good evening i hope that you can hear me we are about to conclude the sixth edition of the festival for economics of and as you know in this edition we discussed very many topics also interrelated one with the other and i think that it was specifically interesting to see the relations between them economic freedom is the topic that we chose to guide our reflections problems and consequences linked to the so-called globalization was another issue as well as the need to give more strength to political europe and immigration policies these are just some of the very many topics that we addressed those that were recurrent so to say in the various meetings due in these meetings economists analyze the economic crisis that we have in this part of the world without taboos without stereotypes accepting to freely exchange views about this and we were inspired by our scientific director in this title boyeri he's a very free person and open person so we also exchange views with sociologists jourists neuroscientists philosophers in this context of intellectual intellectual rigor and freedom of thought it was precious and important for the festival to again listen to sigmund baumann baumann as you know was here at the festival in the first edition and he spoke about the hospital planet and the mission of europe he addressed us on the responsibility of europe towards the world and today he would address us on freedom and liberty and threat to freedom as well these threats are very well known to bowman uh because his life and his uh uh theory is a paid a testimony to that he was born in 1925 in poznan poland from a jewish family he fled at the beginning of the war to the united uh soviet union and then when he came back to warsaw after the war he uh got his university degree in sociology and in 1956 he participated in the so-called polish october movement where the criteria the ideological criteria adopted by the government were criticized it was a reforming student movement and the government role of vis-a-vis moscow so criticism to the soviet ideology was made by professor bowman and he also adopted the teachings by gramsci and that is important since we are in italy he traveled through europe he then started working with economists at the school for economics he held conferences in various universities in 1968 he joined or sided with the student reform movement and so he was strongly criticized by the party actually he was marginalized so much so that he did not have the opportunity anymore to teach at university and together with jamina his wife with whom he shared all his life he went first to tel aviv and then to leeds university where he taught until he retired in 82 an important book was published modernity and the holocaust and then in the society of uncertainties and his uh thought uh uh started focusing on a number of topics that used to say shifting from modernity to post-modernity from solid to the liquid society which is a term he invented and globalization as the moment when social relations are in a way revisited and broken and uncertainty as the way of human beings of governance politically as well baumann focused on consumption uh in his thought as well and i think that he will do so tonight as well and indeed this is a very important topic still today ways lives is another book he wrote about this human wasted lives and he also addressed the wish for a community the very important aspect of his work is concentrating on the phenomena of post-modernity from the analysis of the big brother transmission program to the work about facebook his latest book is a dialogue and is significant also in the title in italian vita canopus living on borrowed time and then he also wrote a book about europe as an adventure whereby the attempt is made to try and make the um the planet hospitable as being a very important aspect of our life so the fact of being hospital uh also here in italy a place where people from other traditions and religions would come and would be accepted and welcome well i think that concluding this festival the voice by bauman will be a very interesting one also in comparison and contrast with the others that we listen to throughout the festival the important thing is to try and give instruments to understand reality from the viewpoint of theories and also orientations and so i think that the freedom of thought is one of the fundamental features um of their work by sigmund mountain whom we are about to listen to introduction i only pray that my delivery will match the quality of your introduction generosity of your introduction and i wanted it also to start from praise praise of whoever articulated the major theme of today's festival of economics because whoever did it uh put his or her finger on the most important challenge which is probably facing us and uh which we have to uh brace ourselves to confront in uh quite near future in confidential libertarian colombia that's the crucial problem the upheaval which is expecting us to find out that the economy which which actually presented itself and justified its form its shape its way of acting by increase in our freedom freedom of consumer freedom of choice plenty of things to be choiced about that this kind of economy acted on innocence false pretenses because we are coming to realize now that instead of expanding widening the range of our options which is the essential foundation of every freedom this range of options is being systematically narrowed and i will give you just few off-cup examples of what i have in mind narrowing the range of options in front of us limiting our freedom quite quickly and above all limiting the freedom of future generations of your children and your grandchildren well one example one case there was an information recently in newspapers it it flashed for a few days as normally jews do in contemporary press and then disappeared i don't know whether many of you notice what was said there about the official statement which said that at the peak of the world production of petrol our major energy which you use every time you come to the festival of philosophy or economy or well legal growth festival of law the peak has been reached in 2006 and from then on for the future there will be only the way down and that happened mind you ladies and gentlemen at the very moment