To Be: Lost Youth

Italy is not a country for young people, and even less so during the coronavirus. With Covid, a new intergenerational narrative has emerged: young spreaders and elderly victims. It started with the statements of politicians and was immediately picked up by the mass media. A false narrative, because it was not the young who acted as spreaders. Useless, because young people reacted very well to the restrictions. Dangerous, because young people suffered during the pandemic and will bear the scars longer than anyone else. In school dropouts, educational poverty, precariousness, Covid has exacerbated pre-existing structural problems and accentuated inequalities. Europe chose to react to the pandemic with a promisingly named plan: Next Generation EU. For Italy, which has access to the largest amount of resources but at the same time takes on the most significant debt, the challenge is epochal: to give back the future to a blameless generation.

• Since March 2020, the lives of young people and children have been deeply disrupted.
• Distance learning has disrupted students' lives. Or would it perhaps be more accurate to say that the pandemic has disrupted students' lives and that distance learning has represented the only practical solution?
• What is the scar effect?
• PNRR: For Not Being Left Behind

Vincenzo Galasso, Professor of Economics at Bocconi University, Director of APE - Analysis in Pension Economics, co-editor of the European Journal of Political Economy and Editor of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, PhD in Economics from UCLA, will discuss it with us through his book.