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    [title] => The Virtues of the Market: Civil Competition
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The entrepreneur is not he who cuts his piece of the market. It’s he who takes care of “producing pies”. He takes advantage of opportunity, without being afraid of benefitting others. It’s the challenge of “civil competition”: a winning idea for getting out of this crisis.
Civil Competition. I win and you win. Enough with killer economy
By Luigino Bruni
Published in the weekly Vita, January 28, 2011 
Competition, if well understood, is one of the main virtues of the market. But, even in this case, we have to clear the field of mistaken or partial understandings of competition. Competition is a virtue when it works as that social mechanism which civil economists of the 18th century, like the Romagnosi from Milan or Cattaneo, called civil competition. What does it deal with?
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The dominate vision today tends to consider competition among businesses as a race between Business A and Business B, in which each one wants to win by battling the other. Sometimes, this vision is even nourished by an incorrect and misleading use of a sporting metaphor (or even by Darwinist caricatures) that shows the market as a place where we all run, and in the end we have winners and losers. Such a vision views competition as a business matter between A and B, which can can have the unintentional effect of producing market price reductions to the advantage of Clients C.
If we look at the market in this way, different from the idea I proposed in the first installment of this series, it would be obvious that competition has nothing to do with cooperation. Rather, it would be the exact opposite, because cooperation between “competing” businesses comes from the cartel or trust perspective, which are established at the expense of citizens and market efficiency.
Instead, what is market competition as seen from the perspective of civil economy? The market game appears much different from this perspective, and it’s not focused on the race between Business A and B, as market competition becomes a process centered on the axes A-C and B-C. That is, every business tries to satisfy clients (in a wide sense) better than the others, and the business that is the worst at doing so has to leave the market. But this is only an effect, and in a certain way it is unintentional. From our perspective, the goal of Business A becomes cooperating with citizens, clients and suppliers C, within a relationship of reciprocal assistance, of a team, and not one of “battling” with Competitor B, and vice versa. 
But up to what point can we push ourselves along this road of civil competition? Many questions arise, and some are very relevant. Perhaps we’ll answer a few of them below. 
To give an example that is not irrelevant to social economics, let’s imagine that the market of social economics is still dominated by public “race” and contract – therefore, by a vision of competition as a zero-sum game, made of winners and losers. This vision, which I have called “upside down subsidiarity” in other writings, has its hub in a public that defines projects and calls cooperatives to “vie” in a race that often has a very dangerous fall. This perspective would be radically changed within a vision of civil competition. In civil competition, social enterprises are the ones that are touch with the needs of the people and that “see” opportunities for mutual advantage with citizens. Then, these social enterprises turn to the public (perhaps not always) in order to transparently and efficiently bring about that project, which is no longer “guided by supply” but by the “demand” of the people. There is still much to do to get to that point.
Then, there are other difficult questions. What role does the division of “exchange earnings” play in such a vision of the market? How can we define the “pie pieces” of the earnings that each of the participants will have once added-value has been generated? To those who would ask these legitimate and due questions to someone who wants to start a business or cooperative, I would answer – along with Genovesi, Mill and Sen – “when you see an opportunity to create value, don’t spend too much energy in defining how to divide future profits. Seek the most obvious and normal division,  establish it as a norm, and concentrate your commitment to creating common benefit”. A piece of advice that ought to be given to the group of participants in such an exchange, as reciprocity is implicit in this vision of the market, is this: “only behave like this with people who share your same market culture”.
But, let’s ask ourselves this question: is it good advice to recommend such a culture or philosophy to individual entrepreneurs or workers when there is no guarantee that others with whom they interact share the same culture of reciprocity and fraternity? I believe so. Someone who follows such a norm will, sometimes, end up with a lower quota of earnings compared to one who obtained his earnings with a stricter and more attentive attitude towards the division of earnings. But, to compensate, he will spend less time and energy, and will be less likely to open contentions and conflicts with others, which often block contracts, business deals and affairs. Over a long period of time, this person will live his life more calmly and will probably not be too poorly off economically either. Finally, institutions have a role in this: their plans can incentivate either the search for mutual advantage or individual opportunism. 
We can then summarize this civil market culture with the following norm: “when you do business together (especially during difficult times), don’t worry too much about establishing the ‘piece of the pie’ that you will create. Instead, worry about the pie and about creating many pies so that over time, if you weren’t opportunist and unfaithful, you’ll converge towards an equitable norm of redistribution. First one will earn more, then the other will earn more, but the important thing is to grow together”. Such council is very efficient especially when dealing with youth, because it greatly reduces costs of transactions, reinforces feelings of mutual trust, and creates a positive and optimistic understanding of commons. Also, insisting on guarantees or relatives ties to (possible) future earnings is never a good way to start a relationship with an associate, supplier or client. It is actually the best way to block business before it begins. Generosity and an open mind are some of more important virtues in an entrepreneur’s success (actually, of anyone’s success). And as I wrote a few installments ago, this is also true because the entrepreneur, thanks to his capacity to innovate, is a “creator of pies” and not a “cutter of pies”.
