The events of Sunday, 3 June, 2012

Equitable and sustainable pensions can also be achieved through supplementary pensions, and not just by extending the working life. The projects of APG and those of PensPlan open up new prospects for subsidiarity.

Economic growth is assumed to be good for human wellbeing; and the case made for free markets is often that they will maximize growth. But recent research into determinants of human happiness questions whether growth should be the objective; and free markets in finance have clearly not delivered even the growth benefits promised. Adair Turner’s lecture will explore what economics can tell us both about desirable social objectives and about the means by which we pursue them. It will argue that while growth itself is not the primary objective, it is a likely result of other desirable aims, such as economic freedom. That alternative justification has, however, profound implications for important aspects of public policy.

The family is the only place in which all the generations meet and where everyone feels as if they are part of a mobile and complex system of transfers. In recent years, not only have the contours of the family changed but also its traditional structure, since for economic, social and affective reasons, grandparents have been placed at the centre of the household geometry. A providential change and at the same time a risky one insofar as it tends to isolate the family from society, hindering the emancipation of children and creating new forms of dependency. All contradictions that merit identification and analysis.

Michele Pellizzari, Nicola Sartor, Antonio Schizzerotto and Claudio Siciliotti discuss the results of a wide sample survey on the role of the family in the early stages of children’s professional careers. The results help us understand the support available today for reforms that liberalize the markets and reduce dynastic constraints in the labour market. 
 

Discussed by Alessandro Barbera, Paolo Guerrieri

Reformulating the title of the film by Jean-Paul Jaud as a question serves to examine the issue of intergenerational transfers in the current economic crisis. The traditional economy is deaf to the reality of the Anthropocentric and is sacrificing the future generations by resorting to the expedient of a mystifying discounting tax. We must now leave the economy behind and build a society of deceleration.