In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment | Hacker News Reader

In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment

nytimes.com

8 pointspg5 comments

Hah, I thought pg might like that one, but refrained from posting it myself because it didn't seem relevant enough.

It's a very accurate portrayal of what's going wrong there right now, and at the same time avoids being one of those articles that just seeks dirt and dishes it (it would be easy to paint any place like a dump if you only report the negatives).

It's all the more heartbreaking, because there really are a lot of people doing interesting, creative, entrepreneurial things, but they are completely strangled by incompetent or actively malicious bureaucracies.

I do think that, long term, they'll do ok, but who knows how long "long term" may be - 5 years? 10? 50? 100?

'Long term' will be never if they don't fix the corruption and bad government problems.

An interesting statistic here was that only 36 per cent of Italians trust their government. US's Congress currently has approval ratings hovering in the 20's. Do you think that a poll would show that even 30 percent of the US people trust their government?

"Doubt clouds the family itself: 70 percent of Italians between 20 and 30 still live at home, condemning the young to an extended and underproductive adolescence."

Cost of living. In the U.S., most college graduates can't afford to live on their own in major cities. Jobs require ever-more qualifications and advanced degrees. Productivity goes out the door and escapism comes in when you're stuck with your parents.

That housing bubble was horrible for the economy. Far from a sign of good things happening, it meant owning their own home was out of reach for the vast majority of young people. The amount of productivity and joie de vivre lost cannot be overestimated. Being stuck living with people you don't want to live with is toxic (that includes non-family members, too).

Housing has always been relatively expensive in Italy, with 60 million people in an area slightly smaller than California. But the problems go far beyond that, unfortunately. In my opinion, they really center around a broken political system that has neither managed the economy well, nor simply left the economy to its own devices without interference.

It costs something like 10,000 Euro to open the equivalent of an LLC in Italy, between mandatory capital requirements, legal fees, and notaries that eat up thousands of euros at a go.

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