Today, we know that one of the first factors in cultural and economic backwardness is made of a mental scheme with which we read market competition and civil life. Communities, peoples and persons grow when they see economic and civil relationships as mutually advantageous, and they remain blocked in traps of poverty when each one sees the other as someone to take advantage of or from which to defend oneself.
A civil economy sees the market as a great and dense network of mutually advantageous relationships, on many levels. Civil competition is the energy that flows in this network of relationships in which the market is established, and whoever is part of it gives advantages to himself and others. Creating an always denser network of exchange opportunities means linking people in joint actions, where each one grows with and thanks to the others, and weaves threads of the network that keeps cities and societies together. This is civil economy, this is civil competition.
See article 
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The entrepreneur is not he who cuts his piece of the market. It’s he who takes care of “producing pies”. He takes advantage of opportunity, without being afraid of benefitting others. It’s the challenge of “civil competition”: a winning idea for getting out of this crisis.
Civil Competition. I win and you win. Enough with killer economy
By Luigino Bruni
Published in the weekly Vita, January 28, 2011 
Competition, if well understood, is one of the main virtues of the market. But, even in this case, we have to clear the field of mistaken or partial understandings of competition. Competition is a virtue when it works as that social mechanism which civil economists of the 18th century, like the Romagnosi from Milan or Cattaneo, called civil competition. What does it deal with?
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    [title] => The Virtues of the Market: Hope
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Today, economy and market are dominated by the idea of fortune. One is successful because of personal charisma and favorable coincidences. Instead, the entrepreneur knows that hope is the motor of enterprise, because it creates relationships and determines certainty in the return on one’s talents.
Hope. The virtue that moves business in a season of crisis
By Luigino Bruni
Published in the weekly Vita on January 7, 2011
Even if it may seem strange, hope is – or at least should be – a market virtue. As is well-known, hope is a virtue, and a particularly a theological virtue alongside faith and charity, as in Western and Christian tradition these virtues are the foundation for the others (courage, temperance, strength, prudence, etc.).
For example, hope is one of the main virtues that an entrepreneur should have. The entrepreneur begins a business or a new economic activity if he hopes that tomorrow’s world will be altogether better than it is today, that the 100 invested today can become 101 or 105 tomorrow. 
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Whoever gives life to a business, not being just a short-term speculator, is like an old man who plants an oak tree. He knows that he is beginning something on the hope that its fruits will go beyond his own person or lifetime. Instead, without hope, it would be better to enjoy his resources or be a spectator. That is why hope is linked to trust (faith, fides), as without faith in life and in the future, one does not begin a business. And it’s understandable why entrepreneurs are optimistic, positive-thinkers, have a generous outlook on the world – all expressions of the virtue of hope.
Who makes me do it 
The virtue of hope also shows its true colors in moments of crisis, of long stalemates, difficulties, slander, suspensions and betrayal. One who has given life to a business knows that the most important moments in its history are those in which he has been able to hope against all that is happening, against all his friends’ advice (“but who makes you do it?”, “you’re too naïve”, “don’t exaggerate”…), against the experts’ forecasts – when he has had the strength to hope, to insist on his project, to persevere in believing (faith) in his idea and in his Socratic “daemon”, walking for years on the crest of precipice.
Hope is therefore a virtue, and like every true virtue is always an alternative to fortune. The great Western culture arose in Greece (especially with Socrates) when it was discovered and affirmed that there existed a struggle between happiness and fortune. In the ancient world, happiness was linked to fortune. The Greek philosophers, in one of human history’s epochal moments, would understand that a new age was beginning for man. Man could be freed from the goddess of fortune, from fate, and begin to truly be responsible for his own destiny.  The instrument of this liberation was precisely that virtue (arête, which means excellence, is the same root that we find in other words, like artist or acrobat), as only the virtuous man can become happy, even against bad fate. 
Capable of excellence
The idea that arises in this extraordinary period of time in human history is that I am the main protagonist in my happiness (and unhappiness), and not events. Events are certainly important to my well-being, but they are never decisive in determining my quality of life, which instead depends on virtue, on my capacity to rise to excellence, which is in everyone in his or her own way.  Virtue defeats fortune. 
Market ethics, and especially entrepreneurial ethics, arise with the affirmation that innovation, responsibility and work – not fortune – are the protagonists of success in our work. That is why this culture of virtue must resist today in a world that underlines luck, lotteries, scratch and wins, games, the SuperEnalotta (its impressive to see the invasion of gambling games online, on TV, in soccer team sponsors, etc.).
Hope is a virtue because, with it, one doesn’t rely on fortune to bring returns on one’s investment and intelligence. Rather, one relies on his own virtues (excellence), on his collaborators, and on all the subjects of the market (we should never forget that the success of one entrepreneur also depends on the virtue of his suppliers, clients and even competitors – of the economic system as a whole). Hope is not fortune or luck then, but a virtue. 
