Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
26 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I thought it was a brilliant system. I think I have this element that goes back to my Sicilian roots.”
02 / belief
“I think that probably we’re going a bit too much in a Southern direction. Take also Netflix.”
03 / belief
“Now, why I insist so much on this, because I think there is an analogy that most people don’t fully appreciate between the Italian unification and the European unification.”
04 / belief
“At the end of the day, you can’t scale these things up. I think that’s a huge problem.”
05 / belief
“I think that I thought that the so‑called bailout of Greece in 2010 was a disaster, was really a bailout of French and German banks covered with the pretense of helping Greece.”
06 / belief
“I think that an injection of democracy is what is most needed, and hopefully all the tension, will emerge.”
07 / belief
“I think that intellectual tradition of Chicago, Stigler, when he invented regulatory capture was borrowing from Marx.”
08 / belief
“I think that the ECB has been designed, basically, to have deflation. I don’t think they’re mentally prepared to out deal in this situation.”
09 / belief
“If I look at the data, I think that Muslim religion is not generally associated with good attitudes for capitalism.”
10 / belief
“I would have said Gordon Tullock had he not just passed away. I think he was really underrated for what he did.”
11 / belief
“Underrated, I think he’s fantastic. But the best movie ever is The Leopard done by him.”
12 / belief
“I think exactly one of the few cases. I never read a book first and then saw a movie that I thought the movie was the same level as the book.”
13 / belief
“I think that one thing that works well in university is that we spend a huge amount of time selecting faculty.”
14 / belief
“I think that your idea is extremely good to make the comparison, to see also which lobbies are winning the game.”
15 / belief
“Recreating a positive feeling toward Germany that was absent in Europe and taking, I think, the right approach.”
16 / belief
“In my view, he was an extremely insightful economist who made the point there is not enough money in politics in 1972, if I’m not mistaken, or ’74.”
17 / evaluation
“” 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.”
18 / evaluation
“” Within two years, it unified — most of it. It was really a chance, but then, because this happened before there was a national spirit, it turned out it was basically an annexation of the South by North, in which the North imposed its laws to the South, and they were not good for the South.”
19 / observation
“What is extremely moving and depressing in this moment is, in these firms, when they go bankrupt, the owners commit suicide. It is a pretty large number of suicides today because, unfortunately, the business is not doing well.”
20 / evaluation
“The biggest problem of Italy is actually fertility, in my view, because we don’t have enough kids.”
21 / evaluation
“Why is that the case?” Obviously, because the market doesn’t work. If you don’t sort out the market, you can have some very talented people doing jobs that generally don’t require the talent, and you have, unfortunately, non‑talented people doing jobs that require a lot of talent.”
22 / evaluation
“Ironically, I don’t think we’re there anymore, but there was period in which venture capitalists were so much flooded with money that they had to dish out this money sufficiently fast, that they had to shell it out in big pieces. They were only financing more advanced companies, because they couldn’t find the time to actually shell it out in small pieces at a time.”
23 / evaluation
“I actually enjoyed, in my book, to pick a little bit on Robert Barro, because Robert Barro defends restrictions in basketball and baseball but not in everywhere else in the United States.”
24 / evaluation
“Most of them are the poorest undergrads, because they’re the ones that desperately need money, so generally art majors, not really representative of businesspeople.”
25 / evaluation
“Once you try to compete in the first league, when you try to be at the frontier of the technology, you need to have a relatively non‑corrupt government, a system where people pay taxes without too much tax evasion, but not too much taxes, because otherwise they don’t produce.”
26 / preference
“I think that I got much more interested in monetary problems, and since ironically I started to study economics because I grew up in a country with double‑digit inflation, so I thought that that was a big problem.”