I suoi dati dicono che il 70% degli italiani è pressoché analfabeta o analfabeta di ritorno: fatica a comprendere testi, non legge niente, nemmeno i giornali. Per il sapere un 70% di somari è una maggioranza deprimente; e per la politica costituisce un'asinocrazia travolgente e facile da travolgere. Perché siamo arrivati, o scesi, a tanto? Quasi tutti puntano il dito sullo sfascio della scuola, a tutti i livelli. Perché è la scuola che dovrebbe «alfabetizzare». Sì, ma chi ha sfasciato la scuola? Alla fonte, e più di ogni altro, sono stati i pedagogisti, il «novitismo pedagogico», i diseducatori degli educatori. E poi, s'intende, tanti altri: il sessantottismo demagogico dei politici, e anche la marea dilagante delle famiglie Spockiane (illuminate dal permissivismo a gogo del celebre dottore Benjamin Spock).

Ma quando si discute di trasformazioni della natura umana (io nel 1997 nel libro Homo Videns e di recente altri con la formula dell'Homo Zappiens) allora il fattore decisivo è la tecnologia. Così alla fine del 1400 nasce l'uomo di Gutenberg con l'invenzione della riproduzione a stampa della preesistente scrittura a mano; così, sostengo, l'invenzione della televisione crea un uomo forgiato dal «vedere» il cui sapere e capire si riduce all'ambito delle cose visibili a danno delle idee, delle immagini mentali create dal pensiero. Al limite, l'homo videns sa soltanto se vede e soltanto di quel che vede. Il che equivale a una perdita colossale delle nostre capacità mentali. Invece la teoria dell'homo zappiens trasforma questa perdita in una glorificazione, in un annunzio di nuovi e gloriosi destini.

La dizione è ricavata dal telecomando che consente e produce il cambiamento incessante dei canali televisivi; il che abituerebbe il nostro cervello al cosiddetto multitasking, al saper fare molte cose contemporaneamente. Davvero? Io direi, invece, che così veniamo abituati alla «sconnessione», a un saltare di palo in frasca che equivale alla distruzione della logica, della capacità logica di pensare una cosa alla volta, di mettere questa scomposizione analitica in sequenza, e nell'accertare se un rapporto prima-dopo sia anche un rapporto causa-effetto. Il progresso della tecnica è inevitabile. Ma deve essere contrastato quando produce l'homo stupidus stupidus. Sempre più i ragazzi di oggi vivono per 12 ore al giorno in «iperconnessione» e così, anche, in «sconnessione». Sono giustamente disgustati dalla politica. Ma dovrebbero anche essere disgustati di se stessi. Cosa sapranno combinare da grandi?
(Giovanni Sartori, Corriere della Sera, 22 marzo 2010)


