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Comments –Lenten Christian Culture and its Civil Nature
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 17/02/2013

Lent also has a civil nature, which reveals itself to us if we read its words in the light of this crucial phase of our public life.  These words are articulated and go to form a true and proper message of a change of route, of a conversion.  The first word is repentance, a strange word in our culture, yet a fundamental one in order to be able to truly begin again after every personal and collective crisis.  After having made mistakes, especially if serious and collective, in order to restart and go speedily on our journey we need, first, to repent, because if we lack the awareness of having done wrong, we cannot find again the road to walk on.
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The first expression of every repentance is a feeling of pain, of sorrow, of regret for having done things that are not good, that brought harm to ourselves and above all, to others.  We have seen many things that are bad and serious, in these years of crisis, and we are still seeing too many.  But one does not see or glimpse remorse in leaders of financial speculation, in the culture of top management of big businesses, companies and banks, and even less in our political parties.   Without civil repentance, accompanied by some gesture, as in all true repentance, we will not have the strength to restart.
For these civil and economic errors and sins, the (very necessary) trials through civil courts cannot exhaust the rites of repentance, excuses or of reconciliation.  When the manager of a great bank or company commits crimes, there is need of something more than just the sentence given by the courts (when one is given): there is also need for these entities who have betrayed the trust and hopes of all shareholders and of the entire country, to be able to repent, to ask forgiveness and pardon of the people.  The reparation and restitution of the civil and penal code are much too poor for these kinds of crimes which hurt the symbolical and ethical codes of the community.
The second word is humility; a fundamental virtue for a good life, a word totally out of use in a culture that rewards the hypertrophic ‘I’ and no longer has eyes for appreciating the virtue of humility.  Humility comes from earth, from that humus that was root one time of humility (humilitas) and of man (homo), a semantic richness that is also found in the Hebrew language where man and earth are called adam and adamah.  Humility is a word that founds the human, because it tells us that great things in life are such because of their smallness, because they  are a little less, a dwindling, because they are earth and dust.
This ancient tie humility-man-earth reminds us that humility is virtue when it comes from having touched dust, earth, ash: one becomes truly humble and truly man/woman when one falls, when one feels the earth and the dust, and then gets back up.  This is the humility of Job, but also of those who work and know the earth, of those who in front of a mountain or a rock, experience their own infinite smallness, and from that contact with the earth rediscover also their own infinite dignity.  We cannot become humble by ourselves (this is narcissism), but it is the others, life, the earth and the dust to humiliate us, which can then help us to continue on our way.  The failures, individual, economical, and political of these past years can become an occasion to do better, but it is necessary first, to want to experience humility, which is absent from all the programs, the promises and above all from the words and tone of these pre-election days.
The third word is fasting.  Our century is obsessed with diets, but no longer knows fasts, because fasting is not a matter of counting calories or of losing weight, but is another pivotal point of a good life: temperance.  Fasting is educating one’s desires, passions, heart, spirit, and intelligence.  In order to appreciate and then cultivate fasting and temperance people are needed who are able to see the values in such things as limit, moderation, and sobriety.  In reality, if we take a good look at our people beyond the television shows, we become aware that there are ever more people leading temperate lives, who give due value to limits (in the use of resources, time, work, profits, consuming…), who moderate their own needs, who enrich them by diminishing them.  I meet many of them, and more every day, but they are not spoken about in the public sphere, because they don’t make for good audiences and don’t bring votes.
The civilization preceding ours was governed by fasts, because the hardship of life was supportable only by educating passions, intelligence and will:  poverty can, and has become, a life that is good and worthy only if accompanied by fasts, which multiplies the value of having little food, and the feasting of the poor.  It is also the lack of a Lenten culture that is decreeing the death of the ‘carnevale’ in our country (and the boom of Halloween, which is its opposite), Carnevale can be lived when it is preceded and attended by fasts, food and feasting.  Fasting, in the end, nourishes and reinforces, it doesn’t reduce the will to live, nor does it reduce the generative side of life: not by chance did the great Greek philosophy indicate in Penia (indigence, lack) the father of Eros.  Every form of creativity, from art to family to business, requires one to desire that which one doesn’t have or is not yet.  The root of every true crisis is the extinguishing of the desire for what isn’t yet.
 
