NO ITALIAN GOVERNMENT HAS EVER ASKED FOR MY ADVICE. This might be simply because they’ve never heard of me, but it might also be because of the inherent instability of the Italian political system, which ensures that few governments survive long enough to get to grips with long-term or structural issues. The political agenda tends to be dominated by crisis responses, campaigning, and power struggles between the parties.

The regions are a little different, and in some cases are much more energetic about looking after their economic interests than the national government, and perhaps this also provides an additional incentive for the national government not to get involved.

In 2012 I was invited to Florence by the regional government of Tuscany to give them some advice on their long-term strategy. Many people around the world would agree that Tuscany is the jewel in Italy’s crown and hardly needs to worry about its image. In fact it’s one of the few subnational regions on earth with a better and stronger global image than most countries (California and Texas are two other examples of this rare breed). But the regional government wasn’t worried about Tuscany’s wonderful image; it was worried about how Tuscany could continue to deserve it: an excellent question, which a number of other highly regarded places would do well to ponder.

The challenges that Tuscany was facing are common to many countries and regions in the “developed” world today: a loss of competitiveness, deindustrialization, immigration, climate change, economic vulnerability, an aging population. It wasn’t hard to picture Tuscany as a place which was past its peak, still managing to live off its glorious past but with few plans for the future, and very little that was truly sustainable in its current model.

In Tuscany, I found it impossible to shake off the sensation of watching the final decline of Europe from a comfortable veranda as one sips an agreeable drink. There are few better places to witness its dying moments as global influence gradually slips back to its habitual location of Asia, where it has resided for eight of the last ten centuries.

The malaise is essentially one of boringness. Countries can and often do become fatally stuck when they perceive that the best thing to do is stop changing. Enrico Rossi, the president of Tuscany, as gifted and dynamic as any politician I’ve ever worked with, told me that he sometimes felt he was expected to be little more than a janitor for the historical theme park he was lucky enough to live in.

Seeing the Brunelleschi frescoes that adorned not just the ceilings of his office but also all four walls, right down to the marble floor, and Brunelleschi’s peerless Duomo standing just outside his window, it was indeed quite hard to imagine how he would ever get much of anything done even if he felt like it.

The trouble was that so few people could see this, or perhaps, understandably, few wanted to see it. Tuscany felt like a place that was stifled by its own magnificent history, its sense of absolute entitlement and privilege. For a population to grow up in towns and cities like Florence, Siena, Pisa, San Gimignano, Lucca, Cortona, Arezzo, Montepulciano, Pistoia, or Viareggio, surrounded by such architecture, such landscapes, and other tokens of historical power and glory must have something of the same effect as the child of an ancient aristocratic family growing up in a home full of the trophies and possessions and symbols of its family’s long-standing wealth and status.

On his fiftieth birthday, Cosimo de’ Medici, the fifteenth-century banker, politician, and founding father of the dynasty that ruled Florence for two hundred years, said: “For fifty years, I’ve done nothing but earn money and spend it, and it’s clear to me that spending it gives me more pleasure than earning it.”¹⁸ And what he enjoyed spending his money on was glorifying his city, Florence: funding art and music and literature and architecture and good works. Once he’d spent everything he could on himself and his family, it was obvious to him that the next beneficiary would be his city.

Cosimo, through his devotion to Florence, reminds us of the correct relationship between a community and its people: a relationship of mutual love and trust. Yet this has become corrupted in our modern age into a relationship of simple prostitution. We throw a handful of coins to the administrators who run our cities and countries for us and never get involved except to complain if we feel our money is being unwisely spent. Then we ring customer services. It’s striking how pathological many of our modern societies have become when seen through this lens.

Well, the only remedy for too much wealth, as any twenty-first-century dot-com billionaire or fifteenth-century banker will tell you, is to give it away. I proposed a solution which I called Tuscanomics: to distill the essence of the cultural, political, social, and economic genius of Tuscany over the last ten centuries, turn it into freeware, and donate it to the world.

The word Tuscanomics was spoken to me by Cosimo de’ Medici in a dream (honestly), a word whose power derives from the fact that it seems to be famous before anybody has heard it. I immediately got out of bed and sent out 120 emails to friends in sixty countries, asking each of them how they would define Tuscanomics. Less than half of the people who replied admitted that they had never heard the word before. It just sounds like something you ought to know about. It’s a word that comes preloaded with meaning and promise.

Needless to say, Tuscany did not create its excellent global reputation by talking. It earned it by doing service to humanity, and it was clear to me that Tuscany should continue to pay the rent on its global reputation in the same way. Because all of Tuscany’s problems today are problems that people around the world share and recognize, it could win the recognition and gratitude of people around the world by finding innovative and effective solutions to these problems, inspired by its own radical innovations during the last thousand years, and by making those solutions open-source and shareable.

