Eat Chestnuts!

I've been using my camera more lately, and it occurred to me today that I could use it to get around one of Italy's Big Inconveniences. Here's how:

The copisterie - the copy shops - are a huge scam. I really should go out and buy an HP printer-copier-scanner and make some bucks myself. A copy is usually five euro-cents, which seems reasonable. Unless you're copying any part of a book, in which case there's a five-to-ten euro-cent per-page surcharge. I realize that it's not ethical to copy a book, but it seems to me that there's a huge difference between copying Figure 15.14 on page 233 of the book and copying the book, and that the first doesn't come anywhere near warranting a twice-the-price surcharge. (Overpriced copiers are also, for convenience, located in the libraries. From which it's quite often prohibited to borrow books.) If you want to do anything in color, it's at least a euro. And this is the winner: To scan a document into the computer: 1 euro per page. To review: Paper use: zero. Ink use: zero. Energy use: minimal. Cost: 1 euro. It's absurd. Also, you're not allowed to make your own copies. The trained copy expert must exercise his or her extraordinary skill (Paper? Check. Index finger? Check.) and make the copy for you. Which, of course, means that you must wait in line, since there's a maximum of one employee in any copy shop, and the person in front of you will want to make six copies of his doctoral thesis.

I’m doing some research now on the chestnut. It’s awesome. I joked that I was going to do my master’s thesis on the chestnut, but maybe it wasn’t a joke. It’s really interesting! Did you know that 70% of the world’s chestnut production takes place in China? Actually, I have another idea I’m fixed on for my thesis now: Something having to do with the hallucigenic use of food in traditional religions. Wouldn’t that be cool? And maybe an excuse for some hands-on research. Of the traveling type. Of the physical traveling type. :)

Here’s a quick video I took the other day. It’s Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, about five minutes from house, where they had a soccer tournament there last weekend.

Unemployment: The Upside

The Italian unemployment rate is around 6%, which is much lower than I would’ve thought, for all the complaining about it that I hear. So I did a little further research, and it turns out that they’re right: the official number isn’t very telling. The 6% figure masks a rapidly growing migrant/immigrant workforce, a growth in part-time workers, a huge divide between the industrial North and the largely unemployed South, and a huge growth in fixed-term contracts (which, along with immigrant-bashing, is everyone’s favorite conversational sport). But from my outsider perspective, I’d say that Italy needs a high unemployment rate. And not for the traditional “ideal unemployment rate” reasoning. Here, there’s a different reason: Someone in every family must be available to wait in lines. “Waiting in Lines” and “Playing Bureaucracy”, is effectively, a job. Two, in fact; though developing skills in one or the other can prepare a beginner for successful careers in both.

Seriously, the amount of time you have to waste here to do anything can get really frustrating. For example, I recently learned that, for the upcoming elections, Italians must return to their home provinces to vote. Mail-in or internet balloting? Ha! Well, that’s not an entirely accurate criticism: If you are incarcerated in a province other than your own, you may vote in the province of your incarceration. If you are working in a province other than your own, or, God forbid, studying overseas, however, you must return home to vote. Seriously, I met a girl yesterday who flew back to Italy from her university in Spain so that she could cast a ballot.

If you need to make a payment to the university? Online payment? Check? Credit card? Ha! Go to the bank with a wad of cash. Wait in line.

And here’s a fun one: Want to take out a book from the library? Ho-ho. Grab a seat. If I had one wish for the Italian university system, it would be a well-functioning library system. As it lies, here’s how it works. There are maybe fifty or a hundred different university and municipal libraries, each with its own set of rules and practices. Need five books? You’ll most like likely need to visit five different libraries and Play the Game at each one. Maybe you need a special card to use a certain library; maybe not. Just to enter, you’ll need to leave your backpack in a locker outside so that you don’t steal any books. (Since the bar code scanners that seem to quite effectively work in supermarkets, department stores, and foreign libraries suddenly don’t function for Italian books???) Actually, more than that: Some libraries are more generously tolerant, but many actually prevent you from bringing books into the library. And, even better, many prevent you from taking books out of the library! How, then, does the library serve its function, you might wonder? Answer: You may sit in that library and read a book from that library.