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Comments –Lenten Christian Culture and its Civil Nature
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 17/02/2013

Lent also has a civil nature, which reveals itself to us if we read its words in the light of this crucial phase of our public life.  These words are articulated and go to form a true and proper message of a change of route, of a conversion.  The first word is repentance, a strange word in our culture, yet a fundamental one in order to be able to truly begin again after every personal and collective crisis.  After having made mistakes, especially if serious and collective, in order to restart and go speedily on our journey we need, first, to repent, because if we lack the awareness of having done wrong, we cannot find again the road to walk on.
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Comments - «Politics»: May it Find Morality and Itself
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 02/01/2013

«Economy» has been the reigning word in 2012.  The first word of 2013 must be «Politics» if we want the year ahead to be better for the economy too.  There is, in fact, the extreme need to invert a tendency in place for some decades, the one that brought us to use increasingly economic logic in areas that had nothing to do with the economy, such as school (‘educational opportunities’, debits and credits), healthcare, culture,  and politics.  It isn’t rare to hear important Italian journalists speak of political parties today as «competitors», of political «supply» and «demand» (what would be the ‘price’ of equilibrium?). 
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But most of all, in this country there is a pervasive feeling of disenchantment which brings too many to believe there can’t be any citizens, much less politicians, motivated by the common good and not by private interests only.  The pan-marketing of these last decades has increased the ‘average cynicism’ as well, convincing many among us that the logic of interest is the only realistic true one, and that all the rest is mere chattering.
Many of the economists have used and are still using economic categories and logics (that is, of the markets) to explain just about anything, from why religious orders make their members wear habits and pronounce solemn vows (to raise «barriers at the exits», as happens in industries), to the behaviours of politicians and of the electorate.
The first economists to apply economic logic to politics were the Italians between the eighteen and nineteen hundreds. Among these Maffeo Pantaleoni, who sustained that choices of fiscal and economic politics depend on «the average intelligence» present in Parliament.  Amilcare Puviani, then, with his ‘Theory of financial Illusion’ retained that the fiscal system of a country is accepted by the masses on the base of a double illusion: that tributary pressure is less than the real one and that internal revenue is used for goals of common good, and not for the private interests of the dominant class.  Wilfred Pareto, the most genial economist ever, continued this tradition, adding to it the important element that human beings are normally moved by passions and interests, but have the invincible tendency to give a logical «varnish» to their actions.  In the case of politicians, the «varnish» is the common good or ideal, while the real motivation is power.
This economic approach to politics is pervasive and dominating, and yet it only picks some dimensions of reality, not all of them, and often leaves out the essential, among which the very fact of the popular vote (it is known that according to official economic theory the ‘rational’ elector should not vote).
I am convinced that but for a few exceptions (one of these is Albert Otto Hirschman, recently missed), economists do not serve well the common good when they treat politics as a market.  Rather, they commit a serious error full of consequences. A  humanistic interest (maybe) works when I must choose a car or an airline ticket, but less for a job, and far less and badly, for choices where symbols and ethical dimensions are concerned, such as political ones.  Some weeks ago a colleague of mine said:   «I belong to the American leisure class and I have every economic interest in voting for a conservative program.  But I don’t do it, choosing to go against my interests».  Dominant economy has great difficulty understanding this kind of choice, which is, instead, very crucial especially in moments of crisis.
Today there are many citizens who go beyond their economic interest in continuing to keep their company going so as not to lay off anyone, to pay taxes knowing they are the only ones to do so, to believe and keep investing in politics and to vote out of civil duty, notwithstanding.  Italy has already had happy moments when politics, at every level, has been something more and different from the search for private interests of electors and elected.
Men, and more so women, are capable of acting for bigger interests than private ones, to deny it would be negating the humanity and dignity of a person.  The decades from which we are (perhaps) coming out of, have undermined the virtue of hope in being able to change:  but it is from this hope that, at an anthropological level, and therefore political, we can and must start again.  Taking the road of good politics, certainly depends on the «average intelligence» of the next eventual Parliament, but depends also, and above all today, on its «average morality».
The many ‘poverty traps’ in which we have fallen, especially for some regions in the south, cannot be broken except by giving prophetic and trusting strength to politics in itself.  From here, work and a good economy will be able to take off.  An economy is not only the one dominating in the world, and the world.  Italy, before Pantaleoni and Pareto, has had Dragonetti and Genovesi, who thought of and attempted a Civil Economy founded on reciprocity and public happiness.  The year 2013 is also the 300th anniversary of the birth of Antonio Genovesi (we will speak about it more on these pages), and it is an occasion for re-appropriating an economy friendly to politics and the common good.
Let’s work and rise to the test of the passage we are going through (by choosing with our lifestyles and our votes) and leave to Genovesi himself the last word, (from a letter written in 1765): «I am already old, and do not hope or expect anything else from the earth. My aim is to see if I am able to leave my Italian people a little more enlightened than I found them in coming, and also a little more attached to virtue, which is the only true mother of every good.  It is useless to think of art, commerce, government, if we do not think about reforming our morals.  While mankind finds interest in being rascally, we cannot expect big things from daily efforts.  I have too much experience of this».
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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Comments - «Politics»: May it Find Morality and Itself
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 02/01/2013