The solutions would form a rigorous, multidimensional, and coherent whole: a new approach to social, economic, educational, cultural, and industrial governance to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century and avoid the errors of the twentieth. I designed a team and a work process that would develop Tuscanomics first into a book, then a research program, a comprehensive new approach to regional and city governance, an annual summit, a global network of ambassadors and teachers, and a whole series of other initiatives stretching years into the future.

One of the many components of Tuscanomics was to be a new approach to displaying works of art, which I called Artecrazia, a name combining the Italian words for art and democracy. I had recently learned that more than 90 percent of all the artworks and historical artifacts in Tuscany were never on public display, but permanently stored in cellars because there just wasn’t enough gallery and museum space to exhibit them properly. Some of the storage facilities didn’t even meet the necessary standards of consistent temperature, humidity, and security, but Tuscany (and indeed most other Italian regions) have so much more art than they can possibly exhibit, it’s a major problem finding places to store it all.

So the idea of Artecrazia was that every Tuscan resident would have the right to select one item from a list of available items in the stores (the list would probably not include priceless canvases by Piero della Francesca, but there are hundreds of thousands of less precious but equally beautiful items which would give just as much pleasure) and take it home on a free two-year loan, entirely on trust. The only three conditions were that they must exhibit it to the public on at least six days in the year; that they would neither sell, lend, or rent it to others, nor damage or deface it; and that they would attend a free half-day curatorship course in order to learn how to look after it. Support and assistance would be provided for the public-display commitment. Anyone borrowing an artifact would also be encouraged to volunteer a few days each year to help other borrowers on their public-display days.

The response from the group in Florence when I suggested this plan was robust, to put it mildly (one elderly participant demanded I be immediately dismissed and sued for the return of my fee), but it was not universally negative. After a considerable amount of discussion I managed to establish that almost everybody would feel proud of this project if it already existed and was up and running, but they just didn’t feel it was possible, which made things much simpler for me: I simply had to work out how to make it possible.

This basically looked like an insurance problem, so I suggested that we put together a small team of the brightest, most creative insurance experts in the world, invite them to Florence, lock them in a villa with a case of Brunello di Montalcino and not let them out until they’d found a solution. In any case, even if some loss or damage did occur to the artworks and artifacts, this seemed to me to be better than hiding them away in the dark where they would crumble into dust without ever being seen by anybody again. There’s something a bit funny going on in society when we truly believe that it’s better for a work of art to be buried forever rather than run the risk of its getting damaged or stolen.

With this and many other initiatives, Tuscanomics would form not only Tuscany’s competitive edge but also its gift to the world, because there were plenty of other places that would like to find such solutions. This might be Tuscany’s chance to forge a new Renaissance and make its second mark on the world.

We launched the program to the media and public in the Renaissance splendor of the Palazzo Sacrati Strozzi with contributions by Romano Prodi (a previous president of the European Commission who had twice been the prime minister of Italy) and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen. There was a certain amount of interest in the media for a couple of weeks, after which the project quickly sank without trace, despite the best efforts of several talented people to keep it going and bring it to fruition.

It simply didn’t stand a chance against business as usual and the gravity of civilizational decline. One day, I hope I someone tougher than me will find a way to bring the project to life. It was too good to waste.

My first sight of Heinz Fischer, president of the Austrian Republic in 2012, when I advised the Austrian government, was from a considerable distance. We were scheduled to meet in his office in the vast Hofburg palace, the seat of government since the thirteenth century. As with many great palaces of the early modern period, a long series of rooms lead one to another, and all the doorways are aligned so that, if the doors are open, one can see one’s destination down a vast vista of ever grander rooms. One curiosity of the piano nobile of the Hofburg is that the doorways appear to get larger and grander as one approaches the most important state rooms (whether this is reality or illusion I have never been able to determine), but the curious effect was that Herr Fischer, as I walked through the last six or seven rooms, appeared to be getting smaller and smaller as I neared him.

Certainly, this quite ordinary, mild-mannered, middle-aged, middle-class man of middle height and social democrat persuasion did not give the impression of being very much at home in surroundings of such overpowering opulence. The ceilings and doorways of such buildings are clearly designed for occupants eight or nine feet in height, but since nobody’s that tall, it’s difficult to imagine how such grandeur can do anything but diminish the owners, making them look and feel constantly undersized. One can only marvel at the impenetrable self-esteem that the men and women who commissioned such residences must have possessed for the vast scale to make them feel bigger while their visitors felt smaller.

Austria is a country that, like Italy, suffers from a sense of entitlement through the recollection of its past glories. Austria also suffers, just like the United Kingdom, from what I call phantom empire syndrome: just as amputees can be tortured by an imaginary itch from their missing limb, so countries that have lost great empires are unable to stop scratching the places where their power used to lie.

