The buzz

[fpb]

I recently spent a couple of days in Rome on business. I mostly live and work in London, but I am involved in a company in Rome and from time to time I have to make brief dashes south. On this occasion, however, I was struck by a difference in mood, in the quality of activity and even attitude, between London and Rome - or rather, Italy. Rome is

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[fishlivejournal]

Nice. How can this be encouraged to spread? (not the arms dealing of course, but the cottage industry mindset).

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Hard to tell, really. It must have existed in England once, or else the industrial revolution would never have happened. I can tell you, having experienced it for a while, that the English unemployment relief system is probably one of the main culprits. It is geared towards looking for "jobs", that is, towards being permanently employed by someone else. I can tell you that taking a single transaction-type job, such as one translation, is a nightmare: you have to sign off the whole unemployment thing and then sign on again one or two days later, which is a nuisance and means that your cheque is blocked for two weeks - even if you are lucky and some bureaucratic clown up the pole doesn't find some excuse to slow it down further. As for what happens when you tell them that you want to set up - or in my case, to set up again - an independent business, I ended up having a shouting match with a particularly incompetent employee who had no idea what a translator did.

[fpb]

If I am correct, then the whole system has done a lot worse than just dampen English entrepreneurial spirits. England has a whole underclass which, having been turned loose by the labour-heavy industries of the recent past, have remained largely unemployed and underemployed, and heavily dependent on others to find work for them. The people who, in Italy, are most prominent in the self-employed business-building group - middle-aged and aging men, say forty to seventy, with a family and some work experience - tend, in England, to have no prospects beyond the ruined industries that cut them loose ten or twenty years ago. The next generation tends to live on temporary or unqualified jobs, and the one after that, not motivated to join society, follows the path of illiteracy and criminality I outlined in my essay about education. In a sense, what you see there is a recovery of the old spirit of enterprise, but in a villainous and parasitic way, as of someone who has simply no concern with wider society. All the while, unemployment