«Economy» has been the reigning word in 2012.  The first word of 2013 must be «Politics» if we want the year ahead to be better for the economy too.  There is, in fact, the extreme need to invert a tendency in place for some decades, the one that brought us to use increasingly economic logic in areas that had nothing to do with the economy, such as school (‘educational opportunities’, debits and credits), healthcare, culture,  and politics.  It isn’t rare to hear important Italian journalists speak of political parties today as «competitors», of political «supply» and «demand» (what would be the ‘price’ of equilibrium?). 
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Third appointment with Comments by Luigino Bruni on ‘Economy and Advent’
Comments – This is also a Time to Understand ‘Poverty’ in its Many Forms
di Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 16/12/2012

Returning to Europe after traveling in Africa, the Philippines, or Brazil, I am struck by how little singing I hear in our own cities, communities, or families.  But, above all, in contrast with what is happening to those younger civilizations, among us, it is the adults and the elderly who do not sing much; and when grown-ups don’t sing it is very serious, because a happy, joyful adult, is a message of hope and life that is launched to all, especially to the young who need, today, to be helped to want to grow up even by the exercise of joyfulness by the adults around them.  Here then, is the importance, civilly as well, of the phrase “Be joyful always.”
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But how can one be joyful in a time of crisis?  To capture it we need first to remember that joyfulness is not an archaic word, but a very current one: it is a word of the future, if it will be better.  It is not only merriment, much less is it pleasure, it is not the merry (cheerful, tipsy), an associated adjective, as in the English language, indissoluble as Christmas (Birth of Christ).  Letitia has a lot to do with relationships: we cannot be joyful by ourselves, we need someone to make us joyful, we need to make others joyful, we need to make each other joyful.  Also because of its nature of gratuity and reciprocity, joyfulness is disappearing from our vocabulary, because, joyfulness is not a word for a consumeristic society, for games and finances. One is not joyful when entering a mall, not even when one compulsively scratches a lottery ticket, or when one makes big profits by incomes and by speculations.  For these experiences or emotions the word joyful doesn’t fit, it sounds off, because it is not an emotion.
To feel true joyfulness we need to receive the news of a new job, of someone getting well again, of a positive diagnosis, we need to return home after a long journey knowing that someone is waiting for us and is preparing something to celebrate with.  There’s need for a graduation day after many sacrifices, of reconciling and hugging again after years of conflict, to wait for and be awed by a baby being born.  Who has no idea of such experiences doesn’t need the word joy, he can be fine with some fun, entertainment, pleasure, happiness.  Joy is then a fundamental word for a time of crisis, of any kind, because it blossoms from good relationships, and it renders them fertile, generative.  For this reason as well, joy has the same latin root (laetus) as (letame) manure, it is that which fertilizes and makes plants fruitful, and what brings up flowers. Joy is like manure in the fields: to make good and abundant fruit it isn’t enough to plow the field (work and talent), there’s also need for that joie de vivre (laetus), both individual and collective, which brings about good results in work.  Joy makes one fertile because, in order to generate companies, jobs, projects, families, and life, there is the essential need to by joyful. The businessperson generates work and riches as long as he remains a little ‘mischievous shop boy’, but innovation stops when he loses this joy.
Creativity, from economy to the arts, is almost always a fruit of adults who, with great effort, have kept the child alive in them.  Joyfulness is a virtue, which, as any other virtue, needs to be cultivated and guarded all lifelong.  The “perfect joy” then, is born of loved wounds, in ourselves and in others, so that they become blessings, for oneself, or more commonly, for the others.  Finally, in order to know joy one must be poor.  It is to the poor that is given the ‘good news’ because chosen poverty, that is therefore, neither indigence nor misery, is the precondition that permits one to be joyful.  Today, in Italy and in the West there are many, too many indigent people in utter misery, excluded from economic and social life (because of being unemployed for example), but there are always less poor, in the highest truest sense (and too forgotten) of the term.  It is the poverty which the Iranian Majid Rahnema speaks about, which in his beautiful book (which should be given as a gift this Christmas season) shows us a ‘misery’ that ‘makes poverty flee’, that is, a bad poverty (the one not chosen and borne with) which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to live the virtue-beatitude of chosen poverty.  When one lives a life of abject misery, when one has no means to live with or help one’s family live in a dignified manner, one cannot freely choose a poor life.  The good chosen poverty, the only one which brings joy, is called sobriety, gratuity, sharing, and is born of the spiritual and ethical awareness  that the goods we have become wellbeing only and if they are shared, and not treated as substitutes for a relationship with others.
Families know this very well.  Those who do not know this chosen and convivial poverty, is not joyful because he is not able to distinguish joyousness from pleasure, celebrations from entertainment, poverty from misery.  Christmas is a true feast only for these poor.  Let us relearn then to wish one another a ‘Joyful (merry) Christmas.’
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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    [text] => 
Third appointment with Comments by Luigino Bruni on ‘Economy and Advent’
Comments – This is also a Time to Understand ‘Poverty’ in its Many Forms
di Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 16/12/2012

