Italy’s growth disaster

Hat tip goes to Matt Yglesias.  At the risk of sounding like a broken record player, we are not sufficiently thinking through what it means for an advanced society to have basically zero net economic growth for a ten to twenty year period.  It’s very possible, and this is (more or less) the same Italy that was praised in the 1980s for its dynamism and which overtook the UK in terms of per capita income, at least for a while.