But, like Latvia, this is also a society that isn’t at all certain it wants to become internationally prominent: the risks of prominence are widely feared to be greater than the benefits. This is a country that sometimes seems to revel in living on the tranquil margins of global society, a self-sufficient, self-satisfied, and ultimately selfish backwater which, if the current exodus of its young people continues, could turn Vienna into a ghost town frequented mainly by tourists.

When I talked to young Austrians on the street in Vienna, I asked them how they felt about the idea that the current of global events might once again flow through Vienna. A surprisingly large number replied that this would result in their getting attacked by terrorists, which in their view didn’t happen because they were invisible, marginal.

History plays an almost opposite role in the two cases: the Latvians wanted to be left alone because they were still recovering from the consequences of fascism and communism; on the other hand, many Austrians have never been prepared to accept that their country was a willing participant rather than an innocent victim of Nazism. The instinct to work hard and not draw attention to themselves was part of the syndrome.

And yet the Austrians gave invaluable support and guidance to their neighbors in southeastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, so they have plenty to feel good about too.

Many of the conversations I had with the Austrian government were on the subject of overseas development assistance. Austria spends quite a lot of money on helping poorer countries, but there was a feeling that a lot of this money wasn’t achieving the results they hoped for, and also, less nobly, that they weren’t getting enough credit for their generosity.

I wrote earlier about the failure of traditional development assistance: how it weakens governance in the recipient nations, chokes off local enterprise, stimulates corruption, and creates a culture of dependency without even beginning to narrow the gap between rich and poor. In our discussions in Vienna, we all agreed that it was time for a change, but nobody seemed prepared to break with the old system, even though it was clearly unfit for their purpose.

My recommendation was that Austria should be the first country to abandon conventional donations (except in cases of emergency assistance) and replace its overseas development programs with a new model I called Chain Aid. The idea was to take a typical assistance project, such as repairing the Adomi Bridge, a vital crossing over the River Volta in southern Ghana, on the condition that whatever skills, techniques, and experience Ghana acquired during the project must one day be passed on to others in the form of further overseas development. Thus, Austria’s Ghanaian partners would acquire a wealth of knowledge and experience in managing, funding, and implementing major civil engineering projects. Austria would then require them to build on this experience and in due course become donors themselves, offering the benefit of that experience to other countries where similar projects needed to be carried out.

There is no reason why the “chain of aid” should remain in the developing world. One day, it would be good to see Ghana offering its skills and expertise in bridge building to a Canadian province or a Japanese prefecture—and this export of skills could one day become a valuable source of revenue for Ghana and provide a return on the original Austrian investment.

The implication of Chain Aid is that it promises an end to fragmentary and inconsequential development projects by building chains that stretch around the world.

I suggested another plan which I called AidSurance. We had been discussing some of Austria’s programs for disaster relief in developing countries and were talking in particular about the catastrophic flooding which occurs so regularly in Bangladesh and causes such devastation. Typically, what donor countries like Austria do when such a flood occurs is to call for pledges to support the victims, but by the time these pledges have been collected, it is often too late for many people. It occurred to me that if Bangladesh were my house, I wouldn’t wait until after the flood happened and then ask my friends for money: I would insure it against flooding in the first place. So why didn’t Austria do the same, and insure Bangladesh against flooding?

Nobody thought that this was possible, including myself, but I recently happened to meet the chief executive of one of the world’s biggest reinsurance companies, so when I got back to London I took him out to lunch and casually asked him over coffee whether he thought his firm would be interested in insuring Bangladesh against flooding. He didn’t bat an eyelid. “Sure,” he said.

When I looked surprised he explained that flooding was simply a weather risk, the kind of risk that companies like his understood very well—far better than their clients, in fact, which is how they make money. The only difference between insuring Bangladesh and insuring my house was that it was a bigger policy, attracting a bigger premium, which made it very appealing. They might need to call in some other companies to spread the risk, but in principle it was perfectly feasible.

The benefits of AidSurance to the Austrians were clear: First, they would know exactly how much they were going to spend on flooding in Bangladesh in advance, instead of giving the finance minister heart failure when they told her at the end of the year how much they’d spent. Second, it would be easier to ensure that the appropriate level and type of assistance reached its destination immediately after a catastrophe (performance guarantees would be built into the policy).

And incidentally, it would also be good for Austria’s international standing: by devising and pioneering a new and rational approach to disaster relief, Austria would show an unusual blend of compassion and creativity and demonstrate some real leadership qualities in the international domain. My recommendation was to pilot the scheme, and if it was successful, to then suggest to the European Union that several member states could join forces and conduct bigger AidSurance projects in other parts of the world. Ultimately, it might become part of the EU’s standard approach to disaster relief.