The Italian Diaspora

There’s a story unfolding (mainly) across Europe that few want to talk about, but everyone can see if they look closely enough. It’s the story of educated young Italians packing their bags and leaving: not for a semester abroad or a gap year adventure, but permanently. And the twist? Almost none of them are coming back.

If this sounds familiar, like that astronaut meme where he realizes “it always has been”, hold on. It’s not quite the same story.

Italians have been emigrating for centuries, sure. But historically, this was the classic poverty migration: people choosing between starvation at home and a perilous journey to somewhere that might be better. They left to do low-paid jobs, brought their ability to stay happy despite difficult circumstances, and (most importantly) taught the world how to eat well.

But what’s happening now is fundamentally different. We’re not talking about people fleeing poverty. We’re talking about skilled, educated, talented people who could theoretically have comfortable lives in Italy, but who are choosing to leave anyway because they can see their potential being wasted.

The previous generation of Italian emigrants were economic refugees. This generation are economic emigrants.

Meanwhile, even Portugal figured out how to become a magnet for tech nomads. My wife met a French artist(!) with Belgian-Congolese heritage in London who moved to Lisbon and loves it there. But Italy? Italy seems determined to remain a beautiful museum that its own young people can’t afford to live in.

This isn’t just about economics, though the economics are brutal. It’s about pride, shortsightedness, and what happens when a country would rather preserve the status quo than adapt to survive. It’s also about something more hopeful: what can happen if the people who leave start building something new together, scattered across the world but connected by shared values and experiences.

Here’s what I think is happening: Italians are too proud to admit that outsiders might do things better and should be allowed to lead. Or maybe it’s envy. Either way, the result is the same: a country that welcomes tourists but has never seriously tried to attract external talent.

If you want to start a global business, you have to compete with other global companies. It’s impossible to win when you’re starting from a position of massive disadvantage, like in Italy: high taxes everywhere, bureaucracy that makes simple things complicated, and a system that seems designed to punish rather than reward entrepreneurship.

Making Italy more competitive would require cutting services, pensions, social welfare, and public sector salaries. But those are voters, and no politician wants to tell voters that their benefits are unsustainable. Taxes can’t be moved to other areas because they’re already too high everywhere. And there are some expenditures, like interest on public debt, that simply can’t be cut.

It’s a trap with no (easy) exit.

The Failed Homecoming

A few years ago, a center-left government tried something interesting: generous tax breaks for Italians living abroad to lure them back to the motherland. I was talking with a friend about this yesterday, and we were trying to figure out the logic.

I think the plan was: get the talent back, let the talent grow the Italian economic pie, everyone benefits from the larger pie, and the generous tax breaks pay for themselves. It’s not crazy in theory.

The problem is execution. To actually let returning talent “cook,” you’d also need to:

• Change the bureaucracy to make creating new companies easier
• Fight the gerontocracy and let these talents actually drive the companies they join
• Create an environment where innovation is rewarded rather than punished

Pretty easy tasks, right?

Instead, what happened was predictable and depressing. Italian companies started offering even lower salaries to Italians working abroad “because you won’t pay taxes anyway.” Never mind that the tax deal would expire after some years, and these companies would presumably not raise those salaries to maintain the same post-tax earnings…

The result? Some people took advantage of the program, but many moved to other countries once the bargain was over. Incentives matter, and the incentives were all wrong.

The Long View Problem

I’ve been listening to an analysis about short-termism lately, and it helped me understand how Italy got into this mess. Italy is basically decades ahead of other countries in dealing with the consequences of short-term thinking…and not in a good way.

Taking the long view is incredibly difficult because even when results arrive, you can never see the alternative reality of what your life would have been if you’d chosen a different path. Look at the European Union and Brexit. The EU has been a largely positive experiment, but people focus on the downsides. Brexit should be a cautionary tale, all those broken promises, all that chaos, but somehow nobody in Europe is really talking about it as a lesson.

So everyone defaults to short-termism because the tiny tax break here-and-there, the €50 extra per month you might get, is visible in your paycheck. It’s real, even if it’s pathetic. The long-term benefits of structural reform? Those are theoretical.

To take the long view, you have to trust politicians and institutions. And at this point, nobody is willing to do that.

The Coming Reckoning

Here’s the tragic thing: there might be a way out for countries like the US, which could theoretically grow their way out of their debt problems. But that’s not an option for Europe, and definitely not an option for Italy.

I’ve been hearing realistic discussions about pension defaults in the US (!!!) or at least massive cuts to benefits. But here in Europe, everyone still seems confident that somehow, in some way, all these unsustainable benefits will continue indefinitely. Even after Greece showed us what happens when the math stops working.

I’m sorry for my fellow Italians living in Italy, but they’re going to wake up to a terrible surprise one day. The rational thing would be to take the medicine sooner rather than later, but obviously that’s not going to happen. We’ll just keep kicking the can down the road until someone like Argentina’s Milei shows up and incinerates everything.

The Diaspora Solution

But here’s where the story gets interesting. The people who left aren’t just disappearing into other countries and losing their Italian identity. They’re creating something new: a distributed Italian community that exists across borders but maintains shared values (ehm…like love for football) and connections.

I run an Italian podcast focused mainly on Italian issues, but about 10% of our listeners live abroad [personal finance is a country-agnostic topic, but many practical implementations and consequences, think taxes, are country specific]. We’re not doing any targeted international marketing: this growth is organic. Italians abroad are seeking out content and community that connects them to their roots while acknowledging their new reality.

