a fianco del Pil. Nell'era dei beni comuni sono gli stock (ambientali, relazionali, spirituli e sociali) che devono ritornare al centro della scena
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"Bes" Report/26 - Relational wealth hiding by the side of GDP. In the era of the common goods it is the stocks (environmental, relational, spiritual and social) that must return to the centre of the stage
by Luigino Bruni
published in 


    

pdf


Avvenire

(49 KB)


 on 11/08/2015
The topic of welfare, well-being, public happiness or social well-being has been and still is at the centre of the Italian tradition of civil economy. In recent years there was a significant growth of the debate around the need to go beyond GDP or, according to some, to start using other indicators telling about the other dimensions of well-being as well.
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Laudato Si' (Praise be to you) - is far from being anti-business. But as we peruse it let us allow ourselves to be led gently through the metaphorical woodlands of the encyclical where the Holy Father Pope Francis’s spiritual economy is buoyant.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 24/06/2015
The cries of many victims, of many who have been 'discarded', raises a question of justice which weighs heavily upon our capitalist system;  a question that is all the more serious because it is no longer being seen or heard. Pope Francis is the only figure of authority on global moral issues, who due to his particular charism, is giving recognition and ear to today's pressing ethical question (corporate social responsibility), in the face of which he is not afraid to raise radical questions (generated by his fraternal concern and love -  agape ). 

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No other 'world organisation or body' exists that is as free as he is from powerful economic and political forces, a freedom that not even the United Nations or the European Commission can lay claim to, let alone politicians at national level, who continue on in their practice of "selling a poor person for a pair of sandals - (Book of Amos), as indeed Italy is at risk of doing with its introduction of new gambling laws.
A number of commentators, self-professed supporters of the free market economy, claim that the Encyclical Laudato si'  is opposed to it ; that not only is it a statement against modernism, but a reflection of the Pope's own Marxist views, going almost as far as predicting a global environmental catastrophe. But far from it. In fact, it does just the opposite.  Pope Francis focuses on reminding us that both markets and business enterprise are precious allies of the common good as long as they do not become the 'only rule'; or that the 'part' (the market) does not try to become the whole (life itself).  The global market is a necessary part of the life of society which contributes to the common good (there are many examples quoted of responsible business owners and technology being used at the serving of the economy and providing employment).   However, it is not the full story, nor the most important.
Pope Francis also seeks to remind all participants of the global economy of their vocation to reciprocity and "mutual benefit". It is on this basis that he criticises companies who exploit (all too often) people and land;  by doing so, they negate the very nature of what the global economy is supposed to be, increasing their wealth at the expense of impoverishing other weaker players.
 
On a second level, Pope Francis raises an issue that has been systematically neglected:  the notion of "efficiency", globalization’s new "in-word", as being solely about technology and therefore ethically neutral, cannot be upheld (34).  The calculation of cost-benefits (cost justifications), which underpin every 'rational' decision by companies and public administration, depends precisely upon what we choose to include in the costs and perceive in the benefits.  For decades we have considered companies 'efficient' who neglected to include in their costs any damage done to the sea, rivers or atmosphere.  The Pope invites us to enlarge our calculations to all types of species, including them as part of our cosmic fraternity,   extending this reciprocity to all creatures, giving them a voice in our economic and political budgets.
But there is still a third level.  Even after acknowledging "mutual benefit " as the fundamental law of civil society, extending it to include our relationship with all living species and with the earth, it cannot and must not be regarded as the only law in respect of life.  Though important, it is not all there is.  Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, refers also to “duties of power". We have a responsibility towards creation because technology is new form of power, the outcome of which can have unilaterally serious consequences for other living creatures to which we are all linked.  The universe is filled with living things and this calls for responsibility. Moreover, there are times when moral duties come before benefits; the concept of "mutual benefit" does not cover the full spectrum of responsibility and justice.  Even the best market, if it becomes the only criteria, may grow into a monster.  There is no economic logic that convinces us to leave forests intact for those to come in thousands of years’ time, and yet we have moral obligations towards the future generations who will inherit and inhabit our earth.
The question of 'ecological debt' (51), is one of the most significant and most prophetic passages of the whole Encyclical. The widespread indiscriminate accumulation of national debt can bring entire nations to their knees (as in the case of Greece), and hold many others to ransom.  Much aggression is used in the name of debt and credit.  Yet a great 'ecological debt' exists between North and South, between the 10% of humanity which has increased its wealth, whilst burdening everyone with the cost to the atmosphere, and continuing to contribute to "climate change".  
The term "climate change" is itself misleading, as it is ethically neutral. The Pope, instead, speaks of "pollution” and the deterioration of that common good which is our climate (23). Climate deterioration contributes to the desertification of entire regions, having a direct impact on poverty, causing deaths and the migration of peoples (25). It is this 'debt of ecology and justice’ that we fail to take into account when we close our borders to the many thousands who arrive because we have burned their houses as a result of our actions. This ecological debt seems to count for nothing in the political world order, there is no Troika to condemn one country for polluting or causing the desertification of another country and so the 'ecological debt' to which the great and the powerful are increasingly indifferent, continues to rise.
Lastly, a word of advice, to whoever has yet to read this wonderful encyclical, do not be tempted to read it sitting at your desk or relaxing on the sofa.  Go out into the middle of a field or into the woods, to begin your meditation on this canticle of Pope Francis. The earth he speaks of is real and tangible, filled with the sights, sounds and scents of an earth that is loved.  Then, go to a poor area on the margins of society, to conclude your reading, surrounded by poor people, and look at the world with its rich and greedy living, with poor beggars on its doorstep and embrace at least one of them, like Pope Francis.  It is from such places as these that we will learn once again to be 'in awe' (11) of the marvels of the earth and of fellow human beings. Perhaps then we will understand and pray the words "Praise be to you".
 
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Laudato Si' (Praise be to you) - is far from being anti-business. But as we peruse it let us allow ourselves to be led gently through the metaphorical woodlands of the encyclical where the Holy Father Pope Francis’s spiritual economy is buoyant.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 24/06/2015
The cries of many victims, of many who have been 'discarded', raises a question of justice which weighs heavily upon our capitalist system;  a question that is all the more serious because it is no longer being seen or heard. Pope Francis is the only figure of authority on global moral issues, who due to his particular charism, is giving recognition and ear to today's pressing ethical question (corporate social responsibility), in the face of which he is not afraid to raise radical questions (generated by his fraternal concern and love -  agape ). 

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