when new powerful economies entered the competition competitive market vying for the yes existing supplies of energy china india brazil um south africa probably not only them there will be more of them coming in trying to supply their citizens and there are millions and hundreds of millions and billions even of them who haven't had cars so far to switch to this kind of energy devouring means of transportation the other information all solution information according to the latest computation and computerized models the until 2020 the prices of food including the essential food will double will double already they are going up very quickly already we have signals about uh food riots coming back from the 19th century we thought they have been forgotten they are coming back with the vengeance for the time being they are happening in far away countries exotic countries we don't hear about them very often but they are coming back and uh third element the rapidly rising rapidly rising inequality on the global scale something amazing something which goes exactly the opposite way which was once pointed out by uh pioneers of modernity pioneers of enlightenment uh people like in times of uh beckham francis bacon i mean the card even hegel even in the 19th century there was not a place it's difficult to imagine now but there was not not a single place on the planet at which uh the standard of living was double of the standard of living of the poorest place two to one that was the most extreme inequality in distribution of well-being among the parts countries of the world now according to the latest computation the richest country which is i don't know whether you know about it it is qatar it is oil rich country has standard of living 428 times bigger than the poorest country which is zimbabwe 428 and no wonder some observers say that if francis bacon descartes or hager knew about it they would be flashing of shame with shame because they predicted completely different outcome of the modern uh progress and i asked that ladies and gentlemen that what i quoted at the moment were comparisons between other ages and averages hide rather than exposing the real dimension of inequality and the volume of existing of existing poverty the if you count poverty independently of country national averages what you will get is the following that the richest 20 percent of the humanity um he or he owns 74 of wealth while the poorest 20 percent owns 2 percent of the world worlds now this is the quality which is going out of control until 30 40 years ago there was a trend statistical trend in the world which actually brought countries closer uh the most spectacular the most awesome manifestations of poverty where and it seemed to have been left behind and replaced with inequality will be probably always with us forever uh there's no uh medicine against that but it really went out of control in the last 30 and 40 years because of the very profound transformation in the worldwide distribution of political and military forces and also because of the process of globalization which i won't expand upon i know i i presume that you know what we are talking about and the question which emerges is why this trend contrary to optimistic shang green full of hope expectations of the pioneers of modern development why we move in this direction suddenly of outer sun um the i would suggest you ladies and gentlemen the two factors are mostly responsible for that and none of them is purely economic there are other social cultural and political than economic but the first one is our formula of of satisfying prosperous life which is steadily consistently over decades over many decades moves shifts into the direction of ways of increasing human happiness increasing the quality of human life measured by the increase of shopping all there was an old saying in ancient rome that all the roads lead to rome we can say today that according to contemporary wisdom all roads to happiness lead through shops which puts tremendous pressure and tremendous burden on economy and uh above all through the economy also tremendous pressure on this sustainability of our planet which is naturally limited in its resources and cannot survive endless increase endless growth of production and consumption and also disastrous for future generations because we we who are sitting here are clearly living above our means and at the expense therefore of our children and grandchildren who find themselves fighting with much more nasty and harrowing deficits than we are confronting so formula of prosperous life what does it mean prosperity what does it mean to be happy what has been to lead a decent human life which puts this tremendous pressure on the explosion of the predatory abilities to supply our kind of standard of living and the second formula is formula of conflict resolution uh which is also a cultural and political problem rather economic we have developed in the course of modernity the ability of resolving emerging social conflicts the grievances about discrimination about uneven distribution of good goodies and so on resolving it with the help of increasing production you know very well that when economic growth measured by gnp falls to zero not to mention when it goes below zero then there is a panic in the country but the panic is not only because uh we feel that you eat less that would we we would survive there is a lot of you know space to still to empty space between the level consumption today and the minimal acceptable but there is a panic among political elites because i repeat all our ways which we developed over the centuries of dealing with social disturbances disorder conflicts and so on were reduced to increasing the production and consumption there is an uh an old ongoing quarrel between people who say that this loaf our common our joint shared love should be distributed in a different way but the prevailing political formula is no instead of quarreling about how to distribute it we just make the law bigger okay providing providing that supplies of flour water and yeast needed to make loaves of bread are infinite that they will go on growing all the time now that is not true simply not true and we are seeing it clearer and clearer day by day that we are reaching already the limits of the possibilities of increasing