Returning to Europe after traveling in Africa, the Philippines, or Brazil, I am struck by how little singing I hear in our own cities, communities, or families.  But, above all, in contrast with what is happening to those younger civilizations, among us, it is the adults and the elderly who do not sing much; and when grown-ups don’t sing it is very serious, because a happy, joyful adult, is a message of hope and life that is launched to all, especially to the young who need, today, to be helped to want to grow up even by the exercise of joyfulness by the adults around them.  Here then, is the importance, civilly as well, of the phrase “Be joyful always.”
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Comments –The Crisis and Our Times
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 02/12/2012

Advent - every advent, and every waiting period for salvation - is a fundamental experience, especially in times of crisis.  One does not come out of a crisis if one does not exercise oneself in the art of expecting a saving act, a joyous, and at the same time, painful art.  A salvation which must be wanted, before being wished for.  Ours is an epochal crisis because we lack the desire to be saved, and it is lacking because we don’t have, on a collective level, eyes to be able to see it, or least-ways, to glimpse it.
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Before asking ‘how long before daylight?’ one must, of necessity, wish for dawn, and be able to recognize it as it happens.  In these past years too many ‘dawns’ have been announced, because each one sees signs of dawn there where others still see deep night.   Some see it in the increase of the GDP, and hope to see the first signs of an increase in spending (the disease becomes the cure), others see it in an ecumenical, but rather vague, ‘social market economy’, others yet in the elimination of political parties so as to entrust even public things to for-profit businesses, deemed to be truly efficient and responsible entities.  However, all of these ‘dawns’ are neither strong, nor symbolically charged enough, to be able to awaken lofty human passions, and therefore, to gather around them great, collective, popular actions.   And the more time goes by, the further ‘dawn’ appears to be – and the end of night has come.  An awaited for economy for today should contain some fundamental words.  Together with ‘work’ and ‘young people’, on whom not enough is written or suffered, there are at least three words which, if missing from civil vocabulary and grammar, make any waiting period illusory.
The first of these is virtue, particularly, civil virtue.  There is instead, an ancient and even glorious tradition which theorizes that from crises, one comes out with vices, not virtues.  But the awaiting is a virtue, since it is cultivated, looked after, and maintained, above all when times are hard.  Three hundred years ago, Bernard de Mandeville, recounted, ‘The tale of the Bees’, where the conversion of the spoiled beehive (a very opulent one) into a virtuous one produced misery for all.  The idea is clear: only vice creates development, because if people don’t love luxury, commodities, hedonism, and games, the economy stalls for lack of demand.  This is also true for a country such as ours in which the economy very much depends, maybe too much, on consuming goods.  Unfortunately, it is an idea very deeply rooted in a good part of the Italian leadership, who make appeals to civil virtues only in referring to tax evasion, without understanding the elementary rule which is at the base of common life: if a ‘progressive commercial’ condemns the “social parasite” and the next one pushes lotteries, the two cancel each other out.  The true fight against evasion is called ethical coherence which then becomes   political and administrative strength.
A second great word on awaiting is ‘relationship.’  Recent data gathered on the increase of litigiousness in our country during this crisis, is astounding.  From apartment buildings to relationships with work colleagues, from traffic claims to ones against teachers and doctors, this crisis is making proximity relationships turn bad – even if, as always happens, in these past years we can see the blossoming of virtuous and productive relations.  The worsening of relationships is a very preoccupying fact, because other serious crises we have been through (we think of the great wars and dictatorships) had, amidst pain, made social bonds stronger, re-created friendship and civil harmony which were essential also for economic recovery.  If we are not be able to cure our ancient and new relational maladies (what is corruption, if not diseased relationships which create diseased institutions, which in turn reproduce even more diseased relationships?), no economy could ever recover, since it is, first of all, a weaving of relationships.
Lastly, a third word is ‘entrepreneur’.  Great teachers on awaiting, have always been and are yet now, farmers, artists, scientists, and above all, mothers.  But also the entrepreneur.  True entrepreneurs, all of them and especially the medium-small, the co-ops, and civil and social entrepreneurs, are suffering greatly today, more than is spoken or told.  During the past decades, these business people have been able to create value from values ‘turning into income’ productive vocations and co-operatives in our valleys and burghs, in the mountains, seas and sea coasts, who today, are seeing their riches and work vanish because of tight credit, because of the lack of system politics, and by the invasion of speculators who take over and often devour their businesses.
The entrepreneur is a man or woman of waiting, because he/she lives only if able to hope (hope is another civil virtue), because if they couldn’t hope on the world of tomorrow being better than today’s, they would do better to enjoy their resources now, or to speculate in search of profits (only unscrupulous speculators can make millions of profits by polluting people and land).  One who generated and grew a business activity knows that the most important moments of his story have been the ones where he was able to await a salvation and hold on to hope against events, against prudent advice from friends (‘why don’t you sell?’), when he had the strength to insist and believe in his project.  The world – and in it Italy – still lives because of people capable of waiting and hoping in a salvation, waiting for a dawn, waiting for Christmas.
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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Comments –The Crisis and Our Times
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 02/12/2012

