(Image credit: rickz)

Per­haps get­ting my hack­les raised on the reg­u­lar about disin­gen­u­ous­ness in  jour­nal­ism reflects poorly on my level of sophis­ti­ca­tion as a reader/consumer. But this recent arti­cle on The Daily Beast (Slate junior in terms of those godaw­ful “provocative” tabloid head­lines) about job woes for Ph.D. hold­ers still makes me sigh and drum my fin­gers impatiently.

Of course a spe­cial­ized market niche will face greater chal­lenges during a sweep­ing eco­nomic melt­down across the coun­try. Things can be dis­turbingly com­pet­i­tive even during the best of times in the aca­d­e­mic job market, espe­cially, as the arti­cle notes, for Ph.D. hold­ers in the human­i­ties. But this isn’t news; plenty of pixels have been pop­u­lated with lamen­ta­tions over the dis­par­ity in supply and demand for higher ed posi­tions. It’s also not news that hold­ers of grad­u­ate degrees in human­i­ties go on to careers in fields loosely related or not at all to the human­i­ties, another rev­e­la­tion we get on page two.

Ian Fisher has a good arti­cle about Italy in today’s New York Times. He writes of a national sense of malaise, or malessere, “a col­lec­tive funk—economic, polit­i­cal and social—summed up in a recent poll: Ital­ians, despite their claim to have mas­tered the art of living, say they are the least happy people in West­ern Europe.” I’m gen­er­ally skep­ti­cal of claims to national feel­ing, but what Fisher describes accords exactly with what I saw living in Bologna last year. Even though my time there spanned sev­eral hope­ful moments—the evic­tion of Silvio Berlus­coni from Palazzo Chigi, the arrest of Bernardo Proven­zano, Italy’s World Cup victory—the two words my Ital­ian friends and acquain­tances couldn’t seem to avoid in describ­ing their coun­try were cazzo and merda.

Fisher lines up the usual sus­pects for this national funk, includ­ing polit­i­cal stag­na­tion, orga­nized crime, and the move to an non­de­pre­cia­ble euro. But the single factor I heard blamed most often was Italy’s geron­toc­racy. (Remem­ber that I was talk­ing mostly to twenty- and thirty-​somethings.) The effects of that geron­toc­racy on the youth are cap­tured neatly in a single sta­tis­tic cited by Fisher: he writes that “70 per­cent of Ital­ians between 20 and 30 still live at home, con­demn­ing the young to an extended and under­pro­duc­tive adolescence,” and goes on to quote Mario Adi­nolfi, a 36-year-old blog­ger and “aspiring lawmaker”:

The gen­er­a­tional prob­lem is the Ital­ian problem…. In every coun­try young people hope. Here in Italy there is no hope any­more.

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