the endlessly the low for distribution which ladies and gentlemen puts under a huge question mark the basic essential formative defining idea of our form of life which is the idea of economic growth economic growth two years ago a very very important book had been published by tim jackson tremendously important i think putting the conditions on the table and not showing what we are to expect if we continue to go in the same direction tim jackson published a book under the title prosperity and without growth prosperity without growth that they are he the book is very very frightening at the same time very very optimistic because he believes that we can kind we can find alternative other different from the present ways to increase happiness and feeling of prosperity satisfaction life satisfaction of meeting or meeting the dependency on the endless systematic economic growth growth of consumption growth of excursion of the planetary resources the alternative if we don't do that says tim jackson our children and grandchildren will face a hostile climate depleted resources the destruction of habitats the decimation of species food scarcities mass migration and almost inevitably war the present day levels of consumption are already unsustainable ecologically problematic socially and disastrous economically well that is what tim jackson says i think it's an important book to be much more sufficiently important to be much more debated and discussed than it is two years ago it was it became available but very little impact on the policies of our government all over the planet recently jeremy leggett in on the pages of the guardian observed well this sort of reaction and came to the conclusion that the very idea of prosperity outside the conventional trappings of affluence and con endlessly growing consumption is treated is treated by the dominant opinion as the ideas of lunatics misty idealist and revolutionaries so we're not taken seriously you don't take seriously the ideas of lunatics and you are not particularly inflamed with love for these statements made by revolutionaries so it is on the margin of the of the worldwide discussion whatever its importance could be um tim jackson says that this alternative alternative to conventional trappings of affluence could be found inside relationships families neighborhoods communities meanings of life they are enormous resources of human happiness which are completely untapped the other statement alarming statement which i would like to bring to your attention is even older than tim jackson's book 20 years old 20 years old and it comes from eleanor olstrom an anthropologist who went to places well not very different mind you from trentino i think trentino is more than any other area i know close to this ideal which allstrom describes her book carries the title governing of commons commons are shared ground which don't belong to anybody in private but could be used by the whole community and she found there in this rather off the beaten track places not in the world capitals of finances and trade she found there that the famous formula of adam smith doesn't work you know my very famous idea of adam smith was that if we get if we can hope that tomorrow morning we will find fresh bread in the bakery it is because of the greed of the baker so greed is actually the positive attitude because thanks to greed of everybody everybody survives and gets all these goodies which the social production can bring what she found there was that spontaneously by themselves people are moved to produce and to share and to increase the communal wealth so to speak other other bodies than greed the grassroots spontaneous reaction to the situation of a closely knit community is acting through how to put it through actions which are little energy consuming and above all waste free and people who are doing that find their satisfaction uh in an honest and sincere intra-community communication in allocating and being allocated respect reverence of other members of their settlement and risk in respecting by joint forces the commons and open pastures what elena alstrom frankly admits is that this way of living may be in the end very happy one and such clearly satisfactory for humans satisfying their ambitions their dreams but it is true she says that none of these ways of living is particularly propitious to economic growth but she adds and that is the other consideration which is normally neglected in the popular popularization of this sort of ideas that on the other hand it is being sustainability of the planet and its inhabitants friendly so it is hospitable to the planet which can survive many generations to come and particularly to inhabitants of that planet well it is a fact that all these ideas which i just mentioned are there's no question about that very marginal in contemporary society the uh policies accepted by both governments of the world go precisely in the opposite direction i don't think there are many governments who think beyond the next general election uh that's what counts the consequences for our children grandchildren well let's let's let to parents um take care of uh counting on them that the parents also will be rather convinced that uh it is better to have a better life now than to wait uh what will happen in 20 or 40 years time and here i come to the major uh message which i want to convey the an extra element which is not widely discussed but in my view is very important one of the of the closest principal causes of the rather unpleasant economic pride in which we find ourselves is what i call commodification and commercialization of morality economic consumer consumer markets are specializing in re-directing the human needs human dreams human desires we were satisfied traditionally without mediation of the market without going shopping redirecting them so that they wrote their satisfaction leads through shops and when i say uh ladies and gentlemen commodification and the commercialization of morality i have in mind such uh basic essential essential needs of each one of us like taking care of our near and dear uh dedicating our time to their problems helping them with their problems and so on so on i suspect ladies and gentlemen that we all hear at least i do feel guilty very often we have these guilty feelings that