{"text":[[{"start":4.5,"text":"There’s an interesting parlour game being played in New York these days: which dodgy economic habits has America picked up from elsewhere? Is it Malaysia’s endemic political patronage? Is it Nigeria’s tolerance of cash bribes as business as usual? Or is it Brazil’s inequality, where the ultra-rich enjoy a life of luxury alongside those living in squalor?"}],[{"start":26.05,"text":"America today has aspects of these and other emerging markets (though that term feels like a misnomer these days, when so many developing nations are besting their rich-country peers in terms of economic performance and governance). But I would make a different comparison. I think that America is starting to look more like Italy, another western nation with a turbulent history."}],[{"start":46.650000000000006,"text":"This is the case for three reasons. While overt corruption may not be as dire in either the US or Italy as in many other frontier markets, both are actively turning away from policing it. Second, populism in politics is showing up in both countries in a similar way. Finally, and most importantly, the labour market in America is starting to look more like Italy’s in one crucial respect: older people are holding on to good jobs, and the young have trouble finding decent ones."}],[{"start":75.30000000000001,"text":"Let’s start with the political economy. Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index gave the US a score of 64 out of 100 in terms of corruption, its lowest to date. Italy was slightly lower, with a score of 53, but the report specifically called out both countries for watering down efforts to fight corruption. Italy’s resistance to criminalising the abuse of power among public officials, for example, and the Trump administration’s weakening of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act belong in the same basket of behaviour."}],[{"start":107.80000000000001,"text":"No surprise then that democracy is weakening in both places. A 2026 report by V-Dem, an academic project that measures democracy, recently identified both Italy and the US as two of the western countries that have had the most democratic backsliding in recent years. Likewise, Freedom House found that the two countries had relatively large swings towards a more autocratic political economy compared with other nations still labelled “free”."}],[{"start":135.25,"text":"The US is no longer an exceptional nation in any positive sense. I sense my fellow Americans starting to think about corruption as endemic, something ordinary people can’t do much about. This reminds me of the shoulder-shrugging “what can you do?” attitude towards bad political behaviour or black-market economies that you find elsewhere. According to a recent Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who say corruption in government is widespread has risen from 60 per cent in 2006 to 89 per cent today."}],[{"start":165,"text":"Economic cynicism is growing too, especially among young people. One of the most striking things about the US economy today is how the labour market is beginning to mirror the two-tiered, age-divided system that has dogged European nations like Italy, forcing younger people to live longer with their parents or leave the country for more upward mobility."}],[{"start":186.4,"text":"The last US jobs report, out in early September, found that unemployment was 7.1 per cent for ages 20-24, as compared to 3.6 per cent for those 25-54 and 3 per cent for those over 55. Youth unemployment in Italy is much higher — a whopping 20 per cent. But the ratios are similar, with unemployment among younger people roughly double that of middle-aged workers."}],[{"start":211.5,"text":"Some of this two-tiered labour market problem revolves around age, but some of it is about who your parents are. If you are an insider, you have opportunity. If you are an outsider, by race or class, you have less. As academics like Raj Chetty have shown, America is looking much more like Old Europe these days in terms of mobility: where and to whom you are born has an outsized impact on how much or whether you prosper."}],[{"start":238.5,"text":"These trends may be amplified by AI, which paradoxically seems to be favouring not young digital natives but rather older workers who have the sectoral experience necessary to leverage the technology and do not face the same risk of disruption as those seeking entry-level jobs. In a paper published in September, the Census Bureau estimated that graduates in the most AI-exposed areas would suffer a five-percentage-point decline in the likelihood of initial employment and 13 per cent lower earnings than those going into less-exposed sectors. "}],[{"start":271.45,"text":"While there’s reason to think the technology could benefit younger people in the future, as they move faster into the new jobs and sectors that AI will create, the short-term result is likely to be more disaffected young people."}],[{"start":283.95,"text":"The result of that would in turn be more of the populism already so evident in the US, Italy and many other European countries. That could in turn slow growth, which would further disadvantage the youngest and the poorest, fuelling the political divides between boomers and younger voters, centrists and extremists. "}],[{"start":304.4,"text":"Italy has, of course, seen this cycle play out many times in its long history, and is right now enjoying a brighter moment, with stronger export and employment numbers. America is only beginning to understand what happens when an empire collapses under its own dysfunctional political economy."}],[{"start":328.59999999999997,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1791244834_2373.mp3"}