Advent - every advent, and every waiting period for salvation - is a fundamental experience, especially in times of crisis.  One does not come out of a crisis if one does not exercise oneself in the art of expecting a saving act, a joyous, and at the same time, painful art.  A salvation which must be wanted, before being wished for.  Ours is an epochal crisis because we lack the desire to be saved, and it is lacking because we don’t have, on a collective level, eyes to be able to see it, or least-ways, to glimpse it.
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Commentary – Social economy, a work of charisms.
More respect for what’s civil
By Luigino Bruni
Published on Avvenire, 2012/10/20

It’s by now clear that mainstream logics in Europe powerfully influence Italy and that people, in our country too, struggle to recognize the reality that is at the same time richness and source of richness for everyone: the civil and social economy. It is affected not only by the critical VAT increase (of 7 percent) on social cooperatives (the major social economic Italian, or probably even continental, innovation over the last twenty years). The recent approval of “betting exchange” and the imminent online slot machines legalization represent an even worse sign, since these radically ‘uncivil’ regulations end up intensifying the social hardship that affects social cooperatives, which have to face it with always less resources. 
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The issue about the IMU [Italian property tax] application on non-profit structures and on religious institutions should also be looked at considering the overall misunderstanding as far as social and civil economy is concerned. The matter has actually been at stake for a while, but should be given even more attention and looked at with more proposals.
On Via Tuscolana in Rome a Salesian community of around 20 nuns for decades keeps a primary school and a kindergarten. Many nuns, some over 80, are volunteers at the school assisting the children during breaks or answering the switchboard. I’ve witnessed first-hand parents sleeping by the school’s gate the day before enrolment begins in order not to miss the few vacancies available. Why does this community carry on this school? For two main reasons: as an answer to the neighbourhood’s vital and pressing demands for it, and because for Salesians educational work isn’t an accident, but an essential aspect of their vocation and charism. When these nuns responded to their call as young women, they donated their lives to young people and to their education.
At least the best part of Italy was partly, and during historical periods mainly, founded by religious charisms and to some extent secular ones as well. During the years when the Italian state still did not exist, or its institutions were too weak or still to be founded, Cotolengo, Don Bosco, Don Orione, Scalabrini, Francesca Cabrini cared for and loved the various kinds of poor and outcasts of that time, making Italian society more civil, and the life of many, poor and less poor, possible. Their structures and houses became public assets at times even more significant than fountains, parks, theatres and museums. Most of them still exist as such and make up a part of our country’s heritage. Nowadays hundreds of thousands of children, teenagers and youngsters are still educated and loved by works born from charisms.  
Only a very absent minded look can define a religious order school or a parish cafeteria as a commercial activity. These are direct and immediate expressions of the charism itself and the difference from profit activities is not because, or when, they ‘do not have profit’ (like the newly published standard regulations point out). The fact of having profit or not cannot be the criteria based on which one sees this reality and so many religious and non-religious organizations (cultural, entertainment, sport…) that carry out commercially engaged activities. 
Like this, projects (and polemics) regarding the property tax increase on noncommercial entities (today IMU is at stake, yesterday ICI [the former IMU]) cover much more than just a ‘catholic’ issue (we should also consider how much damage Italy undergoes by looking at everything under the ideological frame: in favour/against the church!): this matter refers also, and above all, to the country’s civil and economical vocation, to our history and our culture. 
It’s also true that many of these charismatic organizations are maintained for years at the threshold of survival: they receive derisory funds from the government and can only live on the gratuitous offerings they can gather. Collect IMU from their properties and from many other communitarian schools and works means not to understand their value, not to appreciate them and make their lives very difficult, even unbearable. What are the consequences? 
These structures will be more and more vulnerable to the market and will be mission deprived, and sold to speculators maybe, who will double the fees causing families to grow even poorer and will impoverish our lands’ culture and history. Is this what we want? Is this what Europe will impose to the national government once instigated by a handful of politicians that appealed against Italy as guilty for helping non-profit activities with public resources?
In the current extraordinary political and governmental phase a tradition decades old unfortunately lives on and actually expands as well: the lack of eyeglasses to ‘see’ the civil dimension in Italy (which is different from the one in England or in the USA). It’s not a coincidence that the first spending review cut was through shutting down ONLUS Agency [Italian social organization], and (we hope) the last one is through undermining the ‘civil’ works, and therefore the poor. It’s not about equity (treating the church and its works like everyone else); it’s about having a concept of Italy, an overview of the physiology of the healing patient. Since the greatest injustice is to treat different realities the same way: not to consider the difference between a business school and a Don Orione’s school or a kindergarten sustained by a parish.
While the press explores the well-known and very much covered stories about the bed and breakfast pensions owned by religious orders but run as a business often by profit groups (which according to present law pay IMU and all other taxes) people are not aware that due to the amendments on regulations explicitly against non-profit, profit activities themselves will increase. Everyone will pay IMU including those operating without profit objectives, but citizens will pay a much higher price, and our country will lose the contribution of century-old works. 
All this is caused by a combination of radical ideological revenge and crave for revenue increase. Not as in France though, there is no political might to increase 20 percent over the IRPEF [income tax] of the super-rich for such income, thus more is demanded from the poor and the increasingly poorer middle class. The past days’ immorality and corruption scandals should be cured by nourishing the immune system, injecting healthy cells to the badly ill Italian body, also due to the charisms’ exclusion from civil life. Italy won’t be saved by the enlargement of the profit market.
Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial menu.
Translated by Cristian Sebok
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Commentary – Social economy, a work of charisms.
More respect for what’s civil
By Luigino Bruni
Published on Avvenire, 2012/10/20