we are unable to spend enough time with our nearest and dearest family and friends we have we don't dedicate enough time to listen to their problems as attentively and as compared compassionately as such problems would require we are unable to do what people loving people friendly people really wanting to care and help feel obliged to do namely be there always for you whenever you need me just one example in the last 20 years 20 years ago 60 of american families congregated every evening around the family table to share dinner 20 years later only 20 percent of american families do the same otherwise every member of the family locks himself or herself in a private room with the private uh laptop or the private ipad and of course even sitting if that happens around the family table every sitter has a private mobile telephone nearby so that the family is in fact family sitting in fact collection of private conversation conducted with people far away from the home that is a development of recent years listening this guilty feeling not necessarily by anybody's in particular fault and missed the menu but simply that the construction morphology of our daily life underwent a very profound change among other things with the help of technology with the help of mobile telephones which brought great things positive things like being able to connect yourself to anybody who you like at any time wherever you are but at the same time they had a collateral casualty so to speak and collateral casualty casualty of mobile telephones which you always take with you wherever you go uh if you happen to forget to take your mobile terraform when you go out you feel as if suddenly you find yourself without trousers on the open street so it's an absolutely indispensable part of yourself now with introduction of that the the very old established boundary between uh job time and time of leisure between office time and private time has been in fact effaced all time now is job time all night time all time now is the office time the office never closes why because you have your office always in your pocket you're always with you you are constantly on back and cold and there is no justification any longer i'm terribly sorry i didn't get the message because i was away from home it doesn't no how come you are away why how what what is your right to go out without your mobile teleport so there's no justification no excuse you have to work full time in fact ladies and gentlemen the higher you go up in the hierarchy of jobs the less private time you have it doesn't matter whether you are at home whether you are on weekend stroll whether you are in holiday hotel you are always at service and that of course creates the guilty feeling i love my children dearly but i can't spend as much time with them as i would like to i simply cannot be there when they need me that's the constant team today about the tragedies of average well-off family that is problem which haunts them obviously ladies and gentlemen consumer markets cannot repair that situation but what they can do and what they do with great energy and great ingenuity is helping us to mitigate our guilty conscience uh commercialization of morality means and instead of notice primitive homemade ways of expressing your love you can express your life love via shopping and most of us do christmas already is a commercial occasion it is the occasion to buy expensive gifts you know which uh our hope to compensate all the neglect during the year of the needs of your beloved children so guilty conscience the scribbles which you may feel is of his death course by so doing the shopping becomes suddenly a sort of moral act you go to shops not because you are greedy not because you want to possess things you go to shops to do good to do good you haven't done this good to your near and and there simply because you didn't have much time you had to earn money to support your family you had to submit to the expanded demands of your office and so on so at least you express your love with very expensive very expensive as expensive as possible gifts but that has repercussions that has the consequences there is a vicious circle here in this situation once you become adjusted to this shopping way to regulate your relations to supply to sustain to support to develop your relationship with people around you the you are slowly really really losing your own social skills of doing in the primitive way without shops without expensive gifts you forget how that could be done and less unless you can fight for the opportunity to deploy them and that is dangerous why uh physical pain ladies and gentlemen is very important uh argument of every living being without pain if you if you were afflicted with not sensitivity to pain you would be in constant danger because pain is a signal pain is a signal when you signal there is something wrong with your organism you feel pain you go to the doctor you get the drugs you get medicine you get surgery whatever is necessary it prevents development of something very very dangerous for your survival that is about physical pain now moral pain guilty conscience is also very important because it signals something very dangerous not disease of your organism it signals diseases for family of your neighborhood it signals the new uh frailty of human bones human bones well how far this new variety of human bones can go simple statistics of facebook or by space or twitter can show quite easily suddenly we have young people around us who have several hundreds of several thousands of friends of course they are electronic players electronic lens uh they are quite different different kind of friends which traditionally were described by the english saying uh friend in need is a friend indeed friends on on facebook do not belong to this kind of category but it's not the only manifestation of consequences of the commercialization the commodification of moral aspects of human life the other area in which they are very pronounced these processes is the area of identity concerns and identification pursuits in the same way as the guilty conscience showed our concerns his identity are very well justified they are not invented they are real they are real and we have to deal with them but again market is hurrying but of supermarket is hurrying to help us