Una crisi sprecata

Stiamo sprecando le opportunità di riforma offerte dalla crisi. È un vero delitto, data l'angoscia e le sofferenze che ha creato, e il peso che ha caricato sulle spalle delle finanze pubbliche. Angela Merkel e Nicolas Sarkozy si occupano di hedge fund e «credit default swap» (o CDS, quei contratti con i quali ci si assicura contro il fallimento dei debitori e che sono usati, secondo le loro accuse, per scommettere contro l'euro). O non hanno capito niente, o devono creare diversivi per distrarre l'attenzione dalla precarietà delle loro grandi banche e delle finanze pubbliche. Gli hedge fund, per esempio, sono molto, ma molto, meno a rischio delle banche. Speculano molto meno e la volatilità del loro capitale negli ultimi 10 anni è stata meno di un terzo di quella delle banche. Il rischio che gli hedge aggressivi hanno in portafoglio è supportato da un livello di capitale pari a circa 3 volte il minimo prudenziale richiesto alle banche, ed è il doppio almeno di quello che avrebbero le banche a parità di rischio. In questa crisi, pochi hedge sono falliti e nessuno ha messo a rischio il sistema o ha dovuto essere sostenuto con denaro pubblico. Potenza dell'autodisciplina imposta dal mercato ad operatori che non sono troppo grandi per fallire e che hanno quasi sempre tutto il loro patrimonio personale investito nei fondi che gestiscono. Malgrado l'alleggerimento delle regole contabili, la situazione delle grandi banche resta preoccupante, come spiega uno studio della Banca del Ceresio ripreso dal Financial Times. L'analisi dei bilanci a fine 2009 delle prime 5 banche americane ed europee evidenzia per questi 10 istituti una leva ancora di 18 volte: meno di 6 euro di capitale ogni 100 euro di attivi. Se i loro attivi perdono più del 5,5%, queste banche si ritrovano insolventi. Gli ottimisti notano che con una leva così se si guadagna più di un euro all'anno ogni cento di attivi, come sta in effetti succedendo, in 5 anni si ricostruisce il capitale. Ma un Return on Equity superiore al 20% in un'industria soggetta a regole prudenziali e finanziata da depositi garantiti dai contribuenti è sintomo di mezzi propri insufficienti, non di alta redditività ed efficienza che vengono poi prese come scuse per intascare bonus milionari. Che rischio hanno gli attivi di queste 10 grandi banche? Dai bilanci si evince un rapporto tra attivi ponderati per il rischio ed attivi totali del 46 per cento. Se fossero investite solo in obbligazioni AAA il rapporto sarebbe del 25%, mentre se fossero investite solo in azioni quotate sarebbe 125 per cento. Una via di mezzo quindi. In pratica il profilo di rischio è identico a quello del portafoglio di un signore che, avendo 100 euro di risparmi propri, ne avesse investiti 390 in azioni e 1.470 in bond AAA, facendosi finanziare la differenza da qualche matto. Ma i matti siamo tutti noi, o come depositanti, o come contribuenti, chiamati poi a salvare le banche che con questo profilo di rischio hanno la certezza di ritrovarsi insolventi almeno ogni 5 anni, se facessero i conti giusti... Purtroppo politici e regolatori non sembrano interessati a porsi le domande da cui potrebbero nascere le riforme di cui abbiamo urgente bisogno. Che mestieri devono fare le banche e con quanto capitale? Ormai per ognuno dei mestieri che fanno esistono intermediari specializzati e meglio capitalizzati. Chi deve imporre la disciplina alle banche? I regolatori hanno clamorosamente fallito proprio nel settore ove avevano i più vasti poteri. Che mercati finanziari vogliamo? Il grosso dell'intermediazione avviene in alvei opachi di negoziazione dominati da pochi grandi banche che intascano indebite rendite oligopolistiche, mentre i mercati regolamentati vengono indeboliti da normative nefaste come la MIFID. È giusto anche chiedersi che ruolo devono avere i CDS. Ma prendersela con un ambasciatore probabilmente inadatto perché il suo messaggio porta pena è un pessimo uso del poco tempo che ci resta prima che si perda il senso di urgenza della crisi e si ritorni ad una normalità ancora più precaria della precedente. Dato lo stato delle finanze pubbliche, non avremo più per troppi anni le risorse per arginare un'altra crisi finanziaria così efficacemente come fatto finora.
(Giovanni Foglia, Corriere della Sera, 22 marzo 2010)


It wasn't us
Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke still do not believe monetary policy bears any blame for the crisis

THE desire to rescue a damaged reputation is a powerful motivator. That is one conclusion to draw from a new 48-page paper written for the Brookings Institution by Alan Greenspan, the 83-year-old former chairman of America’s Federal Reserve. A man once hailed as the world’s outstanding central banker is now routinely blamed for the asset bubble and subsequent collapse. This is Mr Greenspan’s attempt to set the record straight.

The crisis, he argues, stemmed from a “classic euphoric bubble” whose roots lay in the sharp global decline in nominal and real long-term interest rates in the early part of the 2000s, which fuelled an unsustainable boom in house prices. Thanks to this euphoria, banks misread the risks embedded in complex new financial instruments. Mr Greenspan reckons the best remedy is to improve the system’s capacity to absorb losses by raising banks’ capital and liquidity ratios and increasing collateral requirements for traded financial products.

So far, so uncontroversial. Mr Greenspan’s analysis of the fragilities within finance, and his specific proposals, echo today’s policy consensus. The one area where he differs from the reform consensus is over the wisdom of a “systemic regulator”. Today’s policymakers see such a regulator, which would monitor the health of the financial system and sniff out incipient problems, as an important improvement. Mr Greenspan says it is impossible to anticipate crises and regards such a regulator as “ill-advised”.