Ah! But that assumes you were able to get the book in the first place. That’s a whole ‘nother story. To get a book, you can’t usually just go to the shelf and get the book. That job is reserved for a Library Employee. You must find the book in the catalog, fill out a paper form (electronic requests from the comfort of your home? Ha!), hand-deliver the paper form to the librarian, and wait for the next book retrieval period (often occuring on the hour). You may then pick up your book. If that library permits you to take out books, you’re still not homefree. You might not be able to take out that book, even if it says in the catalog that you can. For example, after visiting three different libraries, filling out a dozen different forms, waiting in three different lines, and spending – no kidding – about five hours on the entire endeavor, I discovered that practically none of the over 2000 Bibles in the Bologna library system can be checked out. I gave up.

Hence: If you want to vote, write a check, read a book – or god forbid do something more complicated such as legalize your immigration status – prepare thyself for hours and days of lines and bureaucracy. It’s no wonder to me that immigrants remain illegal. If my experience is any indication, it would be – no exaggeration – absolutely impossible to have a full-time job and to fulfill the bureaucratic steps for becoming legal.

So, here it is, the Economic Theory of the Day: Without at least one unemployed person in every family, a family would not be able to perform basic social, civic, and economic tasks. Hence, high(er) unemployment is, in Italy, an absolute economic necessity.

On that note, I leave you with this calming photo :)

Picture of the Day

I'm whipped! Lots to report, little time to report it! In the absence of a story, here's a picture of the day. I took it while "studying" (Italians?) in Piazza Maggiore of Bologna. A presto!

The Faster You Go, The More Fat You Win!

I think I told you that the “running” scenario in Italy differs quite a bit from that in the States. In case you missed those episodes, the quick summary is that running in Italy involves a team (mine is Lippo Calderara), a membership card (that’s huge!), a uniform (we’re red, yellow, and blue: I’m all set to root for the Romanians in Peking), Spandex (I invariably violate this rule), an extraordinarily complex organization (Do you want to run in the competitive race? The non-competitive race? The shorter race? The even shorter race? The walk? The children’s race? The younger children’s race?), a sexual harassment-prone landlord (perhaps that’s just my situation? But who knows, maybe it’s part of the “system.”). And . . . prizes!!!

I really like winning prizes, I dislike sexual harassment, I find the obsession with membership cards amusing, and I get a little stressed out by the complexity of the system.

As you know, I’m hyper-competitive, so I really do like winning the prizes. Now I just have to figure out what to do with them. I really get a kick out of this: The prizes invariably consist of giant packages of the fattiest, unhealthiest foods you can find. The faster you go, the more fat you win! Here’s me, wondering what to do with two of my prizes:

That’s what's left of a salame on the left, and a huge hunk of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese on the right. I figured it out, and my excitement reached a kind of violent level in this pic:

Actually, the prizes come in handy: My friends and gastronomo-classmates love them! And I like the winning-them part :)

They Study That in the United States?

I know you’ve been waiting for a language slip-up story, and finally I have one worth reporting. Not that, up till now, I’ve been communicating with such perfect clarity that I’ve been slip-up-free and people confuse me for a native Italian speaker, but I haven’t had any of those “whoops” moments that I always read about, where some poor guy accidentally tries to sell his wife for a few camels, or a foreign girl accidentally invites her professor to dinner. No, wait, actually I have done that last one . . .

Last night I had everyone laughing, though. I wanted to mention my friend who researches homeless people. In Italian, the word for a homeless person is a “senza tetto” – literally a person “without a roof.” What I actually mentioned, however, is my friend who researches people “senza tetta”: “without boobs.”

What a difference an “a” makes! Anyway, for all the flat-chested women out there (ahem), I’ve found you a researcher!

Voulez vous cou- . . . Oh. No. That’s Something Else.

I’m taking a course in French right now. Not a French course, but a course in French. The professor is great: He speaks slowly, is really patient, and does a great Powerpoint. Still, I’m impressed with myself! Not because of my French ability, which ticks in at caveman level. But because I actually understand the course! My questions go something like: “What – is – difference – feculeries – and – minoteries - ?” (Yes. There's even a hesitation before the question mark.) But I’m more or less following the course. At least, I hope so: the exam is tomorrow.

I really shouldn’t be impressed. A few of my classmates haven’t really studied French either. They’re doing the same thing I am, and probably better. And I get the idea that it’s normal in Italy to have a class or two taught in English, just because it’s something that you should know if you want to go into business. Or engineering. Or academia.

Still, I think it’s really cool that we can all do this. And it makes me want to really learn French, which – along with lots of other things – is “on the list”!