in doing just that and help us simply by offering all sorts of trappings paraphernalia so to speak with which we could construct our identity to increase thereby our own market value why simply because if you want to take care of other people first of all you have to have resources with which to express your care because care is implemented by shopping and in shops to the shop you can you have to go either with wallet with money or with credit card otherwise you are not welcome there margaret churchill is famously uh yes is remembered for very stupid remarks she once made she clearly didn't read her bible but but she expressed with tremendous you know unerring precision the beliefs of our times she said shortly after she was elected elected as a prime minister prime minister of england that a good samaritan she said would not be a good samaritan had he no money margaret thatcher couldn't understand how one can be a good samaritan without money so you need money but getting money because it serves moral purposes serves buying expensive and you know very much desired very much fashionable goods for your nearest dear becomes again a moral activity together with shopping earning money is moral the egoism taking care of by self becomes suddenly an altruistic act altruistic time recycled egoism recycled into our trees and the third element of commodification commercialization of morality by consumer markets uh the impact of of consumerism on sustainability of our shared home now that is uh issue which i think is known very very very well known to you you re-are realizing even if it doesn't reflect itself in your daily conduct but theoretically we are all aware that the resources of the planet are limited they are not infinite at some point particularly when chinese go all around the world and buy out all the sources of petrol we are becoming painfully aware that there's not enough resources for everybody that everybody knows but i think there is another way of increasing detrimental impact of the consumerism of the this assumption of the infinity of growth which is not normally noted and discussed and that is the question that until the moral instinct moral imperative which we all have in one or another degree have been commodified and commercialized by the consumer market until then the consumer economy was growing first on the because it was set in motion by human needs later it grew it grew by being propelled and set into action by human desires well human needs are not very promising for the development for the rights of supermarket if consumerism was only about satisfaction of human needs there would be no economic growth whatsoever and that is what the greatest minds among economists in 19th century sold they thought that needs of human beings are stable they could be soberly calculated so we know how much products we must provide in order to satisfy all the needs of human beings and once that is done we can stop and just enjoy the profits of our previous efforts further growth all this anxiety all this hara baloo all this turmoil which goes together with that won't be any longer necessary mill the one of the greatest minds and ricardo as well the greatest economist of early 19th century were convinced that at the end of the road of this temporary effort called industrialization modernization whatever there will be stable economy ideal stable economy in perfect balance with the total amount of human needs well later later of course the other way of uh bringing clients to shops was invented uh buying not because of need but because of desire developing of desires developing a desire very well illustrated uh by the uh known uh case in history of modern economy the quarrel between henry ford and mr sloan from general motors mr henry ford was an opinion and he proclaimed it officially he was very old-fashioned sort of chap he proclaimed officially that he will produce a ford cars team model of any color providing his black black because he calculated that people need cars in order to go from here to there and you can calculate that how many there are americans how many are distances which they have to cover once you calculated that and produce enough black tea models well then you will just renew the cards cars which go out of service because they are too old mr sloan was of different opinion and this battle this particular battle was lost by henry ford namely he said why should people buy cars in order to go from here to there they could buy cars in order to increase their prestige understanding among their community they can buy cars in order to make their friend jealous and envious that they are they have such a wonderful current which they cannot afford uh they can buy cars in order to tempt girls you know to to prepare the specific services and so on so on in other words you don't buy car because you need to satisfy needs you buy car because you desire some other situation of yourself a better situation from one point or another depending on your desires but desires of course is much more prolific much more fertile than buying curve leads much more promising for the expansion of consumer economy but still limited you have to invest a lot of effort research effort commercials a commercial effort publicity effort to develop new desires in human beings and once you have done it then you realize that you can't simply shift desire from one place to another from one product to another product you have to start from scratch the whole long and arduous and very costly work of developing new dreams among people dreams about things they never dreamt about before therefore consumerism which is operated which is certain motion by needs or by desires has the common feature that it is limited in its possibility of expansion curiously ironically this limits have been removed once morality became the object of commodification and commercialization that is the only thing which can really genuinely grow infinitely there are no limits to love there are no limits to being good to other people everywhere living us the greatest ethical philosopher of 20th century put it quite clearly that responsibility which is the substance of morality responsibility for another person loving responsibility friendly responsibility or just human responsibility is unconditional unconditional