But the biggest gap between Mr Greenspan and conventional wisdom lies in the role of monetary policy in causing the crisis. In Mr Greenspan’s telling, central banks were innocent and impotent bystanders in a global macroeconomic shift. Thanks to the end of the cold war and reform in China, he argues, hundreds of millions of workers were absorbed into the global economy. As GDP growth in emerging economies soared, their consumption could not keep up with rapidly rising income, and saving rose. The rise in desired global saving relative to desired investment caused a global decline in long-term rates, which became delinked from the short-term rates that central bankers control.

This explanation is broadly similar to the idea of a “global saving glut” which Ben Bernanke, the Fed’s current chairman, has long espoused. The similarities between the two men’s defence of their monetary records do not end there. The most combative section in Mr Greenspan’s paper—arguing that monetary policy in the early 2000s was not a cause of the housing bubble—is strikingly similar to a speech given by Mr Bernanke at the American Economics Association’s annual meeting in January.

Both men make three broad points. First, they deny that monetary policy in the early 2000s was excessively loose by traditional central-bank rules of thumb. That is a criticism frequently made by John Taylor of Stanford University, author of the Taylor rule on how interest rates should change in response to movements in inflation and GDP. Mr Bernanke points out that based on contemporary forecasts for its preferred inflation measure, the Fed actually followed the Taylor rule reasonably closely.

Second, both men say there is no evidence that low short-term rates drove house prices upward. Mr Greenspan argues that the statistical relationship between house prices and long-term rates is much stronger than with the Fed’s policy rates, and that during the early 2000s the traditionally high correlation between policy rates and long-term rates fell apart. Mr Bernanke points to structural models which show that only a modest part of the house-price boom can be pinned on monetary policy.

Both are equally sceptical that the increase in adjustable-rate mortgages made short-term rates a more potent driver of house prices. Mr Greenspan says that the pace of adjustable-rate mortgage originations peaked two years before house prices, suggesting they were not driving the bubble. Mr Bernanke argues that the monthly payments on adjustable-rate mortgages were, on average, only 16% lower than those for fixed-rate mortgages—too small a gap to suggest that short-term rates propelled the boom.

Third, Messrs Bernanke and Greenspan point to the global nature of the house-price boom as proof that monetary policy was not to blame. Both cite new research from economists at the Fed showing that the looseness of monetary policy in different countries was not correlated with changes in house prices.

By looking only at the effect of monetary policy on house prices, Messrs Bernanke and Greenspan also take too narrow a view of the potential effect of low policy rates. Several economists have argued convincingly, for instance, that low policy rates fuelled broader leverage growth in securitised markets.

Monetary policy may be a blunt tool to deal with asset bubbles. But that does not mean it is irrelevant. Interestingly, one American central banker has a more nuanced view, arguing that “in the current episode, higher short-term interest rates probably would have restrained the demand for housing by raising mortgage interest rates… In addition, tighter monetary policy may be associated with reduced leverage and slower credit growth.” That was Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Fed, who is likely to be Mr Bernanke’s new vice-chairman. With luck, she will prompt her boss to have a rethink.
(The Economist, March 20th 2010)


Smokescreen
Blaming speculators for sovereign-debt woes is misguided. Banning them would be worse

GREECE had a budget deficit of 12.7% of GDP in 2009. It has a record of dodgy accounting. Its own leaders acknowledge how dire its fiscal situation is. George Papaconstantinou, the country’s finance minister, summed it up pretty well last month. People think we are in a terrible mess. And we are.

That hasn’t stopped his boss, George Papandreou, and other European leaders from jabbing fingers elsewhere. To judge by this week’s political rhetoric, the blame for Greece’s woes lies largely with speculators, who stand accused of buying sovereign credit-default swaps (CDSs), a form of insurance against government default, in the hope of profiting from jitters about sovereign debt. “Unprincipled speculators are making billions every day by betting on a Greek default,” said Mr Papandreou in a speech in Washington, DC.

The wheels of policy are now turning. The European Commission has said it will examine the case for banning “naked” sovereign CDSs, in which buyers of protection on government debt do not actually own any of the underlying bonds. A European ban would not do much good on its own: trading would simply move to other markets. The official American response to Mr Papandreou has been tepid. But the issue is on the G20’s radar. The Financial Stability Board, which is co-ordinating international financial reform, thinks that tighter rules are likely.

