A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN: TODAY'S ITALY

In Italy, it's almost impossible for young people to find a job right after their bachelor. Although it's quite hard to explain all the reasons, basically Italian society is still corporation-based, which locks down the market and limit flexibility. Upper Classes are crowded by lawyers and judges, old officers and old bureaucrats. Those people applied their jobs by admission tests in which corruption and nepotism are the only rules; Doctors have a good social status, but they are not interested in research, as it doesn't play a main role into the academic tissue and wages are low.

Italian society is based on patronage: if you want to take a good job and live a good life, you don't need any professional requirement but you have only to find someone who will help you. Politics is everywhere, in every aspect of public life. Hard work and training are not able to make you respectable: you have to become a politician to gain respect. Italians vote parties but they can't choose the candidates who are placed in the Parliament by lobbies. Corruption is everywhere, even in culture: if you want to become a researcher, you have to spend the rest of your life as servant of old professors. And perhaps you will not obtain a good job as well. If you are lucky, maybe you will be associate professor at 60. It does not matter if you make good researches: no one will check your work. In the Italian Universities productivity bonuses don't exist and careless professors are not fired by anyone. 

Masters and professional courses are for the Upper Classes. If you are not a member of high class society, you will not enter those courses even if you have enough money for them: you won't often pass the admission test. Italian school system is not bad: students learn many subjects at their Universities. The curricula provide abstractive knowledge to students, but they still lack training for workplace. The degree is not so important in Italy for work experience. If you have just taken a degree you won't find a job so easily. Not graduated people find better jobs and can earn much more money. If you have a job in the public administration you will be rewarded only for seniority and for old ideas rather than for youthness and new ideas. Trade is overtaxed for one main reason: the government puts high taxes on companies to decrease the national debt caused by corruption. Many companies don't pay taxes because they help politicians with their dirty businesses. The lack of taxes income leads national debt every year.

I took a Bachelor degree in European Literatures and Linguistics and I took a M.A. degree in Italian studies. I guess will move from Italy to find a good and rewarding job. Our beloved Italy rewards mafia, corruption and leisure against hard work, study and research. Italy is the country where everything is possible, in a negative way. Italy is a world turned upside down.     

Marco DiCaprio