unconditional that means that the ways in which you should express out to express your responsibility for another being are not defined they are not spelled out they are not spelled out it's a general command of a sword you take responsibility for another for the well-being for the survival for the identity for the happiness of another human being but it is not said in what way therefore unconditional responsibility comes in package deal ladies and gentlemen with constant uncertainty and anxiety whatever you have done you can never be absolutely sure that you have done everything you could and should there's no limit there's no limit the more you do the more you do the more you have this internal impact uh impulse to do even more than so far not to mention the uh well-known fact in our liquid modern world that things age very quickly lose their charm very quickly so each one next should be even more shocking more impressive than the one before that applies to everything the two horror films we are already so adjusted and familiar with horrors that each one each next one must produce horrors here at or unimaginable now the same applies also to other aspects of human desires human possibilities and above all more than to any other field of human life it applies to moral relations with the others well i suggest you ladies and gentlemen tentatively i am still thinking on this topic it was a recent discovery to myself as well that just as the ethical responsibility for others tolerates no it the consumption invested with the task of venting and satisfying moral impulses suffers ill any kind of constrained and therefore paradoxically that's a paradox which i don't find easy to resolve really moral impulses and ethical responsibilities are being today recycled into a most awesome and difficult to fight back hindrance where humanity finds itself confronted with the most formidable threat to our joint survival consumers economy burdened with this tremendous uh load of our moral obligations of our intention our impulse to love and to care for other people consumers economy burden with this sort of load simply cannot allow itself to slow down its space current it must grow it must grow otherwise you won't be able to follow this track delidiated by consumerist economy they believe the uh what i called the moral tranquilizers which are offered in in the shopping malls so in order to perform this function uh consumerist economy would have to counter factually assume the limitlessness of the planet and durability and infinity of its resources as it happens very often in human practice we have endless examples in history the road to hell was paved to his good intentions good intention to offer mitigation of the moral problems of our times and somehow to compensate for the difficulty we encounter in implementing our moral duty that may bring consequences exactly opposite exactly opposite to the intended ones internet ones i think ladies and gentlemen the moment of truth may be nearer than the overflowing shells of every supermarket the website screwed with commercial pop-ups and courses of self-improvement experts and how to make friends and influence people counselors would make us to believe the moment of truth in spite of all this proliferation of goodies in our consumer society is really near the point is the only point which cannot be prognosticated is how to precede or forestall the coming of this moment of truth with the moment of self self-awakening we can come to this truth the hard way we can come to this truth in a great human peaceful reasonable and in the unhappy way i think the choice that choice is really ours um well we have some time for questions mrs de francesco who is in charge of the organization of the festival told me that there are a lot of people outside a lot of people who listen to the conference from the screens outside and there are many people who came to the festival in these days and this is a positive sign the desire for knowledge here they are together with mr delai and the other people who make up the organizing staff we decided not to give numbers not to say well this year there are more people than last year but i think that we can honestly say that in qualitative terms this is a positive sign and i want to underline that i want to focus on that it's not important only that there are so many people who listen to nobel prizes or to very famous people but what is really positive in the festival is that in these days we've had young economists telling their research studies their experiments and they were very much appreciated by a lot of young people so something which could be given for granted in fact is not so evident so that's really a positive sign a sign of livelihood of vitality now there is a question down there could you please stand up good evening well first of all i'd like to thank you for your magnificent words during your speech protocol determine of ancient greece came to my mind and so 2500 years ago we were in a similar situation as the one described by you a progressive liquefaction of our world and of our soul and what i fear in our society is that apart from hiding our selfishness we are going towards a form of apathy so we are no longer able to live our life based on the colors on the taste whether good or bad so we're losing the sense of life and we cannot really experiment or live the real meaning of our lives according to the meaning that we attribute to our life and that in order to improve our own life and the life of other people so there is this apathy which is running the risk of destroying the world and destroying a humankind yes do you hear me yes uh well han solos another great uh ethical philosopher of 20th century pointed out very interesting things that in recent years definitely in recent years it is a matter of several decades at the utmost we have developed means of influencing things which are at enormous distance from us and both in space and in time we are doing by our daily choices without noticing even we are doing uh the defining job of the conditions which our children and grandchildren will inherit so we are affecting the life of generations not yet born and whatever you are doing here in toronto affects people prospects of their life of people living in bangladesh whatever is happening