It’s by now clear that mainstream logics in Europe powerfully influence Italy and that people, in our country too, struggle to recognize the reality that is at the same time richness and source of richness for everyone: the civil and social economy. It is affected not only by the critical VAT increase (of 7 percent) on social cooperatives (the major social economic Italian, or probably even continental, innovation over the last twenty years). The recent approval of “betting exchange” and the imminent online slot machines legalization represent an even worse sign, since these radically ‘uncivil’ regulations end up intensifying the social hardship that affects social cooperatives, which have to face it with always less resources. 
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Comments: Late Capitalism reveals itself to be like Late Feudalism
The Most Urgent Challenge is Inequality
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 16/09/2012

Growth is a challenge, inequality even more so.  The increase of inequality in capitalist economies is becoming the first real obstacle to socio-economic development.  Because of the great inequality of opportunities, rights and freedoms, the drugged wealth we have created is not fertile, generating authentic development.  How could it be any different, after all?  Only work generates jobs.  If we were to take another look at the journey from the Industrial revolution to today, we would become aware of how preoccupying the index of inequality is in a market economy.  After a substantial decrease in western economies of the nineteenth century, caused by the passage from feudal social and economic structures, to a more dynamic market economy, in the last decades triumphant capitalism is causing inequalities to increase once again, bringing them to almost initial levels. 
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In the USA, the first fortune 500 managers earn on average 10 million dollars yearly, and the 20 wealthiest hedge funds managers (the most speculative investments) gain totally, more than the sum of the incomes of those same 500 managers.  There’s more: today, the inequality present inside the United States is very similar to that in countries which are only now leaving feudal social structures.  Well then, our late capitalism is looking more like late feudalism, as if two centuries of economic development and rights earned, have served for nothing, or too little, in terms of inequality.  Too much market is producing the same uncivil fruits as the absence of markets.  This is an urgent and grave message, also because it contradicts the reformist utopia profoundly associated with the birth of modern political economy, when the development of markets was seen by the illuminati as the main instrument to overcome feudal ways and go towards a democratic society of free and equal people, not foreseen, yet agonized by them.      
In fact, while development of markets also meant development of work and of rights, the economy was overall faithful to its original vocation; but, late generation capitalism, founded upon financial incomes and debt, is bringing the world back towards a rigid polarization between classes which had been believed surpassed.  Why?  First of all the 4/5 of so called absolute poor (approx. two billion people who live with less than 2 dollars a day) are no longer found in what we call ‘Poor Countries’ but in countries with medium to high incomes.  This shows us a new epoch-making fact: the line of demarcation between rich and poor is always less tied to a geographical (North-South) but is shifting more to the interior of every country: globalization has in fact deeply changed poverty morphology.
For this reason, today, the relationship between the GDP of countries and the various indicators of wellbeing and malaise is becoming less significant and useful.  If we take the GDP of countries with medium-high per-capita income (e.g. Ocse Countries) and we crossed them with fundamental indexes for people’s lives such as life expectancy, children’s welfare, mental illness, obesity, crime, youth school grades, and social mobility, we discover that nothing significant comes to the fore, because data is very similar between itself.  Things change dramatically though if, instead of the GDP index we take inequality indicators (among which the famous ‘Gini Index’), because we’ll discover great differences in those fundamental indexes within these same countries.  
In other words, in terms of life expectancy, of health, of human capital, of capabilities, as Amartya Sen would say, there is a much bigger difference between an English office worker and an English woman of Caribbean origins with a casual job and lower education, who lives in London’s poorest quarters and is perhaps a single-mother, than between an English office worker and a Peruvian office worker; a difference which becomes even smaller when we compare an English top manager with one from South America.  Inequality is a grave public malady, of which the entire population of a country suffers, including even the upper class - as much recent data shows- because inequality increases social envy, status mentality, insecurity and the unhappiness of all.
Therefore, coming back to the today of Italy and Europe, those who truly love the common good and work towards true economic recovery, must worry a little less about the GDP and do more about reducing inequality.  If we continue to tax work, gasoline, first houses, raising income taxation (VAT…), and not taxing big stocks and estates, financial incomes, as well as all other kinds (including those of status positions within many protected feudal categories), we will keep looking at the wrong indicators, to confuse effects with causes, to measure things which distract us from the great challenges of the crucial moment we are living in.
Hope resides mainly in young people who have less tolerance for inequalities:  from their indignant non-resignation can begin a new social and economic season, where l’égualité, not only formal but of substance, can once again be one of the greatest values of our civilization.
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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Comments: Late Capitalism reveals itself to be like Late Feudalism
The Most Urgent Challenge is Inequality
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 16/09/2012

Growth is a challenge, inequality even more so.  The increase of inequality in capitalist economies is becoming the first real obstacle to socio-economic development.  Because of the great inequality of opportunities, rights and freedoms, the drugged wealth we have created is not fertile, generating authentic development.  How could it be any different, after all?  Only work generates jobs.  If we were to take another look at the journey from the Industrial revolution to today, we would become aware of how preoccupying the index of inequality is in a market economy.  After a substantial decrease in western economies of the nineteenth century, caused by the passage from feudal social and economic structures, to a more dynamic market economy, in the last decades triumphant capitalism is causing inequalities to increase once again, bringing them to almost initial levels. 
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Comments- The total refusal of vulnerability, the spread of contracts, the pacts crisis
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 24/06/2012

