Censis: Italians increasingly anti-Western and less and less educated. Denatality effect: large assets will be concentrated in a few hands

The lack of basic knowledge makes citizens more disoriented and vulnerable. As far as the school system is concerned, they do not reach the learning targets in Italian: 24.5% of pupils at the end of primary school, 39.9% at the end of middle school, 43.5% at the end of high school (in vocational schools the figure rises dramatically to 80.0%). In mathematics: 31.8% at primary school, 44.0% at middle school and 47.5% at high school (the peak is still in vocational schools, with 81.0%). 49.7% of Italians do not know how to correctly indicate the year of the French Revolution, 30.3% do not know who Giuseppe Mazzini is (for 19.3% he was a politician of the First Republic), 32.4% do not know whether the Sistine Chapel was frescoed by Giotto or Leonardo, and 6.1% do not know whether the great poet Dante Alighieri was the author of the Divine Comedy. While cultural hegemony is being discussed, for many Italians the problem of cultural citizenship is still to come (after all, for 5.8% the 'culturist' is a 'person of culture'). In the limbo of ignorance, stereotypes and prejudices can take root: 20.9% of Italians assert that Jews dominate the world through finance, 15.3% believe that homosexuality is a disease, 13.1% believe that people's intelligence depends on their ethnicity, 9.2% believe that the propensity to commit crimes is of genetic origin (in other words, one is born a criminal), and 8.3% believe that Islam and jihadism are the same thing.

There is a high risk that, after the vigorous post-pandemic recovery, moreover sustained by public debt, Italy's growth prospects are rapidly fading. The accounts, notes the Censis, do not add up. Despite the less than encouraging signs about the GDP trend, the number of employed people stood at 23,878,000 on average in the first six months of the year, an increase of one and a half million jobs compared to the black year of the pandemic and an increase of 4.6% compared to 2007. But the distance between the Italian employment rate (we are last in Europe) and the European average still remains significant: 8.9 percentage points less in 2023. If Italy's activity rate were equal to the European average, we could have 3 million additional labour forces, and if we reached the European level of the employment rate, we would exceed the threshold of 26 million employed: 3.3 million more than in 2023.

The challenges concern the sustainability of the system in the future, also and above all in economic terms. And the welfare is at the forefront. Between 2013 and 2023, there has been a 23.0 per cent increase in real terms in per capita private healthcare expenditure, which totalled more than EUR 44 billion in the last year. To 62.1% of Italians it happened at least once to postpone a medical check-up, diagnostic tests or specialist visits because the waiting list in National Health Service clinics was too long and the cost to be incurred in private facilities was considered too high. 53.8% happened to have to resort to their savings to pay for the necessary health services. On the social security front, 75.7% think they will not have an adequate pension when they leave work. In particular, 89.8% of young people have this certainty.

At the same time, Censis concludes in the new report, a massive intergenerational transition of wealth is on the horizon. One of the hidden effects of the denatality that has preoccupied the country for many years is that, due to the prolonged decline in births, the number of heirs is shrinking, so in perspective inheritances are becoming more concentrated. Today, families of the 'silent generation' (those born before World War II) and the baby boom (those born between the post-war years and the early 1960s) together hold 58.3% of net household wealth. Waiting in the wings are part of 'generation X' (those born between 1965 and 1980), the millennials and 'generation Z' (those born in the last decades of the last century and the first years of the new millennium). What will be the psychological effect on those who know they are the recipients of a succession act? Perhaps a reduced appetite for entrepreneurial risk, compressed by the expectations of potential rentiers. With inevitable consequences in terms of slowing growth.