A social virtue
Finally, hope is an eminently social virtue. One hopes in people: in colleague Mario, in supplier Giovanna, in competitor Andrew. In fact, hope is never generic, given to unknown people or unpredictable events. Hope is a relational good; it´s an investment in a relationship, in many relationships. That is why hope, like all social virtues (fraternity, trust, reciprocity, brotherly love…) is fragile and vulnerable, because you can never control the other’s response. You can only “hope” in his reciprocity, without the guarantee of a contract. But, thinking it over well, vulnerability is the deepest condition of the human person. If economics is part of life, it should also know how to co-exist with vulnerability, aware that a good kind of vulnerability towards others hides many of the most beautiful things in life, like forgiveness, reconciliation, gratuitousness, a free encounter with others and not a hierarchical one, true esteem and recognition, sincere gratitude – all goods that people’s well-being depend upon. This goes for entrepreneurs as well. They produce well-being (and not only wealth) when they’re capable of virtue, of relational excellence. They are cultivators of hope.
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Today, economy and market are dominated by the idea of fortune. One is successful because of personal charisma and favorable coincidences. Instead, the entrepreneur knows that hope is the motor of enterprise, because it creates relationships and determines certainty in the return on one’s talents.
Hope. The virtue that moves business in a season of crisis
By Luigino Bruni
Published in the weekly Vita on January 7, 2011
Even if it may seem strange, hope is – or at least should be – a market virtue. As is well-known, hope is a virtue, and a particularly a theological virtue alongside faith and charity, as in Western and Christian tradition these virtues are the foundation for the others (courage, temperance, strength, prudence, etc.).
For example, hope is one of the main virtues that an entrepreneur should have. The entrepreneur begins a business or a new economic activity if he hopes that tomorrow’s world will be altogether better than it is today, that the 100 invested today can become 101 or 105 tomorrow. 
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    [title] => The Virtues of the Market: Commons: The virtue to rediscover in order to save us from extinction
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It’s fraternity. Few associate it with economic talk. But without it, there’s no model that stands. As is happening today, the individual logic of maximizing one’s advantage at the cost of everyone’s interests is bringing us to a dead end.
Commons: The virtue to rediscover in order to save us from extinction
By Luigino Bruni
Published in the weekly Vita, November 19, 2010
Talk about the commons makes its way always more as one of the great topics of our times: if the most important goods become commons, we need to develop new virtues, as the market’s typical individual virtues are not sufficient to overcome new challenges.
But what is the Tragedy of the commons? First of all, it’s the title of the celebrated article published by biologist D. Hardin, in 1968, in the prestigious Science magazine. The thesis is strong and clear: when we deal with goods in common (commons), even if each person prudently follows his own interests, there is the risk that, without wanted it or realizing it, the branch we are all sitting on will be sawed a little each day. Why?
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There is a noteworthy example in Hardin’s article, by now in every microeconomics textbook, of the common and free pasture, where each farmer brings his cows to graze. The choice that maximizes freedom and individual interest is that of increasing the cattle brought to graze, as the individual advantage of bringing an extra cow to graze is + 1, while the reduction of grass is only a fraction of – 1 (as the damage is shared among all the other farmers who use the common pasture). Therefore, the individual benefit is greater than the individual cost, and this pushes each one to increase their use of the common, also pushing each one to increase their use of the good in common. It leads to the destruction of the pasture, if…something does not happen which limits individual freedom in some way.
The difficult relationship with limits
From the trees on Easter Island to the hole in the ozone, from the truffles of my region of Marche to the unstoppable lowering of the water table in India and in Lake Albano, the big daily story tells us about these tragedies. They happen in communities and civilizations, small or large, that have “collapsed” (as Diamond would say), as they were not capable of no going beyond the limit or the critical point of no return beyond which the process becomes irreversible. On Easter Island, the extinction of that population was not linked to cutting down the last tree, but to have had surpassed, at a certain point and without knowing it, a limit, a threshold, beyond which the extinction of that last tree was inevitable.
Human history, however, tells us of many other stories, where communities were instead capable of stopping themselves in time, of coordinating, of limiting individual freedom and did not tragically collapse. Social norms, laws, antique traditions, uses and customs could be understood as the instruments that civilization invented to avoid collapse. Today, when we think of water management, of cities, the environment, the tragic and always more urgent question is this: will we go beyond the limits and follow the path of the ancient inhabitants of Easter Island, or will we be capable of stopping ourselves in time, of coordinating? Will we, therefore, be capable of that individual and collective wisdom that allows communities – including the worldwide community of human beings and other species on this planet – to not collapse and implode, but live and grow in harmony?
To be able to hope that the second option will come true, we need new virtues today, as the typically individual virtues (like seeking self-interests) do not offer guarantees in knowing how to face the challenges of common goods, and therefore the challenges of the “Common Good” (there is no Common Good without the commons).
