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The Italian Economic Miracle in the Movies of the Time-1X

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The Italian Economic Miracle in the Movies of the Time-1X INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR ECONOMIC RESEARCH WORKING PAPER SERIES S. Adamo THE ITALIAN ECONOMIC MIRACLE IN COEVAL CINEMA A CASE STUDY ON THE INTELLECTUAL REACTION TO ITALY’S SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE Working Paper No. 7/2013 THE ITALIAN ECONOMIC MIRACLE IN COEVAL CINEMA * A case study on the intellectual reaction to Italy’s social and economic change Stefano Adamo‡ Banja Luka University, Banja Luka; International Centre for Economic Research (ICER) Abstract : This essay explores the subject of the aversion of intellectuals to the market economy through a study of the Italian cinema of the early 1960s. The impact of Italy's ‘economic miracle’ on coeval cinema can hardly be overemphasized. Not only it inspired well-known art films, such as Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse , but it also played an inspirational role on the popular genre of the Commedia all'italiana , featuring as a context in Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso and as the main theme in Vittorio De Sica’s Il Boom . The films suggest that the economic boom is bringing forth a scenario dominated by ruthless predators—e.g., Alain Delon in L’Eclisse —and in which virtuous characters have no chance to survive—e.g., Lean-Louis Trintignant in Il Sorpasso . In other words, the films offer a critical view of the changing economy by showing that it favors the ascent of controversial human types who trample on traditional moral values, and dooms those who do not adapt to the new rules of the game. Comparing the realities of the economic scenario with the films under discussion reveals a clash between the existential anxieties and moral corruption that the films emphasize and the story that economic and statistical data tell us. Contrary to what is commonly thought, these films do not capture the essence of the time, but give us a partial, if not distorted, understanding of it. JEL : P19o, Z100 Keywords : Italian economic boom; Italian cinema; Capitalism; Intellectuals and society; Public opinion; Lay comprehension of economics. * I would like to thank Sigrid Streit, Enrico Colombatto, Carlo Testa, and the members of the 2013 ICER workshop for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. ‡ Stefano Adamo, Department of Italian Studies, Faculty of Philology, Banja Luka, Bulevar vojvode Petra Bojovi ća, 1A – 78000 Banja Luka, BiH; E-mail: [email protected], Phone: +387 51-340-120. 2 The Italian ‘economic miracle’ in coeval cinema A case study on the intellectual reaction to Italy’s social and economic change 1 Introduction In this paper, I explore a subject that has engaged several classical liberal thinkers of the recent past, namely the aversion of most intellectuals for capitalism and the market economy in Western countries after the Second World War. After briefly illustrating some of the most popular studies that have so far explored the issue, I confront their theses with the case of four Italian films released at the time of Italy’s ‘economic boom’ (roughly, 1958-1963) and thematically centered on that event. The films in question—Il Sorpasso , Il Boom , L’Eclisse , and La Dolce Vita —relate the economic growth to an alleged obliteration of moral values brought about by a new entrepreneurial class benefitting from that historical juncture. In so doing, the films transmit a sense of discomfort and suspicion against the development process per se , suggesting that little good can emerge from an economy based on entrepreneurship and a free- market order. Such a view clearly gives credit to the concern expressed by classical liberals about the aversion of intellectuals to the market economy. However, a close examination of the films suggests that the explanations attempted so far to account for the views they express need further consideration. I begin by summarizing the main points raised in the classical liberal tradition about the relationship between intellectuals and capitalism, from Hayek to Sowell, showing its relevance to our understanding of how public opinion takes 1 Paper presented at the American Association of Italian studies conference, Eugene, OR, April 11, 2013. A previous version of this text was presented at the International Center For Economic Research fellows’ workshop, Prague, February 26, 2013. 