be different from that of young people; the active policies should therefore have specific, not vague, targets. For those who are no longer young, therefore, it is also necessary to think in a perspective of opportunities of re-employment and not simply of early retirement. Again, this implies a radical change of mentality, that isn’t achieved solely through the approval of a reform, but requires a change in the way one confronts problems, a new attitude on the part of unions and political parties, who should have as their objective not only the protection of the income of the unemployed, but, above all, promoting their re-entry into the world of work. Recent research by Boeri and Garibaldi has shed light on the presence of a displacement effect harmful to the young which is the consequence of raising the age of retirement in 2012 (if the old work longer, the young remain unemployed). Is it therefore necessary to think about the involvement in the labor market of the over-55 cohorts and the reduction of youth unemployment as two conflicting objectives? Perhaps in the short term. To start with, I note that both the authors have changed their minds: Boeri, in particular, has indeed often asserted that one should not give weight to the principle of substitution. I agree with saying that, in the context of crisis, in extending the pensionable age the employment of young people was made more difficult, but I don’t think it is right to assert this without considering the state of necessity and financial crisis in which the reform of pensions was conceived and approved by Parliament, and that these difficulties are presented almost as if they were a structural characteristic, and therefore as if the ‘fixed number of jobs’ rule should apply, by which ‘one entering employment is at the expense of another exiting it’. Empirical research agrees in showing that countries that are able to create employment do so for both old and young workers. There is therefore not a negative link, but rather a positive one. We should therefore think of the unemployment of the young and of those over-55s as of two compatible objectives. Otherwise we commit the same serious mistake that has kept women out of the labor market. The work of women has always been seen as complementary to that of men, and therefore, in times of a shortage of employment, it was (and is) women who have to
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