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Comment by louwrentius | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting, it confirms what I suspected. A negative spiral caused by a fundamentally broken culture that Italy is unable to break away from.

It's all about stuffing your pockets and those of your family. Because nobody can be trusted. You don't build for the future. You don't care about that now.

It seems that there is a fundamental lack of trust amongst Italians. And if there's no trust, you can't build on each other and focus on the long-term. Because you have to spend tons of time watching your back and taking care of yourself.

How will you fucking turn around such a culture?

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I can tell you my story: I tried for years to stay in Italy and work there (it's my home country). As a software engineer I had to work 70 hours per week with no way to get a decent job for a salary between 20-30k euros (gross). When I severely burned out, I found the strength to leave the country and found a completely different work culture in Germany.

This to say: I'm not sure Italians will ever turn it around, still I sometimes think it would be nice to come back and try to change things, but it is incredibly hard given that most of the young people there either leave, they accept shitty jobs or have the same mentality of their parents.

  Take now... some hard-headed business man, who has no theories, but knows how to make money. Say to him:
  "Here is a little village; in ten years it will be a great city; in ten years the railroad will have taken
  the place of the stage coach, the electric light of the candle; it will abound with all the machinery and
  improvements that so enormously multiply the effective power of labor. Will in ten years, interest be any
  higher?" He will tell you, "No!" "Will the wages of the common labor be any higher...?" He will tell you,
  "No the wages of common labor will not be any higher..." "What, then, will be higher?" "Rent, the
  value of land. Go, get yourself a piece of ground, and hold possession." And if, under such circumstances, you
  take his advice, you need do nothing more. You may sit down and smoke your pipe; you may lie around like 
  the lazzaroni of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in a balloon or down a hole in the ground;
  and without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota of wealth to the community, in ten years you 
  will be rich! In the new city you may have a luxurious mansion, but among its public buildings will be 
  an almshouse.

I would add: "Or get some intellectual property everyone must buy." /s

Oh, I am neither against IP, nor in favor of buy-out of all natural resources. I just think it would be good if each IP had reasonable price [0] and everyone had a land for subsistence.

[0] Not like that story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron....

I have no idea. Normally younger people could be a catalyst for change, but they are all leaving. I think the effects of this are going to reverberate in Italy for generations as they fall further and further behind.

I think a lot of mistrust comes down to an "us" vs. "them" mentality that forms in societies which are segmented or where resources are scarce. The most straightforward ways to remedy those situations are the redistribution of wealth or an increase in total wealth, respectively. But how do either of those happen in the country the size of Italy? Maybe you need a shock to the system to kick a sick society out of it's negative spiral, as you put it. The world wars acted as one for much of Europe. Maybe climate change can be the next one.

History shows two ways cultures change for the better: Top-down, by force; Bottom-up, by social pressure.

Top-down:

- U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction

- U.S. Civil Rights Act, enforced by National Guard troops

Bottom-up:

- women's suffrage protest movements of early 20th century

- educational reformist movements e.g. U.S. 19th century

- religious heresies -- Lutheranism

The weakness of "top-down" is that the dysfunction re-emerges when the top-down force is relieved -- if the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction had fully succeeded, the National Guard would have had no need to walk the streets of Alabama with rifles in hand.

The weakness of "bottom-up" is that lasting, visible improvement takes years, and is therefore uninteresting to politicians chiefly looking to get re-elected, say, next month.

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