Is the Sun Setting on the Italian Lifestyle?

Seen from the outside, there is something inspiringly right about how Italians live.  They close up shop to eat a home cooked lunch every day. They buy their food fresh; personally know their butchers and bakers and candlestick makers; spend a month (or two) on the beach in the summer and a week (or two) on the ski slope in winter.  And they own houses, often in stunningly beautiful locations. Italy has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, and few kids and shrinking families mean that properties are often inherited from both sets of grandparents as well as parents. City apartments are rented out. Country homes are used, if for nothing else, for olive trees, from which they press, their own oil.

A declining industrial power, Italy is finding that
it can no longer afford to live Italian style. 

Seen from the inside, Italian families are trapped inside a compression chamber. They work long hours, the lunch break is offset by working late, often six days a week. Wages are low. Promotions are out of the question. And yet, those with a job, no matter how grinding, are grateful, because most people under 40 have given up on getting staff positions. They subsist on short term freelance contracts. No bennies. No security. No niente. To lose a job in Italy is a form of economic death.

And the home cooked meals? They have to be cooked by someone. Italy has the lowest percentage of women in workplace in old Europe (after Greece). Italian women cook and keep house (Italian men know how to make coffee), do the daily food shopping, keep house, and care for the children and elderly parents (the state neither provides daycare nor elderly care). Grown children, often unemployed, live at home into their forties.  

And the houses? Those rented are used to supplement the meager family income, and as a trust fund for unemployed offspring. Landlords live in terror of the deadbeat tenant. It can take decades to evict someone. Those houses not rented, decay. Families age and shrink. Less space is needed, maintained. Italy is house poor, falling into ruin.

Fresh food means constant shopping.

Falling slowly but surely into economic destitution, most Italians use tricks to survive. They cheat on taxes. They skimp on maintenance of their properties. They stop paying rent, buying medicines, eat less.  But this cannot last. 

Is there a way out? Perhaps, but it runs against all the  conservative Italian instincts: 

To create more jobs, make it easier to fire workers. The fact that no one can be fired from a job functions as a curse on the poor, because new jobs are not created or filled. Those who have job, even ones they hate or are under-qualified for, hang on to their jobs with a white knuckled death grip. No one takes a chance on something new. Greater job insecurity, ironically, would increase the turnover and vitality of the job market. 

To get money flowing in the economy, tax property. Real estate is to Italy what the stock market is to the US and savings accounts are for Germany. That is were the wealth is stashed. But real estate is not a productive investment, a house, unlike a business or an investment, does not create jobs. By taxing home ownership, and using the revenue to reducing taxes on labor,  Italians would be forced to sell and spend the gain on something more productive for the economy. But this is hard for Italians, barely making ends meet, but inheritors of a long tradition of valuing home ownership, to swallow. Berlusconi made much hay campaigning against this in the last election. 

Falling surely into destitution,
most Italians use economic tricks to survive. 

To get the population off the death spiral, it is time for welcoming immigrants, and their new ideas and habits and demands, instead of fighting them every step of the way. Italy needs growth and investment, and that requires loosening all the state regulations that keep the economy and society an insiders-only game. Let the sunshine in. 

So, to create more jobs, Italians need to give up job security, lose their second homes, and let go control of what their country looks like (and sounds like). In essence, to gamble on an uncertain future, while relinquishing some of the social gains that made the past more stable and secure.

In other words, to save the Italy, Italians may need to relinquish what, from the outside at least, is seen as the Italian lifestyle --slow, sweet, unchanging.