Luigi Zingales: evaluation

Transcript context

…When I hear other people speak about Italy, there’s a certain tension as to how long these cultural effects last. You read Robert Putnam, things matter from hundreds of years ago. In some of your papers, it matters how many years a region had as an independent city‑state. It matters in the year 1,000 whether you had a medieval bishop in your city. Those are very durable cultural effects. I think back to being in Italy in the mid‑1980s, when it passed the UK in terms of per capita income, it was, in a sense, then at the European frontier and still growing. Now, it’s not so much later, and what feels like the same culture seems to be giving very different results. How’s the way we make sense of that? Two things. First of all, the distinction that Putnam makes and a lot of people make about the North and the South. I think, in some sense, it’s disappearing in Italy, but in the worse direction. All Italy is looking more like the South. [laughter] The Northern people . . . I come from the North, even if my grandfather came from the South, but I came from the North. People in the North, when I go back home, they still feel very proud that they’re much better than people in the South. I say, “You know, when you are in the Titanic, being on the third deck or the first deck doesn’t make a huge difference.” [laughter] “Yeah, you are on the third deck is better than the first, because you just sink a little bit later, but you still sink. ” There is this arrogance in the North that I don’t think is fully justified, because many of the bad practices of the South have been imported to the North. The Mafia used to be only in Sicily, today, is present in Milan, is present in Venice, is present everywhere. When we are questioned, “What has gotten worse?” I think there is this component. The second is the boom. What people did not fully realize, but the boom of Italy in the 1980s was a boom of a developing country that had a protected currency area. We were playing the catch‑up nation within Europe. While everybody else in Europe was moving in more advanced production and services, they were leaving behind market space for us to capture the less technological production, and we did it with gusto. It was a boom in the ‘80s, but it was a boom in the wrong direction. Let’s say we go back to 1860. Was Verdi wrong? Say Italy had not become a single nation. There had been a North and a South or even half a dozen or more nations competing against each other or more of a Swiss model. Was the nationalist model for Italy a mistake?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.