WHY ITALY IS A STABLE STATE. I have posted a number of times—for example, here—-about the ideas of Nassim Taleb, the author of THE BLACK SWAN. “GoldCore” has a summary on the Zero Hedge site of an article by Taleb and Gregory Treverton in the January-February issue of Foreign Affairs.
The Foreign Affairs article, which is entitled “The Calm before the Storm”, attempts to answer an interesting question: what factors make a country or state unstable? The authors propose Italy as an example of a stable state. They arrive at this appraisal by applying this somewhat paradoxical criterion: “Fragility is aversion to disorderâ€.
Taleb and Treverton identify five characteristics of unstable states and four of the five do not apply to Italy. The five characteristics are:
* centralised decision making….Italy is decentralized.
* lack of economic diversity….Italy is not a one product country.
* lack of track record in surviving shocks…Italy has weathered a number of political crises.
* absence of political variability….Italy has had 14 prime ministerial terms in the last 25 years.
* high levels of debt and leverage….This is the test that Italy fails.
For decades, Italy had many changes of government, but often these seemed to be reshuffles of familiar figures. Italy’s politicians seemed to have longer political careers than American politicians, at American executive branch politicians.