Demographic projections estimate that in the coming years, some countries, including Italy, will experience a reduction in the working-age population, which risks making labor-power a scarce commodity. The latest employment cycle has been positive, partly because it was driven by low wages and jobs in low-productivity sectors such as construction and tourism. The Italian labor market has achieved four negative records: the lowest employment rate among all EU countries, the largest gap between male and female employment rates, the highest level of regional inequality, and the lowest wages in Europe. The Italian labor market has characterized by low labor participation and an increase in job vacancies, but when an employer says, "I can't find the workers I need," they should be reminded to add the phrase "at the wage I want to pay." To respond to structural changes such as demographics, we cannot simply force people who are already working to work longer hours. We need to broaden the employment base and increase workforce participation, and the most effective incentive is strong wage increases.
a cura di Fabio Perocco – Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, e Giorgio Pirina – Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
Dai divari regionali alle zone di sacrificio, dalle aree interne alle crisi territoriali, sulla scorta di un ricca documentazione scientifica questo volume esamina in maniera sistematica e onnicomprensiva le cause, le forme, le dimensioni e gli intrecci delle disuguaglianze territoriali in Italia.
This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have slightly recovered. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries earlier identified as overstepped. As primary production drives Earth system biosphere functions, human appropriation of net primary production is proposed as a control variable for functional biosphere integrity. This boundary is also transgressed. Earth system modeling of different levels of the transgression of the climate and land system change boundaries illustrates that these anthropogenic impacts on Earth system must be considered in a systemic context. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
L’intelligenza artificiale è utile in molti settori e dannosa in altri. Tra questi ultimi c’è il fatto di addestrare le AI attraverso contenuti creati da persone che non hanno dato il loro consenso: è disonesto e la passano sempre liscia i più ricchi e potenti. Per fare un esempio concretissimo e attuale, c’è Meta – ma è una pratica che vale anche per le intelligenze artificiali sviluppate da OpenAI e da Google- che, per allenare i modelli linguistici di Meta AI, ha usato milioni di libri protetti dal diritto d’autore, senza chiedere il permesso a nessuno e in maniera totalmente gratuita. Lo ha fatto attingendo direttamente da LibGen, una delle biblioteche online che permettono di scaricare articoli e libri in modo non autorizzato. Solo che se a scaricare anche solo un libro sei tu, povero disgraziato che non hai i capitali per soddisfare tutte le tue voglie di lettura, rischi una multa salata, se lo fa una grande azienda va tutto bene e rientra nel fair use.
“Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king.” (“Ruba un pochino e ti ficcheranno in galera / Ruba tanto e ti faranno re”)
Poi c’è anche che ultimamente mi dà noia la moda di voler infilare l’intelligenza artificiale in tutte le occasioni possibili, di lavoro o meno, come se usarla fosse la cosa più ganza del mondo, a prescindere da tutto. Forse gli integrati, in questo caso, mi stanno sul culo più degli apocalittici perchè sono quelli che ne capiscono di più e, invece di spiegare pro e contro delle AI, spesso si arroccano su posizioni di bene assoluto – quasi apologetiche – difficili da sopportare. Quando succede mi verrebbe da reagire – e così sbaglio anch’io, lo so – con la stessa intransigenza. Per esempio, caricando immagini come quella in cima a questo post. E per concludere in stile rant: si può dire?
2 – US Commerce Secretary wants to remove government spending from GDP. WASHINGTON, March 2 (Reuters) –
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Sunday he would strip out government spending from the gross domestic product (GDP) report, but gave no indication how soon this change might happen, while dismissing fears of a possible recession.
“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said during an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” program. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”
“If the government buys a tank, that’s GDP, but paying 1,000 people to think about buying a tank is not GDP,” said Lutnick, calling that “wasted money” as he explained the rationale for removing government spending from GDP.
