But why do crises in our country always have an asymmetrical generational impact that falls more on the younger age groups? “First of all because there isn’t a structured youth policy, there isn’t a strategy – specifies Monti – A generational impact assessment is needed for each provision presented to the House and Senate, as in the German and Austrian model. In Italy this sensitivity has always been lacking, one does not think about the future impact”. Sporadic interventions, such as the culture bonus or the house bonus they’re not enough: “Seeing no future, young people don’t invest, even if they have the concessions: they don’t get into debt for a house for 25 years. Then let’s think of the interventions for startups, where only 18% concern young people, the rest are created by former managers who have left other companies “.
There is no framework law
For young people, according to the Luiss professor, further facilitations for hiring or incentives for structural training would be needed, in short, long-term interventions: “We need a framework law on young people and we need a pact for youth employment immediately, which among other things is one of the obligations contained in the 2030 Agenda. It is an agreement with the social partners to define a common and single strategy, which also deals with mobility but also with the housing problem. Young people struggle to get a stable job, not permanent but decent: it is full of involuntary part-time jobs. The minimum salary does not allow mobility”.
So there is a lot of talk about young people but little is done: “A formidable opportunity has been lost: the youth pillar was envisaged in Brussels but in our Pnrr (National recovery and resilience plan, ed) does not exist. Young people have been relegated to a transversal priority such as that of women and of the South, which still today is not understood how it will be monitored, because there are no targets that impose regular monitoring which then coincides with the disbursement of resources”.
By directly questioning the young people who still have to face those walls, i.e. high school students, we see how fleeing abroad is seen more and more as a solution to the swamp in the country. Looking at the data on territorial mobility, of the 5,500 young people aged between 14 and 19 questioned via a form for the 2022 survey of the Visentini Foundation, to the question “Where do you see yourself living in 2030?”, more than 1 out of 4 answered outside Italy: “If the data were confirmed in the facts, we would be facing a much more serious migratory flow of our young people than that recorded in recent years”.
If you are poor, stay poor
From the Report on poverty and social exclusion published not even a month ago by Caritasone of the most shocking data is the inheritance of poverty: “Six people out of ten of the poor followed by Caritas come from families that have been in a state of economic fragility for some time – explains Federica De Lauso, curator of the Caritas Report -. This figure is worrying because today in Italy, according to Istat, there are one million and 400 thousand children in a state of absolute poverty. If the emancipation process is strongly linked to the status of our ancestors, we are faced with an altered condition of the principles of equality enshrined in our Constitution. Poor mobility undermines equity and social justice”.