The events of Saturday, 2 June, 2012

Presented by Mercedes Bresso, Paola Pica

Young people risk paying the highest price for the crisis: unemployed, with no pension, and with a heavy debt burden, their future appears more like a threat than a promise. Can coop capitalism address these problems? In what does it consist?

Alberto Bisin, Agar Brugiavini, Maria Cecilia Guerra, Chiara Saraceno and Antonio Schizzerotto discuss the results of a wide sample survey on the distribution of the burden of care of the dependent elderly. The results serve to understand the support that is there today for reforms extending state assistance for the care of the elderly, by imposing taxes on those who work.
 

Una testimonianza scritta di Giorgio Lunghini e Alberto Quadrio Curzio

This lecture examines the impact of globalization on individual life courses in modern societies from an international comparative perspective. It demonstrates that the globalization process has affected life course phases differently in various countries.

Developed nations have spent the post-war era running take-as-you-go fiscal policies in which successive older generations take larger and larger resources from younger generations in the form of government pension and healthcare benefits. This transfer from youngsters to oldsters has been kept off the books by a careful choice of fiscal labels. As a consequence, countries like the United States face mountains of implicit liabilities that are obscured by molehills of official liabilities. This Ponzi Scheme is now coming to its inevitable and tragic end. There are too few young people earning far too little to cover the promises made to current and near-term retirees. The only way to avoid economic game over and secure our children's future is to adopt radical tax, pension, healthcare, and energy reforms and do so immediately.

Discussed by Vittorio Giacopini

Workers now nearing retirement face greater risks than any previous generations. We outline the three phases of retirement – accumulation, investment, and decumulation – and identify ways to better mitigate and manage the risks in each phase. Topics include financial literacy, a pension overview, and decumulation products.

What can we say, in light of the recessions in the past fifty years and of the Great Recession of 2008-09, about the generational profile of those who risk paying the highest price? What phases in the life cycle of individuals can be permanently scarred by a negative event, with knock-on and far-reaching consequences, for example, on their ability to generate revenue from employment? An analysis based on consumption, income, and financial difficulties in the lives of entire generations.

Topping the list of citizens’ worries is work: the jobs that aren’t there for those who look and can’t find them; the jobs that are lost for those who have or had one. But the greatest fears concern the future. Some 85% of Italians predict that their children will face worse conditions than the previous generations. Meanwhile Italy is divided among the many who have little and the few who have much. From the Report on Social and Economic Insecurity in Italy and Europe, published by Fondazione Unipolis, Demos&pi and Osservatorio di Pavia, emerges the evidence of how after years dominated by fears linked to common criminality the insecurity of individuals has regained its ‘social confines’. 

There are two ways to become rich: through inheritance or through one’s own work. Some believe that the structure of modern economic growth has led to the rise of human capital, the decline of inheritance, and the triumph of meritocracy. This lecture asks a simple question: is this optimistic view of economic development justified empirically and well grounded theoretically? The simple answer is ‘no’. Our empirical and theoretical findings suggest that inherited wealth will most likely play as big a role in 21c capitalism as it did in 19c capitalism. This lecture will be based upon the following research, as well as on-going similar work on other countries, including the UK, the US, Germany and Italy.