Cari Fwiani,
Vorrei mettervi a parte di una serie di riflessioni
sull'Italia e l'America anche in vista dell'uscita
di un mio nuovo libro, Italia-Google.

Buona lettura.

-L'America sta molto meglio di quello che sembra

E l'Italia sta molto peggio di quello che si legge.

Sono molti anni che vi racconto quanto sia
decisivo capire, vivere e lavorare nel
e per il Simulmondo.

Il Simulmondo e' l'industria della conoscenza,
la fabbrica di idee, tecnologie e Premium
che ha dato vita ai business piu' profittevoli,
ed ecologici, di questi ultimi 10 anni.

Il Simulmondo e' il papa' di Yahoo!, eBay,
Google, ma anche dei cellulari, di Vodafone,
di Tim, delle tv via cavo e dei contenuti
digitali, dell'Ipod e della PSP, dei videogiochi
e di tutti gli altri prodotti e Premium, del
software e dell'hardware della nostra generazione.

Tutta roba che cresce molto e che inquina poco.

Tutta roba che fa profitti in quantita' industriale
e che impiega molto piu' le menti che le braccia.

Perche' e' molto meglio, ricordate?, muovere
il cervello sulla Rete che il corpo in autostrada.

Il nostro Paese invece e' fermo agli anni settanta.

Le banche e il sistema statale, quando non sono
impegnati in altre attivita' non esattamente
meritorie, preferiscono finanziare business
e imprese del Novecento, piuttosto che coccolare
e supportare gli imprenditori italiani del
2000 e del Simulmondo, che pure esistono.

Esistono, ma soffocano senza soldi e senza visibilita',
oppure 'emigrano' fisicamente, o si limitano
a farlo virtualmente sulla Rete.

Per questo ho scritto un nuovo libro, Italia-Google,
che ho deciso, almeno per ora, di pubblicare in
forma solo digitale, in .pdf, per non far tagliare
neppure un albero per generare le pagine del
mio volume, e per renderlo il piu' digitale possibile.

Il libro racconta perche' l'Italia ha perso
il treno del Simulmondo negli anni Novanta
e come potrebbe prendere questo che passa negli
anni 2000.

Se vi interessa potete chiederlo a premium@finanzaworld.it

E adesso vi invito a leggere l'articolo di
Business Week che pubblico di seguito.

Un pezzo molto lungo e anche in inglese,
che pero' vale tutta la fatica che dovrete
fare per leggerlo.

Racconta perche' l'America sta molto meglio
di quello che sembra e perche' riuscira'
a governare la Globalizzazione e il boom
della Cina e dell'India.

Ci riuscira' perche' fabbrica, e continuera'
a fabbricare e vendere cose che nessun
asiatico puo' produrre. A nessun prezzo.

Buona lettura e scrivetemi a
f.carla@finanzaworld.it
se vi interessa questo tema.

---

Informazione pubblicitaria

Italia-Google e' il nuovo libro di Francesco Carla'
che contiene molte idee e riflessioni sull'Italia
e la nuova economia digitale.

Fino al 31 marzo 2006 puoi acquistare Italia-Google
a 35 euro anziche' 48.

(Oppure puoi abbonarti ai nostri Premium per
uno o due anni:
www.finanzaworld.it/premium.asp
e riceverai il libro gratuitamente).

Chiedi maggiori informazioni a premium@finanzaworld.it

---

-Da BusinessWeek
Why the Economy Is a Lot Stronger Than You Think

By Michael Mandel, with Steve Hamm in New York and Christopher J.
Farrell in St. Paul, Minn.
BusinessWeek Online

In a knowledge-based world, the traditional measures don't tell the
story. Intangibles like R&D are tracked poorly, if at all. Factor them
in and everything changes

You read this magazine religiously, watch CNBC while dressing for
work, scan the Web for economic reports. You've heard, over and over,
about the underlying problems with the U.S. economy -- the paltry
investment rate, the yawning current account deficit, the pathetic
amount Americans salt away. And you know what the experts are saying:
that the U.S. faces a perilous economic future unless we cut back on
spending and change our profligate ways.

