"Shooting Silvio's" government: the case for not helping Abruzzo

After Abruzzo's earthquake there is a compelling case to save money in next elections and referendum in Italy and to earmark funds for the reconstruction in Abruzzo. Actually there is also a cogent case to redefine priorities in Italy's economic and infrastructural policies to do what the country really needs but this appears too much for the present Italian's government.

3-400 millions euro of public funds could be saved and reallocated immediately for the reconstruction in Abruzzo if only the Italian government held an election day, which includes next European, administrative and referendum ballots.

However it appears that the Italian Government could have a new crisis, should an election day be held. Berlusconi’s coalition partner Northern League threatened the government if it opt for the election day. It's just a matter of mean politics calculations!

I believe that regardless the hot debate about the movie "Shooting Silvio", whose director happens also to be from Abruzzo, there might be a compelling case for shooting Silvio's government. The latter seems to care only about itself and its caste system and very little about Abruzzo's people and reconstruction after the earthquake. Italian politicians prefer to spend, that is squander, public money for their own survival rather than the survival of population hit by the earthquake.

I conclude with three considerations: a) Abruzzo's people voted in a large majority and recently for Berlusconi also in the election for the region's Governor. The winner candidate was Mr. Chiodi but Berlusconi actually campaigned for him in the regional election. b) It's difficult to justify any appeal to donate for Abruzzo when the government itself could easily save public funds in next ballots and/or reallocate funds in its public and infrastructure expenditures (it's a matter of priorities). c) Does Berlusconi's governement really care about Italy?

Is an earthquake in Italy really a Black Swan?

An earthquake could normally be characterized as Black Swan to the extent that "first, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable".

Yet in Italy earthquakes are not exactly unpredictable one offs for which there are no precedents and so nothing to learn from. There is a great deal of information in the occurences of an earthquake.

It appears that geophysicists know they still cannot predict when an earthquake will occur, how much its magnitude will be and where it will strike. We say that economists suffer from the same problem in their predictions: if they say when they cannot tell you how much and vice-versa. If they tell you when and how much they will fail the prediction.

However in the prediction of earthquakes, some empirical laws (e.g. power law) are known to hold, which are remarkably simple. There exist also some interesting approaches based on peculiar properties of precursory phenomena observed within complex seismic time series.

The fact that earthquakes like financial markets could be affected by the Black Swan frequency problem does not impel us to do nothing! Not at all. We can focus more and more on prevention rather than prediction and establish some ground smart rules in order to avoid financial systems to collapse in turmoil and earthquakes to raise the death toll and damages.

The recent earthquake in Italy, along the same lines of the world financial crisis, shows that somebody, particularly inItaly, still have some difficulties in making prevention to work and abide by the rules of, for example, seismic construction. Thus the debate is easily shifted from prevention and regulation to failure of predictions so that nobody is accountable. The same is in fact happening in the financial crisis. Sad similarities and news.

G20 Summit- 2009 Odyssey - The Dawn of Man

After watching this video you may wonder Why We Can't Get Along. So, Does America Owe the World an Apology?. While in The G20's Blind Spot: President Obama must squarely face the bad asset problem, I believe that US foreign policy and the global financial crisis are faces of the same coin.

Yet things could be simple as one can read here or an effort should be made to keep it simple.