Il Precario

There’s a curious difference between the ways the (average) Italian and the (average) American view work. In fact, I don’t think most Americans are aware of the “work situation” in Italy. I know I didn’t have much of an idea before living here, and I obviously don’t yet fully understand it, because a newspaper headline today caught me off-guard:

“Salaries: Young People Earn 23% Less Than Those Over 40.”

Yeah? I thought. Why on earth is this being reported in the newspaper? Isn’t this “news” of the dogs-bites-man type? There seems to be a complaint, an outrage over the finding – and yet, from my vantage point, there’d be a problem if it weren’t the case.

On the same page were two other mini-articles that also illustrate a chasmically different (from American) Italian world of employment. One is something that I’ve already written about here: Striking is downright trendy. The article “Strikes on the Rise” reported that, in 2007, the hours of strikes by Italians increased by 62% from 2006 to a total of 6.3 million man-hours. With a workforce of around 25 million people, my calculation puts that at about 15 minutes per Italian worker! That seems hugely significant to me (although I don’t have any comparative statistics). The other headline, “Pay more to better employees,” presented exactly that as a promising – but, alas, probably impracticable – employment innovation.

That probably gives you a starter feel for the difference. We could really talk for days and days about the work situation in Italy – in fact, the Italian newspapers do, and rightfully so. It’s really difficult to get a “good” job in Italy, and that’s the biggest problem facing young Italians.

Which brings us to the Biggest Difference of the Day: The “precario.” What I find most interesting about this entire “issue” is that the very concept of the non-precario leaves most Americans scratching their heads. (Rightly or wrongly). Basically, the Italian job seeker is searching for a contract “a tempo indeterminato” – an “indefinite” contract. It means that, as best I can tell, barring major criminal activity (note the modifier), you have that job, and every month you get paid, and you get to keep going to said job forever and ever, until you retire. If yesterday there was demand for 100 widgets, which made the company hire 100 employees, and today the demand drops to only 10 widgets – bummer for the company, but they’ve got 100 paychecks to write. Getting such a job is THE goal of the typical Italian. Companies, instead, for obvious reasons, are keen to give contracts “a tempo determinato” – fixed-term contracts, usually lasting six months, which can then (somewhat illegally) be extended and re-created ad infinitum, essentially employing someone long-term but in a series of six-month contracts. This leaves the employee as a “precario” – literally in a “precarious” situation. The complaint is that, as a precario, you really can’t plan for the future: you can’t get a mortgage, buy a house, get married, and settle down forever and ever.

As I said, I think the most interesting thing about this entire issue is that the very concept of the problem is foreign to most Americans. I like to think that I’m pretty well-informed, but I had to keep asking my Italian friends “clarifying questions.” (And I’m going to have to ask them another one tomorrow: It a surprise that young people get paid less than those with more experience? Is it a “problem”? Is it “wrong”? Why?)

First of all, I think the desire for a fixed contract is itself an interesting comment on the Italian identity. As much as the image of the shoulder-shrugging, toss-it-to-the-wind Italian prevails, I think a more accurate analysis of the Italian personality reveals an strong push for security, stability, certainty. Adventure, planned or imposed, is “dangerous” and best avoided. (This plays out in lots of ways, not just work: for example, even a vacation is usually “safe,” organized by a tour operator, passed with a group, or spent in a vacation village.) The promise of stability is a good thing: You don’t want 500% turnover every year, and you definitely lose something cultural and familial with lots of moving around. But you also gain something, personally and nationally, through risk, chance, innovation. I’m not surprised that a push for stability exists; I’m surprised at the extent to which it’s dominant. There are really very few Italians who are eager to innovate, to go out on their own, to try something new, to take a risk. Again, you don’t want an entire workforce taking risk, but you do need some of it for a healthy economy. It’s kind of an economic application of “bio-diversity” and genetic evolution, I think: You need some risky genes to mutate the economy for the better, in a “survival of the fittest” kind of way.

Second, I’m really surprised that few people pick up on the economic disincentive of the indefinite contract. If I’m an employer, and I know that I can’t fire a lousy employee, I’m sure as heck going to be hesitant to hire anyone. So I really don’t get the double demand: “Hire more people! Create more jobs!” and “Give everyone an indeterminate contract!” The two just don’t seem to go together for me.

This “issue” is in the papers literally every day. It’s a real issue, and really problematic; but it’s also hindered by a somewhat parochial optic. (Just as my optic, for example, didn’t include this employment worldview up until a few months ago!) I obviously don’t understand “from the inside,” and my “analysis” is pretty limited. Still – it’s one of these things that I find really interesting, and I thought you might, too.