by Emiliano Mandrone (source: lavoce.info)
Meanwhile, an idea of poverty as mistake, which does not include mitigating circumstances. This is how public funds are spent to heal and not prevent, to repress and not to integrate. It’s a welfare of pain far removed from our constitution.
Why do we have social protection systems?
Everyone wants to help people in need, but resources are sparse and so we want to avoid giving them to those who don’t really need them. It is the atavistic problem of public policies and social services: from the disability pension to the building subsidy, from the unemployment to grants, from public housing to basic income. Countering the moral hazard that pervades these social arrangements is like “separating the wheat from the chaff” (the tares or tares, Matthew 13:24:30), a chore that often defeats the purpose of the law and burden management for increases the state, which must set up complex systems of conditionality that discourage those who need them most.
Social protection systems arise from the need to mitigate the harshness of the market due to the business cycle. The intention was that there would be no involuntary termination of employment Poverty. It was a slow process, still ongoing, marked by very hard struggles, nothing was given away. Social institutions are man-made constructs and as such can fail. While there is a wide debate in some northern European countries about extending coverage related to the new risks of the digital world, there is in many parts of the world regression of rights.
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there severance fund it was a typically Italian tool for shaping the demands of the industrial world of work. Today the world has changed and new logics are required, more belonging than economic, because the risks are not only professional and the costs are not only industrial.
Recent history has repeatedly shown how some catastrophic events, systemic crises and technological changes have had a severe impact on citizens who have lost their jobs involuntarily and on companies that have found themselves in crisis through no fault of their own. How do you deal with all of this? Mario Draghi, wrote in 2009 that the rationale for social security lies in better ability to collectively address growing idiosyncratic risks, but requires adequate resources (technical, human and financial) to bolster government action. But who needs help?
The phenomenology of the poor
The poor have a recognizable dress, a strong smell, a typical color. It is the idea of the poor that comes to mind from literature à la Oliver Twist, or from 1950s neorealism, or from accounts of war zones and famine. We see a person with their back to the wall, without alternatives, asking for help that is in the hands of others. We have clung to alien societal conventions that typify a Calvinist and neoliberal vision that we have almost unconsciously assimilated by induction. Reason’s nap made us forget our common sentiment solidarity Catholic-Communist origin. Hence a certain notion of poverty (Chiara Saraceno, 2021) that sees the phenomenon as one fault. So we no longer think of social causes, the combination of multiple disadvantages, living in toxic environments that are difficult to escape from. The prevailing notion of the poor is that of who he chose not to work and does not consider extenuating circumstances linked to the context in which it belongs or to one’s own situation, thereby reaffirming the idea of poverty and unemployment as a mistake, another cultural regression.
This feeds an anger that has deep, primal roots. The masses want pain, they want to see the show Suffer, to be moved and to feel the protagonist of the salvation of the suffering: he wants to see the child with the flies in his eyes, the family in the cold next to the collapsed house, the homeless man dressed in rags. Solidarity is not spared for them: we are willing to donate it felted sweater or to give away the discarded coat, in short: to take small change out of your pocket.
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The dimensions of poverty
Fortunately, clearer dimensions of poverty have been developed as a result of broader sensibilities. But terms like relative poverty, bad worktechnological unemployment, employable persons, educational fragility, fair offer, existential peripheries remain metaphysical concepts, intellectual speculations that people don’t understand. Thus, public funds continue to be spent to heal and not to prevent, to oppress instead of integrate, to help those who are in need instead of slipping into need, to remove the mud from houses instead of cleaning up rivers. History teaches us that we prefer the spectacular, inefficient emergency solution. And the welfare from pain.
Strabismus, cunning, split personality: There are many reasons for this behavior unreasonable, double, hypocritical, typically Italian. We like the dynamics of united networks pulling people out of floods or the rubble of an earthquake, but then elections (especially local ones) are won with amnesties and ruthless regulatory schemes. We refrain from interfering with the causes and a subculture of phenomena is paving its way for which aid to emancipation is preferred and a market of discomforta commodification of poverty, a disaster industry.
Thus, mistakes and merits are attributed only to the individual: faber est suae quisque fortunae (everyone is the architect of his own destiny). Ignoring that the result of our existence has an individual component that someone names meritand a random who fate. In fact, in 1948 it was decided that merit could only be used as a reward criterion when starting points, available resources, and education received were equal. Otherwise it is a mere justification for inequalities. Luigi Einaudi – true liberal – wanted it to be included in the constitution. And it stayed that way.