The biggest difficulty we face in order to come out of the crisis doesn’t lie in the choices made by the institutions, or in politics in Europe, but in our lifestyles which in these last few years have undergone a radical change.  This is the reason for the difficulty in finding a way, because while we complain with words, our behaviour increases day by day that very model of growth against which we raise our voices and which brings much suffering to many (although not to all).  This is perhaps the greatest paradox in this phase of Capitalism.
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Let’s take insurance companies as an important example.  In looking for the common good, it is evident that insurance has an important function:  the possibility of being able to insure oneself against risky and uncertain events generally betters the wellbeing of people and the common good.
A hypothetical world without insurance would be worse from all points of view and would be worse especially for the most fragile parts of a population.  But, as in all good things in life,  knowing  the right measure is crucial, and being able to pinpoint the limit or critical point of no-return in order to keep that good from becoming evil.
Regarding this, we should reflect more on that rising phenomenon which we could call “World Insurance,” that is, the progressive and rapid enlargement of the area of social life covered by insurance contracts.  We don’t see this only with auto insurance, which in a few years has gone from a simple RC to coverage for vandalism, unforeseen atmospheric events, or to the need of a technician in order to mount snow tires in the case of a sudden snowfall.  We also see it much more often in the fact that teachers have to insure themselves against any possible accident during school trips and many other events.  ‘Well……’ someone might say that, with these insurance policies we are able to do many more things than if we didn’t have this coverage.  Attention though! “I say,” because during this process, as well as raising the not so little cost for families, it tends to wear at the interpersonal relationships, and create always greater insecurities which will later cause other contracts to be proposed to us and so forth.
But there’s more.  If a citizen knows that that particular place in social life is covered by insurance, data, as well as our experiences, tell us that there is likelihood the insured will increase the number of claims, court cases and conflicts.  As long as we are talking about vehicles, all of this, even though serious (as insurance companies know well), deal with areas not always central or crucial to our lives.  But if this phenomenon (suing, demands for damages, moral suffering, etc…) begin to extend and include the areas of health, school, and civil life, its effects could become very serious, as is happening and can be seen already.  Let us not even mention the logic that lies at the base of the ‘’derivative titles” that come from it (one of the major causes of financial instability) which are sophisticated forms of insurance (or better, bets) where profits are made over people’s tragedies.
Finally, insurances’ hyper-coverage produces another effect which enters into the heart of social and relational life.  Some years ago a fire destroyed part of a home belonging to a friend of mine.  A few friends began to arrive with offers of help, but as soon as they realized he was insured, they  happily returned home, knowing that ’someone else’ would take care of it.   What a pity, given the time that would have been  spent with one’s friends in rebuilding  a home,  which could be an investment of relational capital, which then produces fruit in other areas of our lives, a capital which the hypertrophy of insurance today tends to attack and reduce.  In this way, our social capital (as well as financial) diminishes, increasing solitude, and the market steps in to offer new contracts for other unstable events (one day we will insure ourselves against not being respected enough, or loved enough by colleagues and family members!?), precipitating us in a social trap in which the effects are much more serious for the poorest who will suffer along with everyone the deterioration of civil patrimony, but who don’t have the possibility of insuring themselves financially.