Need of fraternity
In order to have the commons, there is need for reciprocal virtues that immediately express a link among people. Which ones? The first virtue that should absolutely be raised as the founding principle of post-modernity, of the globalized society and of the economy of commons, is fraternity. Today there is an always more urgent need for a new, worldwide social pact among equal and free citizens who self-limit their use of shared goods (not only on the part of citizens represented in the G20, but potentially among everyone). 

The words freedom and equality say individual. Fraternity, instead, is a good that is a link among people, a link that expresses the same ambivalence that exists in the word “link”, if it’s true that a link is both a relationship and a bind. But without recognizing the links that unite us with one another, we cannot escape the tragedy of the commons, which is a tragedy because of the lack of awareness that common  living is a network of relationships between persons, communities and peoples, a network of relationships that globalization and technology are making always more thick and intricate.

The epochal change which our post-modern society is experiencing deals with the centrality of shared goods, which are becoming the rule rather than the exception in economic and civil life. Today, the quality of development of peoples and of lands certainly depends on shoes, refrigerators and washing-machines (classic private goods), but much more so on the goods (or evils) in common, like greenhouse gases, water, or the trust stocks of financial markets (the financial crisis can also be seen as a tragedy of the common good of trust), on which food, shoes and refrigerators depend.

The history of peoples has seen many moments where we have found ourselves at a crossroads between fraternity and fratricide, two roads that have bordered one another since the times of Cain. Sometimes we have chosen the direction of fraternity, and other more numerous times we’ve followed that of fratricide. Today, the crossroads is still in front of us.
See article
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    [text] => 
It’s fraternity. Few associate it with economic talk. But without it, there’s no model that stands. As is happening today, the individual logic of maximizing one’s advantage at the cost of everyone’s interests is bringing us to a dead end.
Commons: The virtue to rediscover in order to save us from extinction
By Luigino Bruni
Published in the weekly Vita, November 19, 2010
Talk about the commons makes its way always more as one of the great topics of our times: if the most important goods become commons, we need to develop new virtues, as the market’s typical individual virtues are not sufficient to overcome new challenges.
But what is the Tragedy of the commons? First of all, it’s the title of the celebrated article published by biologist D. Hardin, in 1968, in the prestigious Science magazine. The thesis is strong and clear: when we deal with goods in common (commons), even if each person prudently follows his own interests, there is the risk that, without wanted it or realizing it, the branch we are all sitting on will be sawed a little each day. Why?
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    [title] => The Virtues of the Market: Come on entrepreneur, you keep the world running
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    [introtext] => 
ECONOMICS LESSONS. Luigino Bruni: apology for the true motors of development
Come on entrepreneur, you keep the world running
He is the protagonist of economic development. With his ideas and courage, he breaks through stagnant situations and makes the system dynamic. We will never be grateful enough…
By Luigino Bruni
Published in the weekly Vita, October 29, 2010 
When the market functions correctly, it is a place in which innovation and human creativity are favored and awarded. Market competition (which we already spoke about in the previous installments of this series) can be, and if we want to understand it in its truest nature, should be seen as a race to innovate. Those who innovate grow and live, while those who do not innovate remain behind and leave the economic and civil game. 
The author who has most caught this virtuous dynamic of the market (the capacity to innovate is undoubtedly a virtue, because it is an expression of arête, of excellence) is the Austrian economist J.A. Schumpeter. In 1911, he published a book called Theory of Economic Development, a classic economic theory text of the 20th century, which I still recommend today to anyone interested in good reading on economic and social theory. In that book, Schumpeter masterfully describes the dynamic of the market as a “run” between innovators and imitators.
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To explain the nature and role of innovation, Schumpeter draws upon a model where the starting point is the “stationary state”, the situation in which businesses only carry out routine activities and the economic system perfectly replicates itself over time, without there being creation of true wealth.
Economic development then beings when an entrepreneur breaks from the stationary state by introducing innovation, which can be a technical invention, a new organizational formula, the creation of new products or new markets, which on average reduce costs and makes it possible for the business to create new wealth. 
The entrepreneur-innovator is the protagonist of economic development, as he creates real added value and makes the social system dynamic. The innovator is then followed by a “swarm” of imitators attracted by that created added value, just as bees are attracted by nectar.  When they enter into those sectors that verify the innovation, they cause the market price of that given product to decrease, to the point that all the profit generated by the innovation is entirely absorbed. The economy and society return to the stationary state until a new innovation restarts the cycle of economic development. Therefore, for Schumpeter, profit has a transitory nature, as it subsists as long as there is innovation, in that time lapse between the initial innovation and the imitation.
What does this century-old theory still have to tell us today? Above all, it reminds us that the truest nature of the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial function is the capacity to innovate.
The entrepreneur is not a profit-seeker: profit is only a signal that innovation is present. When the entrepreneur (including the social entrepreneur) complains because he is imitated, his vocation is already in crisis. He must be reminded that imitation also plays an important role, as it makes sure that derivative advantages that come from an innovation do not remain in the innovating business alone but are spread to the entire society (for example, through the reduction of market prices, which increases collective well-being).
