Paolo Sylos Labini

Paolo Sylos Labini (30 October 1920 – 7 December 2005) was an Italian economist and a key figure in the economic debate in post-World War II Italy.

After secondary school, Sylos Labini enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the Sapienza University of Rome, graduating in July 1942 with a thesis on the economic consequences of innovations.

[1] In his research, he turned to study classical economists—in particular Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx—after becoming aware of the limited interest in innovations among contemporary economists.

In 1948, Sylos Labini first went to Chicago, where he met Franco Modigliani, and then to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study with Joseph Schumpeter at Harvard University.

[3] The two works were grouped together in an article by Franco Modigliani (1958), which caused them to become accepted as part of mainstream theory on non-competitive market forms.

His model was the first systematic econometric research on the Italian economy, and was aimed to reconcile theoretical analysis with historical changes while being gradually modified with new variables.

According to Sylos Labini, an economist is necessarily influenced by personal judgment, which determines, at a minimum, the choice of problems studied and which may also skew the outcome of the analysis.

In his last book, Ahi serva Italia (2006), Sylos Labini spoke as a civic-minded economist to Italians who refuse to understand that respect for rules is an absolute requirement of a market economy.

On this subject, Sylos Labini referred to an excerpt from Gaetano Salvemini: Almost all of those old teachers belonged to a school of thought which today is viewed disparagingly as positivistic, enlightened, intellectualist.

In those times of unelevated culture, we were clearly split into believers or non-believers, the pro- or anticlerical, conservatives or revolutionaries, monarchists or republicans, individualists or socialists.