What to do then?  I see two paths, one internal and the other external to the insurance world.  We should not forget that insurance came about as an instrument to protect those who are most fragile and vulnerable: at least, that was the original intent.  There is the need today to re-launch a new season of insurance ethics, in the wake of the Nobel laureate M. Yunus, who is now inventing insurance for the poorest, with premiums of only a few dollars.  Insurance societies should by nature be civil enterprises, that is, without intent to profit, simply because the contracts they sell have to do with a primary good, to protect against a bad and devastating vulnerability, and make it more liveable; a good that is fundamental to every person and it is not just to speculate on fundamental rights of people. This is not rocket science (science fiction?) (as one would say today of those leading huge insurance companies) but liberty and democracy.
 
The second pathway is more a cultural one than an ethical one:  we must react to that dangerous dream of wanting to build a common life ‘with relational risk 0’, because this dream can swiftly transform itself into a nightmare. Civil life is made of contracts (including those devised by insurance providers), but is primarily comprised of pacts (family, citizenship, and work), and a pact cannot avoid a certain vulnerability, since pacts are made of trust, and true trust is always open to risk and betrayal, otherwise it doesn’t do any good or serves too little.  But this dominant culture no longer understands what risk means and that suffering is inevitable in living alongside others ( as families well know), and so runs after a monstrous and naive dream of a world without vulnerability, an illusion which makes the individual truly vulnerable in the face  of monumental  suffering.
Only by welcoming and making space for the small vulnerabilities of life in common, will we be (as happens in homeopathic medicine) able to protect ourselves from the big vulnerabilities of our existence; if instead we refuse to welcome the small and ‘good’ vulnerabilities and wounds, we will be very defenceless in the face of the big vulnerabilities which devastate us once on the scene. The good insurance contracts are subsidiary to the pacts, the bad contracts substitute them, deteriorate them and in the long run destroy them. Today we will come out of this crisis with more pacts, with less bad contracts and more good ones, also in the insurance industry.
All of Luigino Bruni's comments on Avvenire can be found under Avvenire Editorial.
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Comments- The total refusal of vulnerability, the spread of contracts, the pacts crisis
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 24/06/2012

The biggest difficulty we face in order to come out of the crisis doesn’t lie in the choices made by the institutions, or in politics in Europe, but in our lifestyles which in these last few years have undergone a radical change.  This is the reason for the difficulty in finding a way, because while we complain with words, our behaviour increases day by day that very model of growth against which we raise our voices and which brings much suffering to many (although not to all).  This is perhaps the greatest paradox in this phase of Capitalism.
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