Some reform of the market for sovereign CDSs is needed. Like other credit-default swaps, there is a strong case for moving these over-the-counter instruments on to central clearing-houses, which stand between buyers and sellers and reduce counterparty risk. Sensible changes of this kind are already in train in Europe and America. But the idea that speculators are to blame for Greece’s troubles is wrong-headed, and the solution of banning naked sovereign CDSs is even worse.

First, the diagnosis. The case against buyers of sovereign CDSs is that by driving up the price of insuring against default, they cause spreads on underlying cash bonds to widen, making borrowing more expensive and bringing default—and a big payout—closer. That drives up the price of insurance further, setting the cycle in motion again. The problem with this analysis is that the tail is far too puny to wag the dog. There are $9 billion of net Greek sovereign CDSs outstanding, compared with more than $400 billion of Greek government bonds. It is a similar story in other countries under pressure. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the proportion of net CDS positions to government debt is highest in Portugal, at just 5%. Moreover, CDS and bond prices have tended to move together, rather than one driving the other.

There is a long tradition of shooting messengers who bring bad news. But the simple explanation for rising borrowing costs—Greece’s finances are tatty—makes far more sense than the complex, politically convenient one. The sovereign-CDS debate is a smokescreen to obscure an unpalatable truth.
(The Economist, March 11th 2010)


Poison Ivy
Not so much palaces of learning as bastions of privilege and hypocrisy

AMERICAN universities like to think of themselves as engines of social justice, thronging with “diversity”. But how much truth is there in this flattering self-image? Over the past few years Daniel Golden has written a series of coruscating stories in the Wall Street Journal about the admissions practices of America's elite universities, suggesting that they are not so much engines of social justice as bastions of privilege. Now he has produced a book—“The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates”—that deserves to become a classic.

Mr Golden shows that elite universities do everything in their power to admit the children of privilege. If they cannot get them in through the front door by relaxing their standards, then they smuggle them in through the back. No less than 60% of the places in elite universities are given to candidates who have some sort of extra “hook”, from rich or alumni parents to “sporting prowess”. The number of whites who benefit from this affirmative action is far greater than the number of blacks.

The American establishment is extraordinarily good at getting its children into the best colleges. In the last presidential election both candidates—George Bush and John Kerry—were “C” students who would have had little chance of getting into Yale if they had not come from Yale families. Al Gore and Bill Frist both got their sons into their alma maters (Harvard and Princeton respectively), despite their average academic performances. Universities bend over backwards to admit “legacies” (ie, the children of alumni). Harvard admits 40% of legacy applicants compared with 11% of applicants overall. Amherst admits 50%. An average of 21-24% of students in each year at Notre Dame are the offspring of alumni. When it comes to the children of particularly rich donors, the bending-over-backwards reaches astonishing levels. Harvard even has something called a “Z” list—a list of applicants who are given a place after a year's deferment to catch up—that is dominated by the children of rich alumni.

University behaviour is at its worst when it comes to grovelling to celebrities. Duke University's admissions director visited Steven Spielberg's house to interview his stepdaughter. Princeton found a place for Lauren Bush—the president's niece and a top fashion model—despite the fact that she missed the application deadline by a month. Brown University was so keen to admit Michael Ovitz's son that it gave him a place as a “special student”. (He dropped out after a year.)

Most people think of black football and basketball stars when they hear about “sports scholarships”. But there are also sports scholarships for rich white students who play preppie sports such as fencing, squash, sailing, riding, golf and, of course, lacrosse. The University of Virginia even has scholarships for polo-players, relatively few of whom come from the inner cities.

You might imagine that academics would be up in arms about this. Alas, they have too much skin in the game. Academics not only escape tuition fees if they can get their children into the universities where they teach. They get huge preferences as well. Boston University accepted 91% of “faculty brats” in 2003, at a cost of about $9m. Notre Dame accepts about 70% of the children of university employees, compared with 19% of “unhooked” applicants, despite markedly lower average SAT scores.