3 – Liberal economists
Figure 1: U.S. GDP Components: “Private” GDP and Government Spending, Quarterly
There is no shortage of strange economic proposals in our current political landscape from both the left and the right. You can add changing gross domestic product (GDP) calculations to exclude government spending to this long and befuddling list.
GDP is the measure of all final goods and services in the economy. It includes final goods and services acquired by the US government because those are no less real than final goods and services produced by private citizens.
Excluding public goods and services from this calculation is misleading and, if done for political reasons, could have serious economic consequences.
Besides, anyone can back out the government spending figure from GDP on their own—the government already publishes all the necessary information.
This saga started with an X post from Elon Musk, where he stated:
A more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending. Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better. For example, you could shift everyone who is building cars to working at the DMV. That would result in no cars and a much worse standard of living, but GDP would appear to be the same!
Mr. Musk might have a point about whether government spending at the DMV is as good for people as private production. But that’s a separate issue from whether spending at the DMV belongs in GDP.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick echoed these views in a recent interview on Fox News where he said:
Governments, historically, have messed with GDP. They count government spending as part of GDP. So, I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent … If the government buys a tank, that’s GDP. But paying 1,000 people to think about buying a tank is not GDP—that is wasted inefficiency, wasted money, and cutting that, while it shows in GDP, we’re going to get rid of that, we’re going to show you how that is.
These positions are incorrect in both their facts and economics. Let me be clear — eliminating wasteful or fraudulent government expenditure is good and a beneficial economic activity. Changing the way economists calculate GDP is not a way to accomplish that goal.
First, the basics: GDP (denoted by the letter Y) is computed using the national income accounting identity: Y = C + I + G + (X‑M). That is, the total value of all final goods and services produced in the US must include all personal consumption (C), all private investments (I), all public spending on consumption goods and investments (G), and net exports from the US calculated as total exports (X) minus total imports (M).
If the goal were simply to provide access to a metric of “private GDP” that does not include government expenditures, this is easily calculable by simply subtracting government spending from aggregate GDP (as shown in Figure 1). All relevant information for such calculations is already reported by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the agency responsible for compiling the national accounts.
However, Mr. Musk and Mr. Lutnick seem to wish that GDP was not only supplemented with this additional measure but supplanted by it.
Their statements seem to indicate an inherent error with GDP calculations and the only “correct” way of national accounting is by replacing aggregate GDP with private GDP.
This view is incorrect, and public spending should be included in national income accounting. Some goods such as roads and national defense are labeled “public goods”—and those goods are produced with a central authority raising taxes to fund them.
These goods certainly exist, and the taxes raised to pay for them are also included in the national accounts.
There is no doubt that governments have often abused this terminology to deem all kinds of things “public” goods. But, nevertheless, such goods should be included in national accounts.
Whether government spending is being used to pay for infrastructure construction or pay redundant consultants, if it results in goods or services produced, it creates economic value. This inclusion does not imply that this is the best use of those funds. Simply that those funds went towards some calculable production or income within the United States.
A deeper misunderstanding is that both Mr. Musk and Mr. Lutnick seem to view the components of Y (i.e., C, I, or G) as disparate entities. Their statements suggest that GDP, as constructed, obscures the government’s flaws because wasteful increases in G simply result in artificially increased Y (output) with no other effects. This is a mistaken view of macroeconomics.
Wasteful activity from the government can and does appear in the GDP as constructed. Economists have long documented the “crowding out” effect. That is, in response to misallocated government resources (such as Mr. Musk’s hypothetical cars versus DMV example), private consumption and investment can fall below their optimal values. As a result, an increase in G can be coupled with significant decreases in C or I, resulting in reduced overall GDP. And removing G from the reported national accounts will make it harder for people to account for the waste.
Figure 2: Government Spending Share of U.S. GDP, Quarterly
If it were possible to simply inflate GDP by consistently increasing government spending, governments in the past would have used it to inflate the size of their contribution to people’s welfare. Certainly, numerous other planned economies would exhibit higher GDP values than their free-market counterparts. Of course, neither of these has come to pass.