in malaysia it affects your own future prospects of job employment well-being and so on we are all interconnected interdependent without being able to give the desirable direction of this for to this interconnectedness and so on in short halcyon put to us that we have developed for the first time the means of affecting conditions and life of people and places tremendously distanced in space and in time but he added our moral imagination is still at the level of adam and eve so the new phenomenon is the enormous potency of acting with inability to develop a similar parallel moral imagination of the consequences of our action that's the problem that is trouble no one is deliberately doing harm to our grandchildren world everybody is of course full of good intentions to leave the children and their children the best possible inheritance you are you will be giving over your italy to italians of 22nd century and everybody probably desires very sincerely very honestly uh to owe to to to give over the country in a best possible condition but the logic of our daily life the way we go about satisfying our needs are these two formulae which i mentioned at the first part of my uh of my uh presentation uh act in the exactly the opposite direction and we could repeat after what i said about francis bacon descartes hegel being read on in face of shame seeing the contemporary the quality with the declared war on uh probably you we from our graves may be red in our faces seeing what sort of a world exhausted of resources and belief of good choices we have left to our posterity that's a problem and i don't have any recipe i don't i'm not able to give you any prescription how to go about this paradox that good intention produce very unpleasant consequences nevertheless that's that that is not a new phenomenon let's not tell you the discrepancy between moral imagination and the task which we are engaged in performing is a very old story and the person who asked the question mentioned 200 years old story well that's that's all true the only new element in the situation is precisely the enormous the logarithmic logarithmic in fact exponential development of the potency of our means of action and the closeness between present condition of the world and the limit of sustainability of the world it is common consent among people who calculate the sustainability of the planet that if the new covers to the developed world implement their desires quite legitimate desires they would like to live as pleasant life as we do as opulent as well provided as fascinating as adventurous as we have but if they implement that we would need five planets not one five planets to raise their consumption to the level of our european and american consumption we would need five planets and for the time being that is at least for the time being that's out of the question so they are very hard moral choices i'm not saying that in order to demobilize you because i really do believe that there is a lot which can be done to prevent this most repairing most frightening movement well i belong to the movement of a happy d growth which is headed by sergio la tush and the principles that you mentioned in the first part of your conference are principles which are very similar to those which animate our movement which unfortunately is very marginal but i have the impression that it's becoming less and less marginal said i have a question about a different topic in one of the conferences these days a speaker said that you move the attention from production terms to consumption terms and by so doing you completely abandoned marks well i've got the impression that you thought is in fact a confirmation of mark's thought so since you're here you can spell out my doubts i'm not so sure really because uh in time of marx uh not because he was a stupid man on the contrary he was very wise but he was very in line with his times and the idea that there might be suddenly the questions like sustainability of the planet uh didn't occur to marx marx was convinced like so many other people on the left and the right of the spectre in 19th century that the whole problem is the question of management there is good management and there is a better management if you go about your household in the wrong way you pay the price but it can be improved so he shared in the enlightenment view that our faith is fully completely in our hearts it is the question how we organize our life now we come to the conclusion um i believe they are worth consideration even if there is no final proof that they are true but we are coming to the conclusion that there are also limitations to liberta economica which are beyond our control we simply cannot cannot do anything about them we have to accept them there they are and draw conclusions no conclusions try for example to stop sending by planes uh fruits from one continent to another and to be satisfied with the fruits which are grown in the beautiful very very time soil of italy why should you necessarily bring them also from australia just one example there are hundreds and thousands of such examples the person who asked the question the made reference to the movement to the experiment there are plentiful experiments like that around the world which are trying to find alternative ways of living in peace with our future generation and with planet and with every neighbor around the general the general principle again beyond our wishes is that every majority every majority in history started from being a minority there's no other way of becoming majority so if you say uh sir that your group your movement is limited is it minority well it's not in itself a tragedy everything starts from minority but there is also another historical truth that all really great upheavals really important upheavals in history came unexpected and unpredicted contradicted so perhaps while we are sitting here in uh in this auditorium and debating this very interesting affairs very interesting problems perhaps somewhere in new zealand or in australia or in others along amazon live a river uh some new forms of life emerge which we don't know anything about we haven't noticed there now mind you when the winter palace was taken by worshiping 1917 the information about it was on the 10th page of the times some sects you know