Imitation is important and plays a role in the common good: the positive way to respond to imitation is to start the race again, continuing to innovate. This is particularly important in this era of globalization, where the innovation-imitation dynamic is very fast and global. Even today, as one-hundred years ago, the answer to living and growing is not complaining or turning to protectionist measures. Rather, it lies in a new start and new investment in the art of innovation. 
Besides, this theory of innovation tells us that when an entrepreneur stops innovating, he dies as an entrepreneur (perhaps transforming himself into a spectator), and so blocks the run or the innovation-imitation relay race, which is the true virtuous dynamic that pushes society ahead, not only the economy.
One of the profound reasons for the current crisis was the progressive transformation of many entrepreneurs and speculators, which took place in the past decades following the financial boom.
The entrepreneur-innovator, compared to the speculator, thanks to his vocation, sees the world as a dynamic place that can be changed. He doesn’t simply think of increasing his own piece of a given “pie”. He creates new “pies”, welcomes new opportunities, looks ahead and not beside him in search of rivals to battle so that he can hoard the pie.
From 4th century civil humanism to the industrial districts of Made in Italy, from artisan-artists to social cooperatives, Italy has been capable of economic and civil development when cultural and institutional conditions have allowed people to cultivate the virtue of creativity and innovation. Instead, we have stopped growing as a country when what prevails is the logic of whimpering, of seeking and maintaining substantial incomes, when we’ve looked at the other as a rival to fight against and not as a partner to grow with. 
Thirdly, the law of the market as a mechanism that awards innovation places the accent on people and not so much on capital, finance or technology. Innovation is first of all a matter of vision, of a different outlook on things and on the world, and therefore a matter of people that see reality differently.
And, in fact, in the 1940s, Schumpeter himself foresaw that the passage of innovation from persons to research offices and development of large businesses would have changed the nature of capitalism. It would cause capitalism to lose contact with the personal dimension – the only one that can really innovate.
And still today, after decades of getting drunk over what’s “big” and anonymous, we’re realizing that the businesses that are able to grow and be leaders in the globalized economy are, more and more, those where there is one or more persons capable of seeing reality differently, capable of innovation. The only true key to innovation and every economic value is people’s intelligence (that is, knowing how to “read and see within” things), as an Italian economist even older than Schumpeter said. I’m referring to Carlo Cattaneo from Milan, who, in the mid 19th century, wrote one of the most beautiful and humanistic theses on economic action, in which he reminds us that the virtue of innovation is founded on an even more radical virtue (because more universal): creativity. “There is not job or capital that does not begin with an act of intelligence,” he said, “Before every job, before all capital…it’s the intelligence that begins the work and stamps the character of wealth into it for the first time.”
Finally, the dynamic, the run, the virtuous relay race of innovation-imitation is greater than just the economic environment. This gives us a beautiful and original key to understanding not only the market but also the civil history of peoples. When societies and markets favor people who innovate, when these people do not lament but delight in being imitated, when even institutions universalize these innovations, then common living and the market work, and they are beautiful places in which to live.  
See article
 
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    [text] => 
ECONOMICS LESSONS. Luigino Bruni: apology for the true motors of development
Come on entrepreneur, you keep the world running
He is the protagonist of economic development. With his ideas and courage, he breaks through stagnant situations and makes the system dynamic. We will never be grateful enough…
By Luigino Bruni
Published in the weekly Vita, October 29, 2010 
When the market functions correctly, it is a place in which innovation and human creativity are favored and awarded. Market competition (which we already spoke about in the previous installments of this series) can be, and if we want to understand it in its truest nature, should be seen as a race to innovate. Those who innovate grow and live, while those who do not innovate remain behind and leave the economic and civil game. 
The author who has most caught this virtuous dynamic of the market (the capacity to innovate is undoubtedly a virtue, because it is an expression of arête, of excellence) is the Austrian economist J.A. Schumpeter. In 1911, he published a book called Theory of Economic Development, a classic economic theory text of the 20th century, which I still recommend today to anyone interested in good reading on economic and social theory. In that book, Schumpeter masterfully describes the dynamic of the market as a “run” between innovators and imitators.
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    [title] => The Virtues of the Market: cooperating and competing
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ECONOMY LESSONS. Luigino Bruni: a false opposition to demystify
Cooperating and competing 
The market cannot be seen only as a matter of competition. Instead, it is an action that joins cooperation and competition. Experience shows this
By Luigino Bruni

Published in the weekly Vita, October 15, 2010
Western thought and culture bring with them millennium worth of dichotomies that have marked their entire development, perhaps producing many fruits, but also creating many problems in people’s lives. The more notable dichotomies are soul-body, spiritual-material, eros-agape, and gift-market. In the last few centuries, some of these contrasts are being overcome (for example, soul-body), but others remain well rooted in our culture, like that which places gift against contract and gratuitousness against responsibility. There are serious consequences that result from considering gratuitousness as something strange to normal economic life, so much so to invent a “non-profit” or philanthropic sector to which all the gratuitousness in economic and civil life is entrusted. In reality, cooperation and competition are often two sides of the same life in common.