As Figure 1 shows, real government spending in the US has remained stable for over a decade. In fact, as Figure 2 shows, the share of GDP attributable to government expenditure has decreased over time and is currently at its lowest range in the postwar period.
Reducing the government’s footprint in the economy is a worthwhile goal, but national income accounting should remain methodologically sound and free from politics. There is plenty of real waste, fraud, and abuse of public funds. Government officials should continue to investigate and address those but leave GDP calculations alone.
“It would be more likely like a publicity stunt,” said Guido Lorenzoni, professor of economics at the University of Chicago.
“It’s completely goofy to take it out,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project. Government spending is a part of that because it is a substantial chunk of the U.S. economy. “So it’s everything from buying pencils to paying federal salaries to building tanks,” said Wendy Edelberg.
She said untangling those federal transactions from GDP doesn’t make sense because they are inherently tangled up with private businesses and consumers. And though measuring the dollar value of a product like a tank is easier than measuring the value of, say, a federal worker analyzing the need for a tank, those kinds of services are relevant. “For sure you want to think about what federal spending is doing to demand,” said Edelberg, along with whether the economy can meet that demand and how prices react.
“I laugh because it would be something insane to do,” said Gian Luca Clementi, professor of economics at New York University. Government spending is a key component of GDP for countries across the globe, said Lorenzoni. “These are, like, internationally agreed accounting standards” set by the International Monetary Fund, “something that, you know, goes back 80 years or more.” Eighty-plus years of standards that help us measure international economies against one another, and our economy against itself over time.
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Jai Kedia, Kristin Schwab, Wendy Edelberg, Gian Luca Clementi
Secondo Jacques Lacan il “doppio osceno” è il lato indicibile che la società produce, ma di cui non può accettare l’esistenza se non scaricandolo e addebitandolo in quanto nefasto e negativo alla figura del “grande altro”.
Per le esigenze del capitale esistono in Europa altrettanti paradisi fiscali che Stati. Ogni paese “civile” ha il suo doppio osceno da utilizzare per delocalizzare l’indicibile dell’economia che va dalle entrate dell’economia illegale a tutta la contabilità in nero. Imprese, grandi studi professionali e agenzie finanziarie, quando non evadono in senso stretto, le tasse spesso le eludono, approfittando di tutti i sotterfugi che una legislazione compiacente consente loro per trasferire fondi a entità fittizie che esistono solo per garantire al capitale che i profitti non servano a finanziare la fiscalità generale.
Lo stesso vale adesso per disciplinare il lavoro, per gli immigrati ribattezzati migranti. Rinchiusi in campi che non si possono mostrare perché osceni. Perché vederli potrebbe mettere a disagio qualcuno. Lavoratori, anche.
Il salario è sempre meno in grado di assicurare un livello di vita dignitosa alle persone che vivono di lavoro. Per la prima volta l’attuale generazione dei giovani sta peggio di quella dei propri genitori e le aspettative non tendono all’ottimismo. È questo l’elemento materiale alla base dei sentimenti xenofobi, ma se questo – i salari bassi – è vero in Italia, lo è ancor più nei paesi meno ricchi dell’Italia. E sono la maggioranza questi ultimi. Soprattutto, una quota via via maggiore di forza-lavoro è esuberante, inutilizzabile, in eccesso rispetto alle esigenze e alle possibilità di valorizzazione del capitale in circolazione. Ergo, questa forza-lavoro in eccesso deve essere disciplinata, e poi svalorizzata o distrutta. Questa la posta in gioco.
Se è vero che il rapporto di un soggetto con il suo Altro e il desiderio di quest’ultimo è determinante per l’identità del soggetto, si capisce l’insistenza e la pervasività della battaglia ideologica continua per scardinare la possibile identità di classe di chi vive del proprio lavoro e per dislocare altrove il senso di malessere dei soggetti delocalizzando gli immigrati, trasformati in capri espiatori.
