This "generic Anglo-Saxon" epithet sounds like an emotional appeal. The facts are straightforward, aren't they?
Italy has an immense public debt. It is getting more and more difficult for Eurozone countries to finance sovereign debt. Its population is aging. Pension costs are rising. Productivity, according to Mario Draghi, is stagnant, in part because employment in Italy is structured weirdly, with large numbers of closely-held firms with a two-tiered system of full-time full-benefit workers hired through nepotism and armies of temp workers†. Civil cases in Italy average more than 1,000 days. The country has wild gaps in educational outcomes between different regions.
I don't think you can write all this off as an "Anglo-Saxon conspiracy". These are ideas that can be described with simple numbers, aren't they?
† Articles about Italy have long attributed this to Italy's family culture, in which people cohabitate with their extended families long into adulthood, but it seems just as likely that this is a result of laws making it hard to fire people.
"Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell ore when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next."
Substitute "Britain" for "Britain and America" in the above passage and the mentality of critiquing "generic Anglo-Saxon" economic neoliberalism is plain to see.
In France there are similar laws which make it hard to fire workers, yet I don't see the same phenomena of young people staying with their family until their late 30s.
A "young" Italian, by living with her parents, doesn't have to worry about rent, food or other basic expenses and can use her modest salary to pay for recreational activities.
Italy has an immense public debt. It is getting more and more difficult for Eurozone countries to finance sovereign debt. Its population is aging. Pension costs are rising. Productivity, according to Mario Draghi, is stagnant, in part because employment in Italy is structured weirdly, with large numbers of closely-held firms with a two-tiered system of full-time full-benefit workers hired through nepotism and armies of temp workers†. Civil cases in Italy average more than 1,000 days. The country has wild gaps in educational outcomes between different regions.
I don't think you can write all this off as an "Anglo-Saxon conspiracy". These are ideas that can be described with simple numbers, aren't they?
† Articles about Italy have long attributed this to Italy's family culture, in which people cohabitate with their extended families long into adulthood, but it seems just as likely that this is a result of laws making it hard to fire people.