 Navigating Italy’s Socioeconomic Contradictions

## Italy's economics cannot be studied

In Italy, a curious (and frustrating) dynamic permeates our understanding of poverty and wealth. Much of what we perceive in official studies and data doesn’t, in my opinion, align at all with what we experience in everyday life. This is why I think that at this point in history, **Italy's microeconomics cannot be studied**, and **have never been studied in a way that hasn't been proven completely flawed**.


## Tourists of poverty

I see this firsthand when I run into old schoolmates —now in their thirties— most of whom are highly educated, with university degrees, expensive and exclusive master’s qualifications, and even more advanced training. The majority claim to earn just a fraction of what I make, despite their higher qualifications, and they do: **they earn too little, they earn so little that their lifestyle choices don't add up**.

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**On paper, they appear to be part of Italy’s struggling young workforce**, dwelling through unpaid internships and low-paying, precarious jobs, but what’s odd is the **disparity between what they report and the life that they lead**. 

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I drive a modest 10-year-old city car, a cheap one that you could get for a few thousand euros at the time, which gets me from point A to point B. And that's enough for me. But I regularly see luxury cars parked outside in the street. If I look out of my balcony window, I can see my 10+ old berlina parked in the same line as four Teslas.
This place is full of **people with financial backing from families** so wealthy that they can casually open and close businesses for their children without concern. They live in houses I can’t afford and drive cars I could only dream of purchasing — even if I **could** afford to do it, because **what I save is all I have**.  

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I call them **“tourists of poverty”**. These are **people who technically fall into the category of the underpaid but whose personal wealth makes them anything but poor**. They are shielded from the real financial struggles that their income alone would suggest. It’s no wonder that I distrust many of the studies around poverty and economic hardship in Italy. From my experience, especially here in the South, higher education often serves more as a status symbol than a pathway to financial success. A lot of youngsters are basically "gifted" university degrees both from families willing to pay for their studies indefinitely, and from an instruction system which is notoriously turning into a degree mill. __Education is no longer the great equalizer it once was; it’s often a marker of privilege, not a tool for social mobility__.


## Hidden Wealth, Debt, and the Disappearing Proletariat in Modern Italy

I’ve long suspected that **the official data about poverty in Italy is misleading**, and I believe several indicators support this view. First, there’s the **enormous amount of unreported wealth that exists**, particularly in the South. Many professionals —lawyers, doctors— seem to declare low earnings on paper, but they’re also the ones **pocketing cash payments under the table**, avoiding taxes, and quietly amassing wealth. This system allows them to live better than the honest surgeon who pays nearly half of his income in taxes. I've never once in my lifetime been able to pay a doctor with my card, and when confronting them on the subject I've been met with an endless stream of lamentations about how they're "oppressed by our unfair tax system, struggling to make ends meet".

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I’ve been the poorest person in my social circles since childhood, yet many of my friends came from families that officially qualified for the lowest ISEE (Italy's Indicator of equivalent economic situation) brackets. Despite this, they showed up to university driving brand new cars, with the latest iPhones and MacBooks. It wasn’t just one or two; this was the norm.

## The financially illiterate

A major part of the problem is that **financial literacy is severely lacking in our culture**. People with half my salary spend triple what I do. I know someone, for example, who splurged on expensive accessory goods like an iPhone, various Apple accessories, a new car, a super expensive Dyson hair straightener, plus several subscription services, all with her first paycheck. All of this was financed through absurdly long payment plans that distort the true picture of her finances. It’s the same story all over here, where you see long **lines outside stores selling iPhones in low-income neighbourhoods** on the day of a new release.

[snip](youth-unemployment-data-2020)

## Scrooge McDuck meets John Locke 

**This isn’t just an economic issue—it’s cultural**. **The concept of the proletariat, a class of people who are economically struggling, seems to have disappeared**. Financially unstable people often spend and incur debt at levels equal to or greater than the wealthy. The result? **The traditional class divide has blurred, **making it harder to discern who is truly poor. If **the poor spend like the rich** and **the rich pretend they're poor as a means of virtue signalling** (and tax avoidance, of course), how can we even begin to accurately measure poverty? Data fails to capture the truth in such intricate circumstances.

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I feel like living in a society that's still moving among **blurred lines of aristocracy and bourgeoisie**, where the new artistocrats live off monumental riches amassed in the dark by their wealthy families, while still applying for low-paying jobs to keep alive the symbolism of work as a source of virtue, and the poor simply never come to terms with their situation, because our society is so deeply rooted in the idea that **the rich are superior to the poor**, to the point that every effort in equalisation ends up in making debt, not freedom, more accessible.


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Italy's illusion of poverty

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