Adrian Wooldridge, Columnist

Italy’s Romance with Meritocracy Has Been On-Again, Off-Again

Italian businesses and government bureaus can’t afford to turn back to nepotism.

June 5, 2022 at 6:00 AM UTC

Corrected

June 5, 2022 at 12:04 PM UTC

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”

The times, they have changed.
Photographer: Andrea Pattaro/AFP/Getty Images/AFP

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

A “festival of economics” sounds like a contradiction in terms. What next? A bacchanalia of boredom? A celebration of sophistry? Thomas Carlyle dubbed economics “the dismal science” for good reason.

Yet Turin’s International Festival of Economics lived up to its billing. Giuseppe Laterza, the festival impresario, got the inspiration of the festival from two sources: the Hay-on-Wye book festival in rural Herefordshire, which Bill Clinton dubbed “the Woodstock of the mind,” and a festival of philosophy in Modena.