Ask Spengler: Yankee noodle
Dear Spengler,
I just became prime minister of Italy, and our economy has a minor problem: it is disappearing. Only 10 years ago we accounted for almost 5% of world trade, but we are losing market share to Asia, and our share of world trade has fallen to barely half that level. Our family firms are disappearing because Italians lack entrepreneurial spirit. Why, every factory manager still goes home to his mother’s for lunch! China can make a slightly inferior but much cheaper version of anything our factories can produce. What should I do?
Romano in Rome
Dear Romano,
Your question implies its own answer. You think the problem is that Italian factory managers insist on having lunch at their mother’s. Have you considered that the Italian mother’s value on the world market has risen by more than the value of an Italian factory has fallen? If you can’t sell commodity industrial products, sell the culinary art of the Italian mother, refined over centuries of pampering spoiled sons.
Eight hundred years ago, China exported an inferior product to Italy, namely noodles, and Italy turned this into a high-end product, namely pasta. The Chinese might be making cheap knock-offs of your industrial products, but they spend their discretionary income on your improved version of their own invention. Shanghai has adopted osso buco alla Milanese as its regional dish. The market for gremolata in Shanghai alone probably exceeds the global turnover of industrial valves. Flash-freeze Italian Sunday dinners and air-freight them to China. Busloads of Chinese tourists will descend on the factory towns of northern Italy to eat a home-cooked Italian meal.
Of course, this is only an interim solution, for Chinese cooks will learn to prepare Italian food as well as the Italians, just as Chinese musicians will learn to play the Viennese classics as well as the Viennese. But you needn’t worry about a long-term solution. Not only are your family firms disappearing; with a birth rate of barely 1.2 children per female, your families are disappearing as well. But don’t worry. When you Italians become extinct, your culture will be in good hands.
Spengler
This article is taken from Asia Times Online, May 16 2006 edition.