René Girard[1] ha dedicato molti libri al tema del sacrificio e del capro espiatorio, fondando su questi elementi un’antropologia cristiana per cui il messaggio fondamentale trasmesso da Gesù nei Vangeli sarebbe la denuncia scandalosa del sacrificio come atto di violenza unanime di una folla in preda a una crisi mimetica.
Storicamente, la pratica dei sacrifici rituali è stata riconosciuta da molti antropologi come un tipico strumento adoperato per scaricare tensioni gravi nel tentativo di preservare l’unità e la forza di determinate comunità. Se la pioggia tardava a irrigare i campi, se i nemici premevano alle porte, se una crisi minacciava la coesione sociale, occorreva addossare le colpe dell’accaduto a qualcuno, sacrificare un soggetto – preferibilmente debole – in modo da placare l’ira della divinità di turno e riportare la pace. L’uccisione violenta di un soggetto, più tardi un animale, ha rappresentato una tappa non secondaria nell’evoluzione dell’umanità e Girard identifica nella condanna e nello smascheramento dell’omicidio rituale il vero elemento centrale della predicazione di Cristo. Mai più sacrifici significa così mai più violenza che si coalizza contro vittime innocenti per salvaguardare la coesione di un gruppo sociale in crisi.
In epoca moderna, uno stato d’emergenza permanente, con la democrazia ridotta al suo stato vegetativo, coincide con una dichiarazione implicita per cui siamo tutti homines sacri, tutti sacrificabili, a partire dai moderni reietti semi-espulsi dal ciclo produttivo e democratico ufficiale. Vite precarie, secondo Judith Butler[2], vite di scarto, per Zygmunt Bauman[3], vite senza valore, nell’accezione marxiana di capitale variabile da svalorizzare per rendere più competitive le economie capitalistiche in crisi.
Il campo – come ci ricorda Giorgio Agamben – riassume tragicamente la condizione prevista per chi non si lascia docilmente disciplinare in tempo di pace, e se la presenza di migranti rinchiusi è causa di proteste all’interno della fortezza Europa, ecco la proposta – tipica di società di guerra – di “contenere” i profughi in campi predisposti il più lontano possibile dai centri dell’Europa “comunitaria”.
Siccome l’economia ha bisogno della precarietà e della flessibilitàdi chi lavora, i suoi dirigenti sanno benissimo che questa condizione provoca insicurezza. La strategia narrativa consiste allora nel delocalizzare l’insicurezza, cercando poi di vendere le varie merci che compongono la “filiera” della rassicurazione.
L’Europa e l’Italia ci campano sugli immigrati. Gli industriali e i banchieri in primo luogo, come è ovvio, ma non solo loro. Sul loro lavoro, a partire dalle campagne ai cantieri edili fino ai lavori di cura, sul loro salario inferiore a quello già basso dei lavoratori italiani.
Non fanno paura gli immigrati quando lavorano a bassi salari, fanno comodo.
Se la vostra squadra del cuore, dopo essere stata per 30 anni costantemente ultima in classifica, agguantasse il penultimo posto, sareste soddisfatti/e? Davvero?
E se fosse sempre ultima, ma con un punto in più? Lo stesso? Beh, lasciatemelo dire, vi accontentate davvero di poco.
La pubblicazione degli ultimi risultati provvisori sul mercato del lavoro in Italia da parte dell’ISTAT[1] ha fatto registrare un coro pressoché unanime di commenti soddisfatti. 24 milioni di occupati e un tasso di occupazione pari al 62,3% del totale delle forze di lavoro. Un record.
Nell’Unione europea, nel primo semestre del 2024, il tasso di occupazione è al 75,7%[2]
Il tasso di occupazione in Italia, questo da record, è qualcosa come tredici punti percentuali più basso della media europea e il divario dell’occupazione femminile è pari a quasi venti punti, il doppio della media Ue.
Se lavora il 62% di chi potrebbe farlo, questo significa banalmente che il 38% delle persone in età da lavoro non è ufficialmente occupato/a, sia che cerchi attivamente lavoro (quel 6,5% del tasso di disoccupazione ufficiale), sia che non lo cerchi.
