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Luigi Zingales

lines on the record
69
first
2015-09-16
most recent
2015-09-16
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “And this is the success of Berlusconi and the success of Trump in portraying themselves as friend of the people. Why? In part is because they speak at a very low level. So people identify with them and they are happy to identify because even somebody that is so sort of crass like Berlusconi can become rich. Maybe I can make it too. So that's a self-identification is very important. But the most important thing that, and this is coming to my advantage, having seen what Berlusconi presented for Italy, I became much more concerned about what the United States are becoming. So my favorite line is that the great contribution of Berlusconi to humankind is that made things transparent. So”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Let me start with the analogy between Trump and Berlusconi, because I think that they are very similar in every dimension. In a sense, they are both extremely good salesmen. They're both extremely wealthy and not afraid to show off their wealth. They're both obsessed with women. They're both obsessed with air or lack of air for Berlusconi. They both profess themselves as free marketeers, but they both made their money in businesses that are the ultimate opposite of free markets. And it says real estate and gambling versus real estate and TV that is basically a regulated utility in Italy. You make money by having the right connection with government. So that's the aversion of free market. But they're both extremely good.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's hard to tax houses. And honestly, if you were to do a wealth tax on houses, the value of houses would go down because people are very illiquid and so would go down. Now, how can you tax a lot other stuff? Labor leaves, I'm an example of that. And unfortunately, there is an increasing number of people living. So when I left Italy, very few people were leaving at that time. Today, it's hard to find people of the younger generation not leaving. It's really sort of a major migration that, by the way, decreased the human capital because now who are living, Italy is in the business of exporting”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think it's false. The only thing that I agree is that Italians give the best and the worst times. I think that that's definitely the case. However, I'm surprised that you don't think there are significant that way cost of taxation and with distribution. And especially within a more mobile world, this is becoming very serious. You mentioned correctly houses, though that's the only stuff that cannot run away. People run away. Financial capital runs away. Houses don't run away. So first of all, Italians attack very little on houses today. And the first decision that Renzi has made is to detax houses completely. Yes, I know. So it's going completely in the wrong direction. Why? Because it's extremely unpopular. If 70% of people own houses, then...”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “No, unfortunately, we miss the right moment. There was a moment in which 50% of the debt was owned by foreigners and the Germans made sure that we bought it all back. That was part of the system. And now, I think 70% owned by Italians, so it's mostly with distribution. But I think that it's very hard to imagine that we can sustain this level of debt. I think that the combination between lack of fertility, lack of productivity growth, and not particularly love for immigration makes sort of demography being the number one consideration. And I've said this like 10 years ago. And of course, nobody wants to talk about these things, but it's inevitable.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's difficult to predict, especially the future. I think that my view is one thing I can predict fairly confidently is that we are not going to pay the debt. So there will be some form of...”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Was there, has been there, and there still is there, but we don't have enough young people. And now what the Chinese are doing are taking over mostly sort of the bars, the restaurants, the small things initially, because those are the easy one to enter. And there are many and they are very dynamic. And so I think that's exactly the Italian problem.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, one friend of mine was saying that the demise of the Italian firm family structure is the demise of the Italian family. And it says, when you used to have seven kids, one out of seven in the family was smart, you could find, right? So you could transfer the family, the business within the family with a little bit of mercas and selection. When you're down to one or two kids, the chance is that one is an idiot and it's pretty large. And so the result is that you can't really transfer the business within the family. And so that's the biggest problem of Italy is actually fertility in my view because we don't have enough kids. And if you don't have enough kids, you don't have enough people to transfer. You don't have enough young people to be dynamic. So the talent culture has a lot of defects, but the entrepreneurship culture.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Exactly, at least there is some redistribution internally. Or at the end of the day, you can scale these things up. I think that's a huge problem.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Exactly. Why? Because the model they're doing allows people to steal whatever they want because you take money here, you use coffee all over the place, you have no monitoring of how much coffee is consumed, how much revenue I produce. If you don't have the lady checking you out throughout the day, at the end of the day, there's zero revenues and all costs. In Starbucks, everything is computerized. So you know at the end of the day how many coffee you have to have and how many RAM you have to have, how much coffee you have consumed, you can actually order coffee online automatically because everything is centralized in Seattle. So you can scale it. In the extreme agency problems of Italy makes it difficult to scale firms. So either you have family firms in which you have all the employees that are part of the family, and it's not obvious that family does not steal, but still.