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In fact, even within organizations, competition plays a co-essential role. Organizations sometimes get sick from too much competition. Other times they get sick from the absence of competition between their members, which leads to leveling dynamics and to mediocrity and inefficiency. If competition is correctly understood as cum-petere, as “searching together” in a different way than the searching together in cooperation, the comparison and the emulation with others plays an important role in knowing my limits and my potential. This is similar to what happens in sports, where my competitor is also a help to my knowing and overcoming my limits, and therefore a help to reach excellence (mine and that of the discipline). Competition with others points out my limits and reveals my hidden potential, which might be dormant in a context without competition (especially when we are young).
Whoever lives within a company, school, university, and generally within institutions, knows that when these organizations or institutions work, good competition coexists with good cooperation. In certain phases and in certain moments, one cooperates for a common goal, and in others (for example, to win a prize or job promotion), one competes with the same people he is cooperating with on many fronts. When one is no longer able to move himself contemporaneously on these two levels, to see his colleague as a competitor and an ally, life in common is reduced only to one dimension and goes into crisis. The human quality of relationships is impoverished and deteriorates.
At the same time, the market cannot be read only as a matter of competition. The dynamic of the market - as classic authors like Mill or Einaudi teach us, or Sen and Becattini today – is mostly cooperative and competitive action combined, aiming at creating mutual advantages for the subjects involved. When this works well, it even does so for the society. In other words, if we want to understand common living, organizations and the market, we have to overcome the opposition between cooperation and competition, one of the last dichotomies that we have yet to free ourselves. Of course, as eros is not agape, competition is not cooperation, but both are co-essential for the flowering of persons and communities. And if, perhaps, we look at them up close and observe them in historical dynamics, we will realize maybe between eros and gift, competition and cooperation, there prevail many analogies about the differences. 
If the market, as understood in light of this dualistic thought, was and is considered as the kingdom of competition and competitors, why, then, is cooperation among its virtues? The first economist who understood the profoundly cooperative nature of the market was the Englishman David Ricardo, who formulated one of the first true economic theories (as it was counter-intuitive), around 1815. In the theory that preceded his, commerce and exchange took place when “absolute” advantages existed. But Ricardo intuits and shows something more: that these happen even in the case of “relative” advantages. Even in a world where English is more efficient than Portugal in both sectors, it is worthwhile for England to specialize in the sector in which it is relatively stronger and – and here is the point – even in this case, an exchange with the “weaker” is also to the advantage of the “stronger”. The classic example is that of the lawyer who, even if he types faster than a secretary would type, it is equally opportune for him to hire a secretary and concentrate on his more gainful legal practices (today it is known as the “cost opportunity” concept). But like England, this lawyer, in hiring a secretary who is less efficient than himself is not passing out “assistance” or benefits, but is also bringing himself advantage from the exchange (not only to the secretary). When the market does this, including who is weaker and making him become an advantage for everyone, then it fulfills its task of civilizing, and is therefore virtuous.
Think of the great innovations that represented the birth of social cooperation in Italy. The disadvantaged subjects included in the business have often become chances for mutual exchange, even for the business that hires them, and not a “cost” or an act of charity. Law 482/1968, on the insertion of disabled persons in businesses, probably failed due to peoples’ perception of the absence of mutual advantage. From those businesses and unions, the disabled worker was (and is) seen essentially as a cost or a weight. Social cooperation really innovated and continues to innovate, when it said that those disadvantaged workers would become a resource even for the business. And when it does not do so, we are still in the routine of assistance, and we don’t value the markets virtues.
But if we are able to activate this cooperation of the market, those who are “helped” feel inside a relationships of reciprocity among equals, which expresses more dignity. They do not feel assisted but as subjects within a mutually advantageous contract, and therefore they experience more freedom and equality. Even a person with down-syndrome can fulfill a mutually advantageous contract with a business. What is needed is that the entrepreneur is truly innovative and generative so that the mutual advantage is always a possibility (it does not happen automatically and always), which requires much work and creativity. But when this happens, the market is transformed into a true instrument of inclusion and authentic human and civil growth. In fact, the sacrifice of the benefactor is not always a good sign for those who are receiving help, because it can express a relationship of power that is, perhaps, hidden by good faith. 