Chi non ha lavoro e non lo cerca, i cosiddetti inattivi, rappresenta il 33,3% del totale delle forze di lavoro, uno/a su tre.12 milioni di persone che né lavorano né cercano lavoro, e dovremmo essere soddisfatti?
How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age? by Nathan Heller
On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains. The stranger’s phone was bright, and as I looked on she scrolled through a waterfall of videos that other people had filmed in their homes. She watched one for four or five seconds, then dispatched it by twitching her thumb. She flicked to a text message, did nothing with it, and flipped back. The figures on her screen, dressed carefully and mugging at the camera like mimes, seemed desperate for something that she could not provide: her sustained attention. I felt mortified, not least because I saw on both sides of the screen symptoms I recognized too clearly in myself.
For years, we have heard a litany of reasons why our capacity to pay attention is disturbingly on the wane. Technology—the buzzing, blinking pageant on our screens and in our pockets—hounds us. Modern life, forever quicker and more scattered, drives concentration away. For just as long, concerns of this variety could be put aside. Television was described as a force against attention even in the nineteen-forties. A lot of focussed, worthwhile work has taken place since then.
But alarms of late have grown more urgent. Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a huge ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally, a third of whom cited digital distraction as an issue. Clinical presentations of attention problems have climbed (a recent study of data from the medical-software company Epic found an over-all tripling of A.D.H.D. diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, with the steepest uptick among elementary-school-age children), and college students increasingly struggle to get through books, according to their teachers, many of whom confess to feeling the same way. Film pacing has accelerated, with the average length of a shot decreasing; in music, the mean length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020. A study conducted in 2004 by the psychologist Gloria Mark found that participants kept their attention on a single screen for an average of two and a half minutes before turning it elsewhere. These days, she writes, people can pay attention to one screen for an average of only forty-seven seconds.
“Attention as a category isn’t that salient for younger folks,” Jac Mullen, a writer and a high-school teacher in New Haven, told me recently. “It takes a lot to show that how you pay attention affects the outcome—that if you focus your attention on one thing, rather than dispersing it across many things, the one thing you think is hard will become easier—but that’s a level of instruction I often find myself giving.” It’s not the students’ fault, he thinks; multitasking and its euphemism, “time management,” have become goals across the pedagogic field. The SAT was redesigned this spring to be forty-five minutes shorter, with many reading-comprehension passages trimmed to two or three sentences. Some Ivy League professors report being counselled to switch up what they’re doing every ten minutes or so to avoid falling behind their students’ churn. What appears at first to be a crisis of attention may be a narrowing of the way we interpret its value: an emergency about where—and with what goal—we look.
“In many ways, it’s the oldest question in advertising: how to get attention,” an executive named Joanne Leong told me one afternoon, in a conference room on the thirteenth floor of the midtown office of the Dentsu agency. We were speaking about a new attention market. Slides were projected on the wall, and bits of conversation rattled like half-melted ice cubes in the corridor outside. For decades, what was going on between an advertisement and its viewers was unclear: there was no consensus about what attention was or how to quantify it. “The difference now is that there’s better tech to measure it,” Leong said.
Dentsu is one of the world’s leading advertising agencies, running accounts for Heineken, Hilton, Kraft Heinz, Microsoft, Subway, and other global corporations. In 2019, the firm began using digital technology to gather data that showed not only how many people attended to its ads but in what ways they did—information that could be applied to derive a quantitative unit of attention value. In 1997, the technology pundit Michael Goldhaber had envisaged a world in which attention supplanted money as a dominant currency. (“If you have enough attention, you can get anything you want,” he lamented.) Since then, advertising has caught up with the trade.
“Six years ago, the question was around ‘Can this usefully be measured?’ ” Leong said. Now it’s a circus. “There are companies that use eye tracking. There are companies that do facial coding”—reading emotions through micro-expressions. “It’s no longer a matter of convincing clients that this is something they should lean into—it’s how.”
