Willem314

I heard from a lot of people here in France that it is a country where contacts are important: apparently many people get their position trough somebody they know, before somebody more competent. It is obvious that these sometimes even largely incompetent people damage the company they are in. Being part of a culture it damages a country.

Apparently things are not as bad here according to an article in the Dutch paper the Volkskrant that states that in Iatly it has become so bad that most school people feel forced to take their skills to another country where they are more appreciated. (which apparently is almost everywhere) Jacopo Panizza states in the article:

Being smart is not enough in Italy… …it is a place where goofs are best of. Your Master education barely has any value.

The Italian Statistical office states that barely half of all graduates have a job on their own level within three years. Where 43 % of these make more than 1700 euro a month in other European countries this is only 9,2% in Italy.

This by itself doesn’t have to be a problem if they manage to estimate qualities in a different way. Lets be honest there are a lot of incompetent people with a masters diploma and a lot of competent ones without them. But speaking to some Italian students today gave me the same answer. “Italy is not about quality it is only about contacts.” Really depressing that some groups are struggling to innovate these systems to improve them, others seem to be stuck in the middle ages. This would be easy to understand for eastern European countries that are still recovering from communism and the corruption that comes with it. That only recently got to take advantage from organization as the EU. For a country like Italy this should have been peanuts to resolve.

It is hard to imagine how countries like that manage to compete on an international market and how they contribute to this? How are weak judgments like these ever going to allow us to move forwards?