Go to BusinessWeek Online to see how we could measure the shadow economy

But what if we told you that the doomsayers, while not definitively
wrong, aren't seeing the whole picture? What if we told you that
businesses are investing about $1 trillion a year more than the
official numbers show? Or that the savings rate, far from being
negative, is actually positive? Or, for that matter, that our deficit
with the rest of the world is much smaller than advertised, and that
gross domestic product may be growing faster than the latest gloomy
numbers show? You'd be pretty surprised, wouldn't you?

Well, don't be. Because the economy you thought you knew -- the one
all those government statistics purport to measure and make rational
and understandable -- actually may be on a stronger footing than you
think. Then again, it could be much more volatile than before, with
bigger booms and deeper busts. If true, that has major implications
for policymakers -- not least Ben Bernanke, who on Feb. 1 succeeded
Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Everyone knows the U.S. is well down the road to becoming a knowledge
economy, one driven by ideas and innovation. What you may not realize
is that the government's decades-old system of number collection and
crunching captures investments in equipment, buildings, and software,
but for the most part misses the growing portion of GDP that is
generating the cool, game-changing ideas. "As we've become a more
knowledge-based economy," says University of Maryland economist
Charles R. Hulten, "our statistics have not shifted to capture the
effects."

The statistical wizards at the Bureau of Economic Analysis in
Washington can whip up a spreadsheet showing how much the railroads
spend on furniture ($39 million in 2004, to be exact). But they have
no way of tracking the billions of dollars companies spend each year
on innovation and product design, brand-building, employee training,
or any of the other intangible investments required to compete in
today's global economy. That means that the resources put into
creating such world-beating innovations as the anticancer drug
Avastin, inhaled insulin, Starbuck's, exchange-traded funds, and yes,
even the iPod, don't show up in the official numbers.

Now, a generation of economists who came of professional age watching
the dot-com boom and bust are trying to get a grip on this shadow
economy: People like Carol A. Corrado and Daniel E. Sichel of the
Federal Reserve Board, who, along with Hulten, figured out that
businesses are spending much more on future-oriented investments than
widely believed. In a way, these economists are disciples of
Greenspan, who understood earlier than most that the conventional
numbers don't capture the emerging knowledge economy.

Greenspan was continually digging into arcane factoids he hoped would
give him a better insight into what was going on under the hood of the
U.S. economy. And Bernanke seems to understand the importance of doing
the same. In a speech last year, he said that intangible investments
"appear to be quantitatively important." As a result, Bernanke noted,
"aggregate saving and investment may be significantly understated in
the U.S. official statistics."

BEYOND WIDGETS
As Greenspan would be the first to tell you, it's a lot easier
counting how many widgets the nation produces in a year than
quantifying the creation and marketing of knowledge. After all, we're
talking about intangibles: brand equity, the development of talent,
the export of best practices.

This stuff is hard to measure, but to ignore it is to miss what the
economy is telling us. And to miss that is to increase the likelihood
of committing policy blunders. Including these intangible investments
could provide a better picture of the economy, one that offers more
advance warning of recessions, slippage in our ability to innovate,
and other nasty surprises.

To understand why the government measures the economy the way it does,
it helps to go back in time to the 1930s. The Great Depression had the
nation in a death grip, and government planners and politicians lacked
the tools to answer the big question of the day: Was the economy
getting better or worse? To find out, the Commerce Dept. brought in
economist Simon Kuznets , then at the National Bureau of Economic
Research, to calculate for the first time the nation's income and
output -- the purchasing power and production of the U.S. economy.
Setting such a benchmark would allow the government to figure out if
the economy was growing or shrinking.

Working with handwritten data, Kuznets and a small group of fellow
economists began counting tangible things like machines and buildings
as long-term investments. It made sense, since this was still the
Industrial Age. And such calculations came in handy during World War
II, when the Roosevelt Administration needed a fix on the nation's
capacity to grind out tanks, ships, and planes.

