There is a big absentee in the debate on the fight against inflation: collective goods. The powers that be respond with the blunt tools of monetary policy, and argue over other more effective but complicated tools, such as price cap, the ceiling on prices. Individuals, as always, are called to make do, with enormous economic suffering. But there is another way, that of public goods and services.
The most striking case is that of transport. In Germany they tried, with the experiment of the monthly ticket at 9 euros for all local trains: it was a success in the summer months, but it also created many problems of overcrowding and inefficiencies. As could have been foreseen, it has been realized that it is not enough to give free – or super discounted – tickets if you do not increase the offer, and if you do not equip all the services to make it work, making public transport the normal and absolutely prevailing means to go to work, to school, to go shopping.
It is just one example of a collective approach to the energy shock that is totally lacking in our own policies and also in the proposals of the electoral campaign. So far, the response to the energy crisis and the consequent rise in inflation has been entrusted to central banks, with the rise in rates which, unable to affect the causes of the rise in prices, will only push us into recession.
As for governments, in no particular order they try to compensate for the increases to a minimum by resorting to the public budget; while so far they have not agreed on the need to review the mechanism by which energy prices are fixed, anchored to speculation on the gas markets.
The outgoing government insists on this last point, as does the program of the Democratic Party. A technical solution that involves the revision of a mechanism conceived for “normal” times, but which is blocked by various national interests, until yesterday’s turning point by Germany and Ursula von der Leyen. But, as the economist Francesco Saraceno wrote in Domani, price controls are necessarily a transitory measure, and in the long run they could favor non-virtuous behaviors such as the consumption of fossil fuels. Saraceno himself adds that we must look at the fact that inflation is a tax on the poor, and resort to redistributive measures, not only by helping those most affected but also by raising wage levels.
But what if we were also talking about another type of redistribution, from individual to collective consumption? The case of transport is emblematic, but it is not the only one. Let’s think about schools. The province of Verona came up with the absurd idea of putting the kids in dad to save on heating: as if in their homes the students did not need to heat up. We would need to do the opposite: keep schools open longer, perhaps with an after-school program to do homework, to allow everyone to stay in heated environments. Of elderly centers, where perhaps retirees can spend a few hours keeping the heaters off in the house. Of condominiums with shared environments. To reopen the houses of the people, where they still exist; or to make new ones.
In short, an anti-inflationary policy entrusted to public goods and consumption, with a consequent reduction in increasingly unsustainable private consumption. Exactly the opposite of what perhaps awaits us for the winter: who can pay, who can not turn off.