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Explanation If you go to an Italian coffee, by the way, the only country in the world where Starbucks has not arrived is Italy. And so if you go to an Italian coffee shop, the productivity of the individual working there is five times the one of Starbucks. They do coffee cappuccino one after the other, no question ask. They understand five orders contemporaneously. You come here to the United States.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Absolutely, but it's not just the epoch of this world, it's also the Starbucks. It says, if there is one thing Italy is competitive on and is better than everybody else is food. And the fact that the major chain of coffee is not Italian is really hurtful. And it says, I understand that apple is an American product, okay? But when I arrived in this country 27 years ago, you're not really drinking coffee, you are drinking like a dark thing that tastes like, I don't say what because we are online, okay? So the cultural coffee did not exist here and the culture of coffee and a cafe where you sort of sit and drink, etc. What Starbox is, is an Italian or at most French culture. And why we are unable to export this? And this is my little...”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “This is a very hard question, but let me try to say that what I think was wrong is precipitating the unification without really a national culture. They talk, they go to the same meetings, etc., etc. And they're trying to force unification over sort of the desire of people. And the result, I think, is not working very well. And in the old days you were sending sort of troops to maintain the south under order. Now you use the central bank or you use sort of, but it's not that different. At the end of the day, what I fear is a desertification of the southern part of Europe similar to what happened in the southern part of Italy.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Used to be only in Sicily. Today is present in Milan, is present in Venice, is present everywhere. So I think that we are questioning what has gotten wars. I think there is this component. And the second is the boom, what people did not fully realize, but the boom of Italy in 1980s was a boom of a developing country that had a protected currency area. And this is, we were playing the catch-up nation within Europe. And while everybody else in Europe was moving in more advanced sort of production and services, et cetera, they were leaving behind market space for us to capture the sort of less technological productions, and we did it with Gusto. And so it was a boom in the 80s, but was a boom in the wrong direction.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Two things. First of all, the distinction that Patnan makes and a lot of people make about the north and the south. I think in some senses disappearing in Italy, but in the worst direction, it says all Italy is looking more like the south. So the north, the northern people, and I come from the north, even if my grandfather came from the south, but I came from the north and people in the north, when I go back home, they still feel like very proud and much better than the people in the south. And I say, you know, when you're in the Titanic, being on the third deck or the first deck doesn't make a huge difference. Yeah, you are on the third deck is better than the first because you just sink a little bit later, but you still sink. And I think that there is this arrogance in the north that I don't think is fully justified because many of the bad practices of the South have been imported in the North.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Pay taxes without too much tax evasion, but not too much taxes because otherwise they don't produce and so on and so forth. And Italy has failed, in my view, to do that. And I think that the new government by Wenze is trying to do this. The Jew is still out whether it will succeed.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I don't think there is any evidence that's the case in spite of the fact there is very strong correlation temporally. I think that the said reality is that the institutional deficit present in Italy are particularly severe as you approach the technological frontier. So if you have institutions that don't work, that are corrupt and etc, you can get by if the only thing you have to do is improve agriculture and produce t-shirts. And we've seen sort of Cambodia, not great institution, but they produce great t-shirts and it works. Once you try to compete in the first league, once you try to be at the frontier of the technology, you need to have a relatively non-corrupt government, a system where people”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And the question of why I think is one of the most important questions not just for the future of Italy, but for the future of Europe in general. A co-author, I have tried to analyze the values theories, because one theory which is very popular, particularly in Italy, is that it's all fault of the euro. Because it is true that this sort of sudden stop happened roughly at the time Italy joined the euro.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “That you said correctly is not just the fact we're coming out from a triple recession, it's the fact that Italy did not grow for the last 20 years. And there are a lot of things that Don't go well in Italy. But when I left it 27 years ago, a lot of things were not working and Italy was growing. In fact, in the period of 1945 to 1995, Italy grew at a rate that was at least as good, if not better, than Europe and the United States, and especially in terms of productivity. And since 1995, Italy stopped growing in terms of productivity. And of course, if you don't grow in terms of productivity, don't grow in term of income per capita and so on and so forth.”

    2015-09-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Luigi Zingales on Italy, Google and Conglomeration, and Donald Trump (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source