The US is looking more like Italy 

Financial Times Europe 5 Oct 2026 Rana Foroohar rana.foroohar@ft.com

 There’s an inter est ing par lour game being played in New York these days: which dodgy eco nomic habits has Amer ica picked up from else where? Is it Malay sia’s endemic polit ical pat ron age? Is it Nigeria’s tol er ance of cash bribes as busi ness as usual? Or is it Brazil’s inequal ity, where the ultra-rich enjoy a life of lux ury along side those liv ing in squalor? Amer ica today has aspects of these and other emer ging mar kets (though that term feels like a mis nomer these days, when so many devel op ing nations are best ing their rich-coun try peers in terms of eco nomic per form ance and gov ernance).

 But I would make a dif fer ent com par ison. I think that Amer ica is start ing to look more like Italy, another west ern nation with a tur bu lent his tory. This is the case for three reas ons. While overt cor rup tion may not be as dire in either the US or Italy as in many other fron tier mar kets, both are act ively turn ing away from poli cing it. Second, pop u lism in polit ics is show ing up in both coun tries in a sim ilar way. Finally, and most import antly, the labour mar ket in Amer ica is start ing to look more like Italy’s in one cru cial respect: older people are hold ing on to good jobs, and the young have trouble find ing decent ones. Let’s start with the polit ical eco nomy. Trans par ency Inter na tional’s most recent Cor rup tion Per cep tions Index gave the US a score of 64 out of 100 in terms of cor rup tion, its low est to date. Italy was slightly lower, with a score of 53, but the report spe cific ally called out both coun tries for water ing down efforts to fight cor rup tion.

 Italy’s res ist ance to crim in al ising the abuse of power among pub lic offi cials, for example, and the Trump admin is tra tion’s weak en ing of the For eign Cor rupt Prac tices Act belong in the same bas ket of beha viour. No sur prise then that demo cracy is weak en ing in both places. A 2026 report by VDem, an aca demic project that meas ures demo cracy, recently iden ti fied both Italy and the US as two of the west ern coun tries that have had the most demo cratic back slid ing in recent years. Like wise, Free dom House found that the two coun tries had rel at ively large swings towards a more auto cratic polit ical eco nomy com pared with other nations still labelled “free”. 

The US is no longer an excep tional nation in any pos it ive sense. I sense my fel low Amer ic ans start ing to think about cor rup tion as endemic, something ordin ary people can’t do much about. This reminds me of the shoulder-shrug ging “what can you do?” atti tude towards bad polit ical beha viour or black-mar ket eco nom ies that you find else where. Accord ing to a recent Gal lup poll, the per cent age of Amer ic ans who say cor rup tion in gov ern ment is wide spread has risen from 60 per cent in 2006 to 89 per cent today. Eco nomic cyn icism is grow ing too, espe cially among young people. One of the most strik ing things about the US eco nomy today is how the labour mar ket is begin ning to mir ror the twotiered, age-divided sys tem that has dogged European nations like Italy, for cing younger people to live longer with their par ents or leave the coun try for more upward mobil ity. The last US jobs report, out in early Septem ber, found that unem ploy ment was 7.1 per cent for ages 20-24, as com pared to 3.6 per cent for those 25-54 and 3 per cent for those over 55. Youth unem ploy ment in Italy is much higher — a whop ping 20 per cent. But the ratios are sim ilar, with unem ploy ment among younger people roughly double that of middle-aged work ers. Some of this two-tiered labour mar ket prob lem revolves around age, but some of it is about who your par ents are.

 If you are an insider, you have oppor tun ity. If you are an out sider, by race or class, you have less. As aca dem ics like Raj Chetty have shown, Amer ica is look ing much more like Old Europe these days in terms of mobil ity: where and to whom you are born has an out sized impact on how much or whether you prosper. These trends may be amp li fied by AI, which para dox ic ally seems to be favour ing not young digital nat ives but rather older work ers who have the sec toral exper i ence neces sary to lever age the tech no logy and do not face the same risk of dis rup tion as those seek ing entry-level jobs. In a paper pub lished in Septem ber, the Census Bur eau estim ated that gradu ates in the most AI-exposed areas would suf fer a five-per cent age-point decline in the like li hood of ini tial employ ment and 13 per cent lower earn ings than those going into less-exposed sec tors. While there’s reason to think the tech- nology could bene fit younger people in the future, as they move faster into the new jobs and sec tors that AI will cre ate, the short-term res ult is likely to be more dis af fected young people. 

The res ult of that would in turn be more of the pop u lism already so evid ent in the US, Italy and many other Euro- pean coun tries. That could in turn slow growth, which would fur ther dis ad vant age the young est and the poorest, fuel- ling the polit ical divides between boom- ers and younger voters, cent rists and extrem ists. Italy has, of course, seen this cycle play out many times in its long his tory, and is right now enjoy ing a brighter moment, with stronger export and employ ment num bers. Amer ica is only begin ning to under stand what hap pens when an empire col lapses under its own dys func tional polit ical eco nomy.