took some palace somewhere it doesn't it doesn't really very much matter uh that shows what is our ability to predict importance of affairs which are happening so i want to believe that this minority you mentioned uh will be subject to the same rules of history so many things sigmund bauman i'd like to invite the people in charge of the festival to come over to the podium for the traditional goodbye so first of all the scientific director of the festival tito boyeri and the dean of the school of economics paolo collini the local councillor maestri the president of the university of trento mr chipoleta and the president of the provincial authority mr delay check thank you as tradition goes just a couple of brief words on behalf of all the organizers and words which really come from my heart many thanks to professor bauman who shared with us these very deep thoughts and many thanks to all the actors of this sixth edition of the festival many thanks to the institution which are represented here the city of trento many thanks to the sponsors the partners many thanks to the public as many already said in these days the quality of the festival is given by the quality of the speakers but it's also given by the quality of attendees and since the first edition we have really witnessed to a huge increase in the quality of attendees and by quality i mean very interested people very motivated people people who do not come just to have a look but because they think that coming to the festival they can improve their ability to be responsible citizens earlier the young man spoke about apathy well it's true our festival wants to be an antidote to apathy and the contrary of apathy is not only sympathy but trust and feeling as people who share the same fate so we like to launch these bridges well we are used to closing the festival with the traditional things and also with some commitments for the future i remember that last year the final meeting was with roberto saviano and in closing the festival with roberto saviano we all committed to doing something in showing and offering attention to the many citizens specifically young people who in the south of our country work and act to create prospects for the future and for a new civil movement i believe that we honored our promise in naples we had a preview of the festival on the 28th of may and we talked there about moonlighting about black market about the various sites of the economy and indeed i think that the commitment that we can express this year for the future is going to be equally important in that our commitment is first and foremost to continue this festival that is now taken for granted at the end of the first edition so we normally asked ourselves whether we would organize the festival the following year but now everybody expects that there is going to be an extra festival and that goes also for for for this festival so we will have a seventh edition and in a way we already announced that we will have the president of the italian republic here next year president napolitano will be with us will join us next year we are very proud of that and indeed president uh or the presidency of the republic offered us its patronage this uh this year so we worked under the auspices of the presidency of the republic of the italian republic and so that was very important for us for of course we will continue working in trento and roberto as well for the festival we will try and renew a bit its format even though i think that it did not go wrong it was successful so so far so we will do that and we will also try to do something else because we were asked to take responsibility in this respect and also vis-a-vis the sound for the world so we will try and honor that promise and we will organize another event in naples but not only naples we think that that is important and we also want to establish cooperation and connection networks with the very many people who live in the south and who really live in difficult situations but share the same civil values that we spoke about over these days and so we would also try and do something abroad we have an international festival we have speakers coming from abroad we have many participants from foreign countries but we will also try and organize events previewing as anticipations of the festival in other countries as well we think that us is proper and correct so that we involve in our line of reasoning european countries non-european countries emerging countries countries which are in difficulty because we think that this mutual exchange is going to be beneficial for them and for us and then i would also think i also think that we will be able to add other initiatives to meet the need of filling the gap that there is in between the festivals there is already one concrete idea in this and i would kindly ask tito boheri whom i think again he is the scientific director of the festival so i would like to ask him what this idea is thank you as a matter of fact that the festival continues throughout the year because you see today we take a day off but then starting from the day after tomorrow we will start working on the new addition and indeed there is already an appointment we would like to tell you about and that was a thought for the first uh uh evening of the festival remember that enrico bondi was announced and then he had to cancel the event and he decided that he could not take the floor because important things were taking place so the public offer is closed on 13th of july and so uh immediately afterwards bondi will tell us about his experience with parmalet and with what happened through the reorganization of the company and also at the end of this phase so face so on 40th july in milan five o'clock at university bocconi we will have marconado and massimo mukketi discussing with uh about this operation and what happened and indeed the festival so will be present there uh the squirrel will be there and we will continue talking about the issues that we started addressing over this day so that is the first appointment and others will follow suit throughout the year thank you so the squirrel goes to milan to milan naples the us mozambique germany we will see but it it is still a squirrel or originating from trento that is for sure thank you very much thank you and see you next year