There is a long-standing, widespread belief that attention carries value. In English, attention is something that we “pay.” In Spanish, it is “lent.” The Swiss literary scholar Yves Citton, whose study of the digital age, “The Ecology of Attention,” argues against reducing attention to economic terms, suggested to me that it was traditionally considered valuable because it was capable of bestowing value. “By paying attention to something as if it’s interesting, you make it interesting. By evaluating it, you valorize it,” he said. To treat it as a mere market currency, he thought, was to undersell what it could do.
Advertisers’ interest in attention as a measure was sharpened with the publication of “The Attention Economy” (2001), by Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, which offered a theory of attention as a prelude to action: we pay attention in order to do (or buy). But there have long been varied views. The neuroscientist Karl Friston has suggested that attention is a way of prioritizing and tuning sensory data. Simone Weil, one of attention’s eloquent philosophers, also resisted the idea of attention as subject to economic measure.
In the Dentsu office, Leong, who had her hair in a neat ponytail and wore a sweater with wide, simple horizontal stripes, sat beside the company’s head of research and measurement, Celeste Castle, an executive who oversees the math behind Dentsu’s own answer to the question of attention’s worth—the “effective attention cost per a thousand” impressions. The old metrics used in advertising were based on an opportunity to see. “An ‘impression’ is just a measure that the ad was served,” Leong said. But recent data revealed that even most supposedly “viewable” ads weren’t being viewed. “Consumers’ span of attention is now believed to be less than eight seconds,” Raja Rajamannar, the chief marketing officer of Mastercard, a Dentsu client, told me. “That is less than the attention span of a goldfish.”
At Dentsu, as elsewhere, the aim has become to get more from these shrinking slivers—an endeavor some outsiders liken to fracking, the process used to force lingering pockets of fossil fuels out of the earth. When I asked whether these efforts would dissipate people’s focus further, Castle said that optimizing would result in ads being even more precisely tailored to entice their audiences. “As attention measurement matures, things will fall by the wayside and we can eliminate some of the waste,” she said.
In “Scenes of Attention,” a collection of scholarly essays published last year, the editors, D. Graham Burnett and Justin Smith-Ruiu, challenge the idea that shortened attention spans came about because of technological acceleration alone. True, tools and lives are faster, they write. But claiming innovation as the original cause is backward: “Human beings make the technologies—and they make them in the context of other human beings needing and wanting various things.” It wasn’t as though people, after millennia of head-scratching, suddenly “discovered” the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and the telegraph, and modernity unspooled. Rather, people’s priorities underwent a sea change with the onset of the modern age, turning to efficiency, objective measurement, and other goals that made such inventions worthwhile. The acceleration of life isn’t an inevitability, in that sense, but an ideological outcome.
Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton, is the author of five books, ranging in subject from seventeenth-century lens-making to New York’s judicial system. For the past several years, he has been working on a history of the scientific study of attention. I went one day to the main branch of the New York Public Library to hear him speak at the invitation of the New York Institute for the Humanities. “It was the sciences that sliced and diced this nebulous, difficult-to-define feature of our conscious and sensory life so that the market could price it,” Burnett said.
As an academic at the lectern, Burnett cut a curious figure. He was tall, with a graying backpacker’s beard and light-brown hair pulled into a topknot. He wore sixteen silver rings, gunmetal nail polish, and an outfit—T-shirt, V-neck sweater-vest, climbing pants—entirely in shades of light gray. He looked as if he had arrived from soldering metal in an abandoned loft. Scientific models of attention, he argued, had been products of their eras’ priorities, too. So-called “vigilance studies,” which figured attention in terms of cognitive alertness, had coincided with the rise of monotonous control-panel jobs in the years after the Second World War. When soldiers began having to deal with multiple directives over the wire, attention science became preoccupied with simultaneous inputs.
per/corsi di economia politica 