3 shape. I then turn to the Italian art cinema climate of the post-war period, stressing how film writers and directors of that generation understood the political and ideological implications of filmmaking. After describing the representation of the economic boom that the four films convey, I conclude by showing why that representation is inaccurate and offers no support for the moral judgment suggested by the films. I argue that although the growth process did pose some real problems that could have caught the attention of a politically engaged filmmaker, the films’ criticism of the economic boom is based on a misleading representation of the Italian economy as a land of adventurers, seeking easy profits in an unregulated business environment. Of course, topical inaccuracy does in no way undermine the artistic—i.e., aesthetic—merit of these films; it shows, however, that contrary to what is commonly thought, the films do not capture the essence of the time, but give us a partial if not distorted vision of it. Intellectuals and capitalism For many years, since Hayek’s seminal essay on the “Intellectuals and Socialism” (1949), classical liberal philosophers and social scientists have tried to understand what led most Western intellectuals to embrace anti-market ideas. Hayek identified them as a class of professionals “who through their habitual intercourse with the printed word become carriers of new ideas outside their own fields” (Hayek 1949, 419). Therefore, the class includes journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists and artists—all of whom, says Hayek, may be masters of the technique of conveying ideas, but are usually amateurs with respect to the substance of what is conveyed. Hayek’s own view was that intellectuals, which he somewhat contemptuously qualified as “second-hand dealers in ideas,” tend to sympathize with socialist views for essentially two reasons: 4 The first is that they judge all particular issues exclusively in light of certain general ideas; the second that the characteristic errors of any age are frequently derived from some genuine truths it has discovered, and they are erroneous applications of new generalizations which have proved their value in other fields. (Hayek 1949, 423) More specifically, Hayek’s view was that Western intellectuals gave credit to socialist ideas because (1) some key economic flaws of socialism were not immediately visible to the uninitiated—e.g., the problem of economic calculation in the absence of a market price system—and (2) because their fashioning as scientific ideas reinvigorated the old time dream of manipulating society in the same way in which scientists manipulate nature. One further attempt to take up this line of investigation from where Hayek left off was undertaken by Mises, whose Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, released in (1956), presents a wide-ranging survey of what the author describes as a downright resentment towards capitalism on the part of various professional groups, including writers, performers, “white collars” and others. According to Mises, Western and especially American intellectuals tend to embrace anti- capitalist ideas essentially as a reaction to an alleged loss of status and privilege brought about by the advent of capitalistic mass consumption. Although the argument is articulated along the lines of a fairly uncontroversial cost-benefit analysis, the highly polemical tone of the book and the oversimplified character of his illustrations weaken Mises’s case, and raise the doubt that the book is rather intended to be a political pamphlet than a straightforward social study. At the turn of our century, Robert Nozick (1998) and two French sociologists, Diego Ríos and Raul Magni-Berton (2003), independently tackled the problem from a similar angle. All three ascribe the anti-capitalistic feeling of most intellectuals to the different reward structures present in the market and the school system. The argument goes somewhat like this: the class of intellectuals (journalists, writers, teachers, etc.) is mainly composed of people who thrived at school. Their success in the classroom makes them feel entitled to enjoy a 5 comparable status for the rest of their professional life as well. However, school and market have different reward structures. For example, whereas market rewards are distributed “horizontally,” i.e., through the exchange mechanism, school rewards are the result of a top-down process such as grading. More importantly, whereas market is morally agnostic—in the sense that the value of production is solely given by its demand—school success depends on meeting criteria that are often underlain by moral values: doing homework requires patience and assiduity; acquiring and creatively elaborating knowledge requires humility and engagement. What these differences come down to, among other things, is that being good at school does not guarantee a high-income job 2. It should therefore not come as a surprise that those who fare well in the former might feel less at ease in the latter, the authors conclude. Recently, Thomas Sowell (2012) has joined the debate by observing that “most intellectuals outside the field of economics show remarkably little interest in learning even the basic fundamentals of economics” (2012, 34). Sowell continues by showing that, more often than not, the animosity of many intellectuals toward the market follows from the wrong assumption that the market process reflects a zero-sum game. Sowell provides a broad (and sarcastic) survey on the many ways in which twentieth-century intellectuals have fallen short of their mission by failing to correctly identify social problems and historical trends—extolling soviet socialism for its alleged economic efficiency being one among several examples.
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