A BREAK WITH THE PAST
Kuznets' work set the tone for the rest of the century, not to mention
helping win him the Nobel prize in Economics in 1971. Machines and
buildings were counted as future-oriented investment, but spending on
education, training, and R&D was not. No attempt was made to judge the
social utility of expenditures. For example, the $6 million cost of
building the Flamingo Hotel, the Las Vegas casino opened by Bugsy
Siegel in 1946, was tallied as an investment. But AT&T's funding of
Bell Labs, where the transistor was invented around the same time,
wasn't even included in GDP. Kuznets himself acknowledged the
limitations of his system, yet it stayed basically the same for most
of the postwar period.

By the early '90s, Greenspan was becoming increasingly frustrated by
the official numbers' inability to explain a rapidly evolving economy.
In 1996 and 1997 he refused to accept conventional data telling him
that productivity growth was falling in much of the service sector,
noting -- correctly, as it turns out -- that "this pattern is highly
unlikely." He also pointed out that the official numbers for consumer
inflation were too high.

At the Washington offices of the BEA, J. Steven Landefeld, who became
director in 1995, felt pressure to include numbers that better
reflected the knowledge economy. Landefeld isn't a rash fellow, and
the pace of change at the BEA, while quick for a statistical agency,
would be called deliberate by most. But in 1999 -- six decades after
Kuznets laid the groundwork for calculating GDP -- Landefeld and the
BEA decided to break with the past.

The BEA started treating business spending on software as a long-lived
investment. The decision was overdue. Companies were spending more
than $150 billion annually on software, far more than the $100 billion
for computer hardware. And the software often stayed in use longer
than the hardware. The fact that economists could go into stores and
see software in brightly colored boxes reassured them that it was
real. "Prepackaged software is a lot easier" to count, recalls
Landefeld.

Silly as it may seem now, it was a revolutionary change at the time.
But over the past seven years the economy has continued to evolve
while the numbers we use to capture it have remained the same.
Globalization, outsourcing, and the emphasis on innovation and
creativity are forcing businesses to shift at a dramatic rate from
tangible to intangible investments.

According to BusinessWeek's calculations, the top 10 biggest U.S.
corporations that report their R&D outlays -- a list that includes
ExxonMobil, Procter & Gamble, General Electric, Microsoft, and Intel
-- have boosted R&D spending by 42%, or almost $11 billion, since
2000. Yet over the same period, they have only increased capital
spending by a meager 2%, or less than $1 billion. So all together,
these giants have actually increased their future-oriented investment
by roughly $12 billion -- most of which doesn't show up in the BEA
numbers.

This shift to intangibles looks all the more remarkable when we look a
bit further back. P&G, for example, has boosted its spending on R&D,
which doesn't count as investment in the GDP statistics, by 39% since
1996. By contrast, the company's capital budget, which does factor
into GDP, is no bigger today than it was back then. The same is true
at spicemaker McCormick & Co., where capital spending is basically
flat compared to 1996 but R&D outlays to create new products have
tripled over the same period.

Want to see how this works? Grab your iPod, flip it over, and read the
script at the bottom. It says: "Designed by Apple in California.
Assembled in China." Where the gizmo is made is immaterial to its
popularity. It is great design, technical innovation, and savvy
marketing that have helped Apple Computer sell more than 40 million
iPods. Yet the folks at the BEA don't count what Apple spends on R&D
and brand development, which totaled at least $800 million in 2005.
Rather, they count each iPod twice: when it arrives from China, and
when it sells. That, in effect, reduces Apple -- one of the world's
greatest innovators -- to a reseller of imported goods.

That's why the new research from Corrado, Sichel, and Hulten is so
important, and why building and improving upon it could become a key
goal of economists in the coming years. Ultimately, we might end up
with a "knowledge-adjusted" GDP, which would track the spending so
crucial for global competitiveness.

Right now, though, rough calculations of these intangibles are all we
have. To help come up with their $1 trillion number for unmeasured
business investment, for example, Corrado, Sichel, and Hulten counted
the portion of advertising designed to have long-lived effects on
perception (that would include the sort of corporate image advertising
seen here at BusinessWeek). They also estimated the value of new
product development in the financial-services industry, which current
R&D numbers miss. "We had to hunt around for bits and pieces of data,"
says Hulten.