A civil entrepreneur should not be in peace until the people included in his business feel useful to the business and to society, and not assisted by a philanthropist or an institution. Think of Microcredit: giving the excluded a chance to bank was one of the innovative economic principles of our time which has freed people (women in particular) from misery and exclusion in a way that is more efficient than many international aid interventions. Let’s make a sort of rule: if an intervention does not help all parties involved, it can rarely be help for any one of them. If I don’t feel benefitted by another, rarely will the other feel truly benefitted by me, especially when it is a long-term relationship. The law of life is reciprocity, which keeps relationships from getting sick and helps them grow in mutual dignity. The reciprocity of the market, then, can also be genuinely understood as a form of cooperation.
see article
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    [text] => 
ECONOMY LESSONS. Luigino Bruni: a false opposition to demystify
Cooperating and competing 
The market cannot be seen only as a matter of competition. Instead, it is an action that joins cooperation and competition. Experience shows this
By Luigino Bruni

Published in the weekly Vita, October 15, 2010
Western thought and culture bring with them millennium worth of dichotomies that have marked their entire development, perhaps producing many fruits, but also creating many problems in people’s lives. The more notable dichotomies are soul-body, spiritual-material, eros-agape, and gift-market. In the last few centuries, some of these contrasts are being overcome (for example, soul-body), but others remain well rooted in our culture, like that which places gift against contract and gratuitousness against responsibility. There are serious consequences that result from considering gratuitousness as something strange to normal economic life, so much so to invent a “non-profit” or philanthropic sector to which all the gratuitousness in economic and civil life is entrusted. In reality, cooperation and competition are often two sides of the same life in common.
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    [title] => ABCDEconomy "S" as in "Subsidiarity"
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    [introtext] => 
ABCDEconomy by Luigino Bruni
Subsidiarity. New inflections of an ancient principle
Published in the monthly Communitas n.33  within the special issue titled L'abbecedario dell'economia civile (The ABCs of Civil Economy)
There is not good civil and political life without subsidiarity. This is one of the big lessons of the 1900s, of its totalitarianisms and ideologies, among which the most recent is perhaps the most dangerous (because it does not appear so): the market understood as the only regulatory principle of society. Subsidiarity is an expression that comes from subsidy, help. This principle was explicitly pronounced for the first time by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, during an historical period that had killed freedom and democracy also because it had first killed that principle. Implicitly, however, the principle of subsidiarity is ancient and dates back at least to the first ecumenical Councils, to the Fathers of the Church, to Scholastica, when it becomes an elaborated category of person. A very close relationship exists, in fact, between the principle of subsidiarity and the personalistic principle. Let´s see why. 
 ABCDEconomy - S as in Subsidiarity
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The first definition of subsidiarity could be the following: the choices that regard a person or community should be taken at the closest level to the people involved. Every other intervention more distant is "good" if it is of help (that is what a subsidy does) to the lives of those people. It is, instead, "bad" if the more distant action substitutes that which is closer to the people. In other words, a public intervention or a collective action should be preferable the more it involves the subjects interested by that intervention or action. Participation, the process, is not less important than the objective to be reached, as the “how” often does not count any less than the “what”.
The principle of subsidiarity is also one of the principles of the European Union (which however, only partially understood it, because it unhooked it from the personalistic principle), and which is always more invoked by who searches for an institutional architecture which respects “proximity” and deliberative democracy. Until today, such principle was mostly applied in its “vertical” version (as regulatory criteria of the relationship between the various levels of public administration: state, region, municipality…). Recently, the “horizontal” aspect has also been emphasized (regarding the relationship between civil society, market and public administration).
I am convinced that a new declension of this fundamental principle of civil life is necessary. It could be formulated like so: do not make a contract out of what could be done with reciprocity (gratuitousness). Or, in a more positive version: the market contract is the form of a fully human and civilizing relationship when it is subsidiary to reciprocity. The market contract becomes, instead, an enemy to the common good when it becomes a substitute for gratuitousness, as, unfortunately, is happening in our market societies, even when they abstractly invoke the principle of subsidiarity. In certain contexts, above all those in which the protection of disadvantaged subjects is at risk, and where there is structural asymmetry between the parties in question, the contract can reveal itself a valid instrument that serves, helps (subsidizes) gift and gratuitousness (many micro credit experiences are positive examples of this version of subsidiarity). May contracts and the market be welcomed, but if they help to increase universal fraternity.
At this point, the nexus with the personalistic principle should be clearer. Why, in fact, should we prefer the intervention of the municipality to that of the state (in the “vertical” version of subsidiarity) or the nursery school managed by a cooperative of parents rather than a public nursery school (in the “horizontal” version)? Because at the basis of the principle of subsidiarity, one finds the implicit hypothesis that people are truly people when they meet and when they live relationships of reciprocity, and precisely because the human being is not individual but person, that is to say, he is himself only in relationship with others. It is in the personalistic principle that we should trace the presence of the principle of subsidiarity in the original design of the Republican Constitution, in all of the tradition of civil, social, cooperative economy, which has always existed even without being called by that name (it´s a difficult name, also because it is often poorly explained and in an abstract way).
Always on the same personalistic basis, subsidiarity can be explained in the relationship with the new media: a media (e-mail, Skype, Facebook…) is good if it favors personal meetings. Instead, it´s bad with it becomes a substitute for real human relationships – the border between the good and the bad is often subject to a critical threshold.
