A long journey to discover the origins of wealth and to try to understand why some societies have reached the age of abundance while others continue to be poor. But above all an itinerary to understand what wealth has to do with the pursuit of happiness and the conquest of political freedoms. This is the path that the polygraph, writer and journalist Maurizio Sgroi took in the essay ‘The history of wealth. The advent of Homo Habens and the discovery of abundance’ (Diarkos).
“This – writes Sgroi in the introductory pages – is a history book. So he talks about the present, while trying to imagine a future. From the present he takes an obsession as a pretext: the one for debt. From this obsession he develops an investigation that begins noting how rarely anyone who talks about debt concentrates equal attention on its natural counterpart, i.e. credit”. Sgroi, a writer and journalist who has been dealing with economic issues for over thirty years and for a decade now has animated the community that has gathered around TheWalkingDebt, a blog dedicated to debt analysis, then tells the story of wealth, i.e. of the counterpart nature of debt, which is credit.
“It is difficult to understand – he says – the meaning of this obviousness which is nevertheless transparent: debt tells the story of poverty, just as credit tells the story of wealth. The focus on debts rather than credits is one of the consequences of our ambivalent feelings towards wealth, to which private desires and public shame are reserved”.
The author begins his story from the Sumerian civilizations and takes the reader on a journey that takes him through antiquity, up to the fall of Rome, and from there, thanks to the culture that develops in the Middle Ages, brings him to modernity. , when Western Europe experienced its extraordinary progress which led it in the space of a few centuries to become the hegemonic power of the world. Then he speaks of the 19th century epic, which was not only economic but exquisitely gnoseological, up to the great crisis that led to the double global war – the second European Thirty Years War – from whose rubble arose what the author calls the third bourgeois revolution, the one that in the 20th century introduced large swathes of the western population into the age of plenty, which was also that of the extraordinary progress of rights. Two sides of the same coin.
Maurizio Sgroi is a polygraph, he worked in newspapers, developed editorial and communication projects, wrote books. He founded and manages the TheWalkingDebt.org website, a point of reference for fans of socio-economic stories, with a style that favors narration, dissemination and information rigour. He has written, among others, for Econopoly del ‘Sole 24 ore’, ‘Il Foglio’, ‘Aspenia’, Aspenia On line and Linkiesta.