Austerity Italian Style - YouTube

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Austerity Italian Style - YouTube





BLACK: Well, I just got back from Reggio di Calabria in Italy, which is that toe part

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that looks like it's kicking Sicily, and a conference on modern monetary theory. I have

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a prop on all of this. And we were talking about austerity, Italian style, and some remarkable

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things.

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The first, while we concentrated on Spain and Greece and their Great Depression levels

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of unemployment, unemployment is very high and rising in Italy. But the real story is

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among young adults. And the unemployment rate among young adults is surging, and it's already

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in the--closely approaching 40 percent, which is to say, it's nearly at the levels of young

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adult unemployment in Spain, and in Greece as well.


When an economy is iv-B it is like a weed, it can grow quickly with resources even if a stimulus. It can also collapse even more quickly with austerity. A V-Bi economy can handle austerity better because it averages out good times and bad with savings and insurance. Iv-B is highly innovative and can mutate to new conditions, it can grow to an economic stimulus but then just collapse. It is like a weed that only grows with a particular fertilizer but had adapted to only that. Germs as R might adapt to a particular host and die out without being able to jump to another species.

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And so you have this paradox of Italy, where, you know, in the variant of the old joke that

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there are three things that are important in terms of real estate, location, location,

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location, there are three things important to Italians, it's always said: family, family,

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family. But Italians are--first, they don't have a lot of kids. Their fertility rate is

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1.3, so way below replacement rate. And second, they are increasingly causing their kids to

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emigrate, because there is absolutely no prospect of a good job in Italy for younger people.

Younger people are often at the base of the plant, they can have support from Bi families but need to find their own resources to grow like a plant does. For example they might need to find a job to get a car, a house, furniture, spouse, etc. In Roy they still need to do this but they are more often the focus of Oy conmen and crooks on G public land. 

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And, you know, in the old days, this was typically peasants who were leaving, but nowadays it's

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their most educated folks. You get your university degree--which you're going to essentially

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do for free, still, in Italy, minus some fees--and then you have to emigrate because there are

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no positions.

When an economy turns Roy people can become nomadic on this G public or abandoned land or opportunities looking for GB greener pastures to settle on as private property. 

And those problems that I talked about are vastly worse in the south of Italy.

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These are where the really poor places were.

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So we were talking about that and the insanity of an austerity principle that is tearing

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Italy apart and destroying family, left right and center.

Stronger austerity drains the V-Bi savings so people end up fighting for survival on their own, they need to maintain insurance to quench the chaos or the system can go into free fall to a floor in areas.

I mean, nowadays the only good

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news is with modern technology you might be able to talk to your kids more cheaply when

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they're 5,000 miles away.

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JAY: How much of this is recent, in the sense these new austerity measures that have kicked

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in over the last couple of years?

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BLACK: Well, it's not entirely recent. In other words, it's a trend that's gotten much

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worse. But that trend had existed for much of this century, because Italy was simply

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not producing new high-tech jobs very well.

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But for us the craziness was that we were talking with Italian professors of economics,

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you know, perfectly intelligent people, but often big believers in austerity, even though

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they said, yes, austerity is causing greater unemployment, yes, it's causing the kids to

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emigrate, yes, we have no answer other than austerity, right, there is no alternative,

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which is precisely what we then went down to say--well, in fact, there are excellent

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alternatives; you shouldn't be doing this.

 Austerity can be bad but just adding resource can cause Iv-B like weeds to just mutate and waste them, the need is to build stable and strong Biv businesses that last not zombie color disconnects.