Luigi Zingales: evaluation

Transcript context

…Here’s an article from Quartz. Let me read you the headline. Maybe you saw it from a few months ago. “The most common surnames of new entrepreneurs in Italy are Hu, Chen, and Singh.” If you look at Milan, you have to go through 20 names, and at number 20 is the Italian name Colombo for the most common or most frequent names of entrepreneurs. Is this sustainable culturally, or is this Italy’s future, in essence, to be economically colonized the way parts of Southeast Asia have been by Chinese, Indians, Sikhs, whoever it may be. Maybe Germans. One friend of mine was saying that the demise of the Italian firm family structure is the demise of the Italian family. In essence, when you used to have seven kids, one out of seven in the family was smart. You could find him. You could transfer the business within the family with a little bit of meritocracy and selection. When you’re down to one or two kids, the chance that one is an idiot is pretty large. The result is that you can’t really transfer the business within the family. The biggest problem of Italy is actually fertility, in my view, because we don’t have enough kids. If you don’t have enough kids, you don’t have enough people to transfer. You don’t have enough young people to be dynamic. The Italian culture has a lot of defects, but the entrepreneurship culture was there, has been there, and it still is there, but we don’t have enough young people. What the Chinese are doing are taking over, mostly, the bars, the restaurants, the smaller things initially because those are the easier ones to enter. They’re many and they’re very dynamic. I think that’s exactly the Italian problem. Paint a picture for me here of the end game 30 years from now. Typical Italian family has 1.3 kids. Debt‑to‑GDP ratio at least is reported at about 130 percent, second highest in the eurozone after Greece. Productivity problems. Thirty years from now, what do you predict? What are we going to see?…

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