Censis (Centro Studi Investimenti Sociali) has been producing for fiftysix years a constant and articulated research, advice and technical assistance in the socio-economic development. This business has developed over the years through the implementation of studies on the social, economic and territorial development, intervention programs and cultural initiatives in the vital areas of the Italian society: education, work and representation, welfare and health care, the territory and the nets, economic actors, media and communication, public governance, security and citizenship.
The annual "Report on the social situation of the country", yearly prepared by Censis since 1967, is considered the most qualified and complete tool for the interpretation of the Italian society. This here below is the abstract of the 2024 report.
In Italy it's back to talking about growth. The question of how to sustain the progress of Italian society can no longer be postponed. The country has begun timidly to consider the possibility of assimilating emerging processes and of building growth paths consistent with them, because the deficit has emerged of collective mastery of the profound transformations that the flow of history imposes on Italian society, in behaviors daily life and in medium- or long-return investments.
The transformation of the industrial sector, conditioned by the fragility of many global supply chains and the slowdown of major European players, in a framework of growing international uncertainty (especially due to the rising costs of many raw materials), opens up processes of innovation and investment. The drive to do business by young people and the families that support them, in traditional as well as advanced sectors, presses on gradually larger economic segments. The strengthened social consciousness of the demand for the protection of the fragile, women victims of abuse and violence, the non-self-sufficient elderly, and the poor, calls voluntary work and the heterogeneous world of nonprofits to a profound structural revision of the structures and forms of non-emergency solidarity. It is not without significance that the highest and most critical calls resounded repeatedly over the past year to warn of the risks of progressive marginalization of Italy and Europe have had in common the duty of humility, seriousness, discipline.
There is a high risk that after the vigorous post-pandemic recovery, which was moreover exceptionally supported by government borrowing, Italy's growth prospects are rapidly clouded. There is perhaps a contradiction between common feeling and logic, where the former affirms the primacy of getting out of waiting and the latter the inability, if not the impossibility, of taking a path and following it with the necessary vigor and appropriate hopes.
The paradox is more political than social. The path of an ultrademocratic society-“polyarchical,” Censis wrote in the 1990s, in which we govern, or at least concert governmental choices, with large collective actors-has not worked. After so many years of political prominence, the many forms of self-government in social and territorial subsystems, of trade unions, trade associations, local and regional governments, have remained as smoke in the air. Similarly, hypotheses of government by charisma, by overabundance of powers, by the exercise of chieftains deciding for everyone by pounding their fists on the table have not worked. In between, we have tried them all: technical governments, of the best or transitional; sovereignist or populist governments; devolution of powers and differentiated autonomy; asphyxiating anti-politics. There have been alternating myths and hopes of planning and reform, without removing the incrustations of the past. The social body, on the other hand, even in a fragile and slabbered society, always follows its own logic and tends to bring the ungovernable engine of growth and development back on track.
Inside the oscillation of continuity and change, of expectation and transformation, of individualistic cynicism and collective cohesion, in a temporal complexity poor in rules, as always society seeks its own rhythm to exercise its intentions. In this difficult year, and after such a long time spent in waiting, one must take the risk of going further.
After years - more than 15 years now - in which Italian society has stood at the window, a new world scenario and a new technological scenario are on the horizon in which boats no longer all rise and fall with the same tide.
By a very large majority, Italians nevertheless float, despite everything and as always. Skillful floating does not, however, protect us from a long series of drawbacks. In bland water it is more difficult to stay afloat: if the fluid in which we are immersed changes density, we either increase our effort or go down. If the water gradually decreases in level, we do not sink but also stop floating, and the submerged part comes to light (and discovers its flaws). If the distances between each other increase, because we see fewer and fewer families and businesses competing around, adaptation remains an individual responsibility and stops being a collective quality, and fewer and fewer will be able to float. Out of metaphor, it seems to be safe to say that it is true that we have weathered crises well, but the time has come to take note that this is no longer enough.
Our society is much more mestizo than we say, accustomed to mixing values and meanings, people and behaviors. Part Western and part Mediterranean, Levantine and Middle Eastern, peasant and cybernetic, polyglot and dialectal, worldly and plebeian. We are no longer a thundering running society for development, but neither have we become a people of poor devils destined to remain miserable.
In recent months, the larger and more advanced European nations have shown many frailties in the economic and social fields, as in the expression of financial, industrial, and administrative leadership. But Italy is an ancient country, where, however, it is difficult to sketch a collective identity. A picture emerges of a pulverized people with little sense of history, however, in search of a collective identity that sums up the long season of competing individual identities.
In a country that is feeling the rush of getting moving again, putting its intermediate dimensions back into play, depowering imitative drives, trying to tread water not only to float and survive, but also to move in new directions, there remains the age-old vice of a scarcity of direction, an absence of goals and the courage to assert them. It is exhausting to give direction to development, to imagine a course and follow a navigational chart. Doing politics is a high exercise, it is the art of consensus and interpretation of social feelings and needs, it is a task complex of responsibility and imagination: it means reading the country's gaze into the future. Yet, the year that closes leaves the bitter taste of a politics all played out on the taste not of doing, but of being political.
In a closed society, growth is either not there or is dramatically slow. Economic, social and personal welfare development matures and becomes concrete in societies capable of opening up to the new, of breaking the fence, of exploring new boundaries, of welcoming new graft, of running new dangers. When, conversely, real possibilities for mobility, advancement, individual advancement are not accessible to each social group, a society remains trapped within itself, folds up, waits. An open society brings with it risks, for collective institutions and for private life, and, with risks, it also brings concerns about loss of security, limitations on redistribution of rents, cultural hybridization. It is a risk that our society seems unwilling to take, but one that, at the same time, it cannot afford not to take if it wants to grow and no longer float.