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If you ask yourself what's the future for Italy, if you can't control your exchange rate,
you can't protect yourself, against the competitiveness of Germany
because they can keep their deutche mark from appreciating
you're going to have this cronic deflationary problem
And you can either adjust it by changing the competitiveness of italian business sector, getting productivity growth to be higher than it is in Germany, and that's hard to happen,
or you can lower real wages in Italy, and that's not going to be a pleasant process
that is lowering real wages by actually reducing nominal wages, because then there will be a problem in serving the debt
Question: Will it be possible to grow forever in a finite world?
What woould you think? I think that in the very very long run,
that's true, as long as population is increasing.
So, if you start to look at population growth, what's happening to the population in Italy? What's happening to the population in Western Europe?
It starts to decline. Only in France it may still be increasing, but even there it's fragile.
In Asia, outside India, the rate of growth seems to start declining.
Latin America is still growing but the fertility rate
is coming down,
very close to just replacement.
So the first answer to that question is
populations are now about 8 billions. To make it to go up to 11 billions, but if fertily decreases, population shrinks. And if population shrinks, you can have no economic growth,
but still improving the economic conditions for people. So tha's the first condition you're hoping for.
And again i think if you look at these projection outside of Africa, and maybe Latin America, where population looks what it's is going to be in 100 yrs from now.
That's the first answer to that. The second answer to that is: Look at what people want, It's increasingly NOT resource intensive. So what's happening to your children when they get older? Hopefully at 80, they will have half part of their body with artificial parts.
and they will work really well. Now, that's a very expensive economic activity, but not resouce intensive. They'll be incredibly well educated, Because they will go to school to thei 40's, then they will work from 40 to 70, then they'll retire with the artificial parts from 70 to 110
But notice, that the process of getting educated is NOT energy intensive and things people are starting to consume money on,
are things that do not use as much energy as before
so the United States for example is now more and more on services, actually has declined energy use for capita and per unit of GDP
And if that takes over these resource constraints will disappear. And if that's improved buy demographic trends finally turn negative, that we don't have to worry at all.
And in Italy, of course, demographic trends are negative, you're shrinking ...
So let me just say that, in light of these policy recommendations,
the single person,
other than M. Gallegati, who I count to be the most effective implementer of these sensible economic policies, is BEPPE GRILLO and I look forward to be able to count myself among his economic advisors!