Why do Mr Golden's findings matter so much? The most important reason is that America is witnessing a potentially explosive combination of trends. Social inequality is rising at a time when the escalators of social mobility are slowing (America has lower levels of social mobility than most European countries). The returns on higher education are rising: the median earnings in 2000 of Americans with a bachelor's degree or higher were about double those of high-school leavers. But elite universities are becoming more socially exclusive. Between 1980 and 1992, for example, the proportion of disadvantaged children in four-year colleges fell slightly (from 29% to 28%) while the proportion of well-to-do children rose substantially (from 55% to 66%).

Mr Golden's findings do not account for all of this. Get rid of affirmative action for the rich, and rich children will still do better. But they clearly account for some differences: “unhooked” candidates are competing for just 40% of university places. And they raise all sorts of issues of justice and hypocrisy. What is one to make of Mr Frist, who opposes affirmative action for minorities while practising it for his own son?

Two groups of people overwhelmingly bear the burden of these policies—Asian-Americans and poor whites. Asian-Americans are the “new Jews”, held to higher standards (they need to score at least 50 points higher than non-Asians even to be in the game) and frequently stigmatised for their “characters” (Harvard evaluators persistently rated Asian-Americans below whites on “personal qualities”). When the University of California, Berkeley briefly considered introducing means-based affirmative action, it rejected the idea on the ground that “using poverty yields a lot of poor white kids and poor Asian kids”.

There are a few signs that the winds of reform are blowing. Several elite universities have expanded financial aid for poor children. Texas A&M has got rid of legacy preferences. Only last week Harvard announced that it was getting rid of “early admission”—a system that favours privileged children—and Princeton rapidly followed suit. But the wind is going to have to blow a heck of a lot harder, and for a heck of a lot longer, before America's money-addicted and legacy-loving universities can be shamed into returning to what ought to have been their guiding principle all along: admitting people to university on the basis of their intellectual ability.
(The Economist, September 21st 2006)


Entlaßt die Experten

Es dürfte mittlerweile keinem aufmerksamen Menschen entgangen sein: Die Prognosen der Wirtschaftsforschungsinstitute sind ungefähr so zuverlässig wie die Orakel von Sterndeutern und Kaffeesatzlesern. Monat für Monat wird das Ritual unerschütterlich wiederholt. Man verkündigt die frohe Botschaft, wir seien bereits aus der Sohle des Tränentals heraus, um im gleichen Zug zu erklären, daß sich die letzte Vorhersage als falsch erwiesen hat und „nach unten revidiert” werden muß. Erneut werden Daten und Indizes prophezeit, nach denen sich die Entscheidungen der Politik und das Verhalten der Wirtschaftsakteure richten sollen. Bis zur nächsten Korrektur.

Man könnte glauben, daß der handelnde Mensch Hauptgegenstand der Wirtschaftswissenschaft sei, doch er wird als Störfaktor jener mechanischen Gesetzmäßigkeit angesehen, die das Weltgeschehen regelt. An dieser Trennung zwischen Reinheit und Sünde ist das fundamentalistisch-religiöse Moment der Ökonomie zu erkennen.

Der zweite Grund: Experten seien keine Beobachter eines ihnen äußerlichen Gegenstands, sondern selbst Teil des Gegenstands. Prognosen sind nicht neutral. Wenn ich zum Beispiel ankündige, daß eine Firma demnächst insolvent wird, und mir Glauben geschenkt wird, dann beeinflusse ich das Verhalten von Kunden, Lieferanten und Aktionären, und die Firma gerät erst recht in Schwierigkeiten. Ich habe die Tatsache nicht vorhergesagt, sondern mitverursacht. Wirtschaftssubjekte reagieren auf eine Vielzahl von Reizen, darunter auch Prognosen und maßgebliche Meinungen. Daher meint Brodbeck: „Die Anwendung der Theorie ist ihre Falsifikation.”

Wenn die „Erwartungen” der Haushalte veröffentlicht werden, dann wird damit gerechnet, daß jeder Haushalt sein Verhalten dem angekündigten Konsens anpassen wird. Zudem beschränken sich Experten nicht darauf, leere Vorhersagen zu liefern. Sie beraten auch Entscheidungsträger. Dabei dürfen ihre schulmeisterlichen Empfehlungen um so radikaler sein, als sie weder auf Wähler noch auf Belegschaften Rücksicht nehmen müssen.