In my mind, the podcast should be a gateway to community, and the community should be the central focus. We’re using Reddit for now, but at some point we’ll need to move to a proprietary platform like other successful communities have done (*cough* Rational Reminder *cough*). Using a third-party platform is too risky for something you’re trying to build long-term.

The Power of Chosen Community

I love the idea of community because I’ve experienced its power before: through a snowboarding crew, through playing Magic: The Gathering semi-competitively, through various other shared interests. I just realized how much I miss it. My wife and I surf together, but we’re always connecting with local crews for just a couple of days before moving on. There’s no sustained community there.

(As an aside, my six-year-old daughter has already fallen in love with her surf teacher during our recent holiday; and with a proper rock star who was living next to us in London before that. I’m very bearish about my prospects when she becomes a teenager. At least she considers me cooler than Roger Federer, take that Switzerland)

The power of real community is being able to share ideas and concepts with people you know share your values. It’s the best way to grow intellectually and personally. It’s also a shortcut: you can take their opinions at face value because you know they’re legit. You don’t need to do extensive research on every person’s credibility because the community has already filtered for that.

Building Something New

The ultimate goal is to bring this distributed community together in real life. I’ve experienced amazing gatherings and parties, but I can’t organize a dinner for four people if my life depends on it: that’s really not my skill set. Hopefully I’ll find the right person to handle the logistics.

There’s an additional layer of responsibility here because people have to pay for these events, even if the event itself is free. Just traveling to meet up has costs. It doesn’t take much to create a disaster: nobody wants to accidentally organize the next Fyre Festival.

But this is the plan: we might end up living in different corners of the world, but we’ll still have more in common with each other than I have with my neighbours here in Zurich. And the children of the Italian diaspora will definitely share more with each other than with the people who decided to stay.

The Paradox of Modern Diaspora

What’s fascinating about this moment is how technology enables new forms of community that weren’t possible before. We can build careers and lives in countries that actually want our skills and energy, while maintaining and deepening connections to people who share our background (and values). We can be Italian in ways that people living in Italy often can’t: more internationally minded, more entrepreneurial, more connected to global opportunities.

This isn’t just about Italy, by the way. It’s happening everywhere that educated young people feel like their home countries don’t want them or can’t use their talents effectively. The difference is that now they don’t have to choose between abandoning their identity and abandoning their ambitions.

The Network Effects

Here’s what I hope happens next: these distributed communities become more powerful. They have the shared cultural and intellectual capital of their home countries, plus the dynamism and opportunity of their adopted countries, plus the network effects of being connected across multiple markets and jurisdictions.

This creates a feedback loop. The diaspora becomes more successful (should say less disadvantaged but you get it, everything is relative), which attracts more people to leave, which makes the diaspora stronger…and the home country weaker.

You might read a conflict here, an “us vs them” argument, but that’s not the point. Living abroad ain’t a walk in the park. Going back to the friend I was referring to ealier, neither of us would leave Zurich even if doing anything admin here is a total nightmare (there is a fundamental difference in not acting like a spolied brat requiring everyone to speak another language other than German – which, by they way, Switzerland has THREE official languages – and using German to make others life miserable on purpose). The goal is to empower the community. If this has secondary effects on something else, be it. I am not designing a zero-sum interaction but I cannot hide some of the consequences.

The Institutional Response

The tragedy is that this is probably fixable, but it would require the kind of long-term thinking and structural reform that seems impossible in the current political environment. Italy could compete for global talent. It could reform its bureaucracy, reduce its tax burden, and create an environment where young entrepreneurs could thrive. I mean, it is not even about global talent, just let homegrown bright lads flourish without stifling entrepreneurial endeavours with crazy policies. [A 100% laissez-faire attitude towards crypto is prob not great, US I am looking at you, but Italy thought about taxing like 50% capital gains on those assets…yes, I cannot recall the right number CAUSE THEY FUCKING CHANGE THEIR MINDS EVERY 5 MINUTES]

But doing so would require admitting that the current system isn’t working, and that’s a level of intellectual honesty that seems beyond most political systems right now, not just Italy.

Instead, we get cosmetic changes and temporary tax breaks that create market distortions without addressing underlying problems.

The Personal Is Political

What makes this story particularly poignant is how personal it is for everyone involved. These aren’t abstract policy discussions: they’re decisions about where to build careers, raise families, and invest emotional energy.

When a country makes it clear through its policies and culture that it doesn’t value what you have to offer, leaving becomes not just an economic decision but an existential one. You’re not just seeking better opportunities; you’re seeking recognition of your worth and potential.

And once you find that recognition elsewhere, it becomes very hard to imagine going back, even if conditions at home improve. You’ve built a new life, new relationships, new professional networks. The switching costs become enormous.

Looking Forward

So what happens to Italy? Probably what’s already happening: a slow decline punctuated by periodic crises. Brain drain leads to economic stagnation, which leads to political instability, which leads to more emigration in a vicious cycle.

But what happens to the diaspora? That’s the more interesting question. I think we’re seeing the early stages of something unprecedented: globally distributed communities that maintain cultural identity while transcending geographic boundaries.

These communities might become more Italian than Italy itself: more dynamic, more innovative, more creative. They’ll preserve what’s best about Italian culture while discarding what’s holding the country back.

And maybe, eventually, they’ll be the ones who figure out how to fix Italy. Not by returning en masse, but by showing what’s possible when Italian talent and creativity are unleashed in environments that actually support them. That would be the ultimate long view: leaving not to abandon your country, but to save it.

ahahahah who do you think I am, Packy bloody McCormick? There is no optimistic view here, just the hope that one day I’ll be able to organise a surf retreat with my fellow expat 😉 Fuck Italy.

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