Luigi Zingales: belief

Transcript context

…There’s maybe two or three ways of thinking about what you’ve done. A lot of your main papers, they’re about corporations or politics. I read you as taking core areas of economics, and then pretty consistently suggesting that culture really matters and governance really matters, and doing that consistently for businesses and government. There’s another way I think of what you’re doing. This is maybe more Italian. Take the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote about hegemony, and power, and control. To me, you read like someone who read Gramsci at an early age, was quite struck by it, maybe didn’t agree with it, but you’re taking all of his questions and reasking them about control and hierarchy but with real economics and with something like scientific method. In both ways, you’re quite this Italian thinker. I have this saying, “All thinkers are regional thinkers. You just have to figure out what the region is.” You’re redoing Gramsci with economics or you’re redoing economics with culture and governance. Then, there’s this other Gramscian dimension to your thought. He once said, “In the medium of the intellect, I am a pessimist, but when it comes to the medium of the will, I am an optimistic.” There’s this seesawing back and forth of the extreme pessimism and extreme optimism. I see that in your work, too. You’re an Italian who came to the US with such high hopes. In many ways, you love it, but in other ways, you’re deeply disappointed. You keep on seeing the unities between US and Italy, corporations and government, and the practical pessimism of this state of affairs. Yet, you’re propelled to do something about it by writing, speaking, being a public figure, and so on. That would be like my two‑minute version of who you are, what you do. What do you say to that? It’s fantastic. I wish I had thought about it. Seriously, I think that it’s very true. By the way, the only thing that you probably missed is that this tension between the North and the South is also Gramsci. It’s called the historical bloc. It’s the bloc that ruled Italy for a long time is this alliance between the Northern elite and the Southern elite was exactly Gramsci. I think that intellectual tradition of Chicago, Stigler, when he invented regulatory capture was borrowing from Marx. It’s right‑wing Marxism. You told me you’re a quarter Sicilian. What’s the part of your thought that’s a quarter Sicilian?…

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