Assessing how much bang for the buck companies get from their spending
on intangibles is even harder, especially in the fast-changing
knowledge economy. Take employee training. In the old days, that
required flying people to a teaching facility, which cost companies a
lot of time on top of the cost of the instructors and real estate. Now
online learning and other innovations are driving down the cost of
training. At IBM, the training budget fell by $10 million from 2003 to
2004, a 1.4% decline, while the number of classroom and e-learning
hours rose by 29%. Are other companies seeing an equally dramatic
decline in the cost of training? No one knows.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS
That's why the BEA doesn't want to move too fast. It plans to publish
supplementary accounts for R&D in the next few years, which will track
R&D spending without adding it into the official GDP numbers. Other
intangibles, though, remain below the radar. "No one disagrees with
this conceptually," says BEA chief Landefeld. "The problem is in the
empirical measurement."

But look at how our perception of the economy changes once you add in
things like R&D and brand-building. The published data show that total
investment -- business, residential, and government -- has been

falling over the past three decades as a share of national spending,
while consumption has been rising. Add in the intangible investments
provided by our three economists, and the picture changes completely.

Total investment rises, going from 23.8% of national spending in the
1970s to 25.1% in the early 2000s -- much higher than the 18.3% the
conventional numbers show. That helps explain why the economy has
sustained strong productivity growth, and why foreign investors
continue to pour money into the U.S.

Factoring in the knowledge economy also helps us understand why the
recession of 2001 seemed worse than the official statistics showed --
and why the recovery was so slow. According to the published numbers,
the six-month recession of 2001 was so mild the business sector
actually grew at a modest 0.4% pace that year. By 2003, however, more
than 3 million private sector jobs had disappeared.

One reason for this disconnect is simple: Corporations hacked back
their budgets for R&D, advertising, training, and so forth. Yes, that
canceled out a ton of high-paying jobs, but had no direct effect on
GDP. Remember that R&D and other intangible business investments are
not currently counted as national output. Therefore, when a company
laid off an engineer doing long-term product development but kept
selling the same number of its old products, GDP stayed the same.
Productivity even went up, because fewer workers were producing the
same amount of output. And if that laid-off engineer went to work,
say, building houses? National output might even have risen.

There's enough data available through 2003 to estimate how business
intangibles would have changed the growth numbers. For our purposes,
let's assume that overall intangible business investment followed the
same path as industrial R&D and advertising, for which annual data are
available. Crunch the numbers and it looks like the business sector
really grew by only 0.1% in 2001, less than a quarter of the size of
the official increase. Growth in 2002 now also looks slower than the
published data.

By contrast, the conventional numbers may be understating the strength
of the economy today. The BEA announced on Jan. 27 that growth in the
fourth quarter of 2005 was only 1.1%. In part that was because of a
smaller-than-expected increase in business capital spending. However,
employment at design and management-consulting firms is up sharply in
the quarter, suggesting that businesses may be spending on intangibles
instead. Indeed, the consumer confidence number for January zoomed to
the highest level since 2002, as Americans became more optimistic
about finding jobs.

Then again, the economy may hit bigger bumps in the years ahead. When
companies significantly trim their spending on R&D, design, training,
and other knowledge-enhancing activities, as they did in 2001, the
resulting pain in terms of job losses and reduced innovation could
deepen the next downturn.

Perhaps the trickiest and most controversial aspect of the shadow
economy is how it alters our assessment of international trade. The
same intangible investments not counted in GDP, such as business
knowhow and brand equity, are for the most part left out of foreign
trade stats, too. Also largely ignored is the mass influx of trained
workers into the U.S. They represent an immense contribution of human
capital to the economy that the U.S. gets free of charge, which can
substantially balance out the trade deficit of goods and services. "I
don't know that the trade deficit really tells you where you are in
the global economy," says Gary L. Ellis, chief financial officer of
Medtronic Inc., a world leader in medical devices such as implantable
defibrillators. "We're exporting a lot of knowledge."