In conclusion, I want to cite a phrase that I heard from Mons. Bregantini, and which I personally consider the best declension of the principle of subsidiarity: “Only you can do it, but you can´t do it alone”. Subsidiarity is, in fact, an extraordinary principle also in every authentic educative relationship: if the parent, or the teacher, or the adult, is not subsidiary but substitutes the other, the educative process doesn´t work and only produces pathologies and narcissism (not by chance the big illness of post-modernity). Analogous discourse on the theme of development: every type of help that arrives to people from the outside is efficient only if it supports and empowers the first fundamental movement that happens entirely within a person: his desire to live!
Subsidiarity is, therefore, a big civil word because it offers the criteria for organizing diversity, for articulating the multiform colors and facets of the communitas, for creating the cohabitation of differences. That is why it´s a word charged with future, in a world that will become always more multiform and rich with diversity.
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ABCDEconomy by Luigino Bruni
Subsidiarity. New inflections of an ancient principle
Published in the monthly Communitas n.33  within the special issue titled L'abbecedario dell'economia civile (The ABCs of Civil Economy)
There is not good civil and political life without subsidiarity. This is one of the big lessons of the 1900s, of its totalitarianisms and ideologies, among which the most recent is perhaps the most dangerous (because it does not appear so): the market understood as the only regulatory principle of society. Subsidiarity is an expression that comes from subsidy, help. This principle was explicitly pronounced for the first time by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, during an historical period that had killed freedom and democracy also because it had first killed that principle. Implicitly, however, the principle of subsidiarity is ancient and dates back at least to the first ecumenical Councils, to the Fathers of the Church, to Scholastica, when it becomes an elaborated category of person. A very close relationship exists, in fact, between the principle of subsidiarity and the personalistic principle. Let´s see why. 
 ABCDEconomy - S as in Subsidiarity
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ABCDEconomy by Luigino Bruni
Gift. It does not exist if there isn´t reciprocity 

published in the weekly Vita, May 22, 2009
With the word “Gift”, which our readers will find this week, we conclude the series ABCDEconomy by Luigino Bruni.  We proposed this series as a guide to the key words within economic behavior, after breaking down the myths and bursting a few bubbles.  Here´s an index of the analyzed words: Happiness, Profit, Market, Bank, Investment, Responsibility, Rules, Interests, Organization, Reciprocity, Capital.  This week, the second part regarding the concluding word, “Gift”.
The idea of a gift consists of a way of acting inspired by gratuitousness, and so moved by the search for the good of the other, of the common good.  A related experience: a few years ago in Montevideo, a few women made a living by begging outside of supermarkets. At a certain point, an NGO arrives that begins a development project with these women, giving birth to some cooperatives which produce artisan goods, embroidered handkerchiefs.
ABCDEconomy - G as in Gift - Part 2 

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The day arrived when these women returned, after years, to sell the handkerchiefs, fruit of their work, in front of the same supermarkets where they once begged people for alms and gifts.  During the first few days, people still handed them money, but they didn´t want the handkerchiefs, until one of those women said, “If you don´t want the handkerchief, we don´t want the money”.
This is also “gift”. It´s gratuitousness. It’s giving recognition to the other.  Its reciprocity.  Today, microcredit projects in the world are authentic experiences of gift and of gratuitousness, not through gift-giving but through contracts. We need to get used to seeing gifts in our complex society not as a “thing” but as a “means to”, not relationships limited to philanthropy or alms-giving but based on reciprocity and happiness.
This complex grammatical use of munus, of gift-that-obligates, of which important authors and philosophers like Derrida and Marion, sociologists like Caillé and Goodbout, have written, would even be at the base of the ambivalent “communitas”, as Roberto Esposito has shown.  The base category within the circuit of giving is not gratuitousness but reciprocity, as we´ve been shown especially by Karl Polanyi, a 19th century author who was a point of reference for the anthropology of giving.
The reciprocal aspect of giving is not, in its basic relational structure, substantially different from the phenomenon of economical exchange, appearing in cultures much later in respect to ritual giving. In the history of cultures, between giving and the market there was a difference of degrees (of measuring equivalents, of the timing of giving and receiving, of the allowed sanctions) and not of nature.  With giving, we close our ABCDEconomy series.  Thank you to all who have followed me through this small handbook of civil economy.
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ABCDEconomy by Luigino Bruni
Gift. It does not exist if there isn´t reciprocity 

published in the weekly Vita, May 22, 2009
With the word “Gift”, which our readers will find this week, we conclude the series ABCDEconomy by Luigino Bruni.  We proposed this series as a guide to the key words within economic behavior, after breaking down the myths and bursting a few bubbles.  Here´s an index of the analyzed words: Happiness, Profit, Market, Bank, Investment, Responsibility, Rules, Interests, Organization, Reciprocity, Capital.  This week, the second part regarding the concluding word, “Gift”.
The idea of a gift consists of a way of acting inspired by gratuitousness, and so moved by the search for the good of the other, of the common good.  A related experience: a few years ago in Montevideo, a few women made a living by begging outside of supermarkets. At a certain point, an NGO arrives that begins a development project with these women, giving birth to some cooperatives which produce artisan goods, embroidered handkerchiefs.
ABCDEconomy - G as in Gift - Part 2 

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