Time for another real-world example. In December, Intel Corp.
announced plans to build a new wafer-fabrication plant in Israel. To
the statisticians, the value of that foreign investment is the book
value of the plant -- that is, the cost of erecting the building and
installing the chipmaking machinery.

Not counted is the systematic export of knowhow to Israel that enables
that factory to operate profitably. At the core is a program called
Copy Exactly!, which requires that a new fab duplicate an existing one
that is working well, down to how often the plant's pumps are
serviced. All of this critical information is documented and
transferred from the U.S. to the new plant, but it is not picked up by
the trade statistics.

The numbers don't catch Intel's exhaustive training program either. To
get its new plants running quickly, the chipmaker brings 800 or 900
employees from the new fab to spend a minimum of six months in
Hillsboro, Ore., where Intel develops new production processes. By the
time they return home, these people will have picked up not just the
details of the process but also tribal knowledge -- the unwritten lore
of how Intel works. With that info in their heads, they're equipped to
get the new factory up and running at high volume within a quarter,
rather than taking a year or more. In economics speak, this is a
classic transfer of human capital. So why isn't it called an export?

Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard's Center for International
Development, believes it should be. He describes these cross-border
flows of knowhow as "dark matter." Hausmann notes that U.S.
multinationals consistently earn higher rates of return than their
foreign counterparts -- an average of 6% on foreign operations since
2000, vs. the 1.2% foreign multinationals earn in the U.S., according
to the latest BEA figures. From that, he infers that the
multinationals are benefiting, in part, from knowledge exported from
the U.S., a country with faster productivity growth than the rest of
the industrialized world.

Using these arguments, Hausmann finds that the U.S. current account
deficit actually disappears, averaged over time. "With globalization,
you develop a blueprint and sell it in all countries," he says.
"Countries that are good at creating blueprints get more exports of
dark matter."

Admittedly, most trade experts are hostile to Hausmann's conclusions.
A recent report from Goldman, Sachs & Co. likened Hausmann's dark
matter to cold fusion. And the economists at the BEA worry that adding
knowledge exports to the trade stats would make published data less
useful. "I have a problem putting fabricated flows into exports," says
Ralph H. Kozlow, who oversees international accounts at the BEA. "You
get into an impossible statistical maze when you try to value all of
this at anything that anyone would believe."

But even if Hausmann is overstating his case, he's on the right track.
There's no doubt that the statistical problems are formidable, but
it's also certain that the conventional trade statistics are missing a
big portion of the knowledge flows that create value these days.
Suppose we assume that U.S. multinationals can earn an extra
percentage point of return on their foreign investments by being able
to use business intangibles exported from the U.S. Then a rough
estimate of the value of the unmeasured exports of knowledge is
anywhere from $25 billion to $100 billion per year, depending on what
assumptions are used.

And let's not forget about immigrants. The workers who move to the
U.S. each year bring with them a mother lode of education and skills
-- human capital -- for free. One celebrated example is Jonathan Ive,
the man who designed the iPod and iMac. Ive was born in England and
educated at Newcastle Polytechnic University of Northumbria before
joining Apple Computer Inc. in California in 1992.

Ive is not unique. Most of the workers who immigrate to the U.S. each
year have at least a high school diploma, while about a third have a
college education or better. Since it costs, on average, roughly
$100,000 to provide 12 years of elementary and secondary education,
and another $100,000 to pay for a college degree, immigrants are
providing a subsidy of at least $50 billion annually to the U.S.
economy in free human capital. Alternatively, valuing their
contribution to the economy by the total wages they expect to earn
during their lifetime would put the value of the human capital of new
immigrants closer to $200 billion per year. Either the low or high
estimate would make the current account deficit look smaller.

These numbers may also seem squishy. Still, if Fed chief Bernanke,
corporate executives, and ordinary investors want to know where we've
been, and where we're headed, tracking the creation and flow of
knowledge is the only way to go.

---

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