While skimming the oral history interview of Berkeley economist Lloyd Ulman (Harvard PhD, 1950), I learned that he was in Rome the day that his Italian colleague, Professor Ezio Tarantelli, was assassinated by two members of the Red Brigades in a parking lot outside of the building where he had just lectured.
I met Ezio during my first year of graduate school at M.I.T. in 1974-75 through my classmate Francesco Giavazzi. While I probably had discussed economics and politics with him only a few times and probably less than for a couple of hours, he impressed me with a combination of intelligence, warmth, and humility that I was to discover to be relatively rare, and not just in a university setting.
When I read the news that this mild-mannered professor of political economy in Rome had been murdered by political terrorists, I was utterly dumbfounded. Clearly having a name and a face for the victim of an act of senseless political violence made all the difference. Today I decided to add this post, a minor tribute to the memory of a most decent man and fellow economist.
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About Ezio Tarantelli
Red Brigades Kill Rome Economics Professor, by Sari Gilbert. Washington Post, March 28, 1985.
Chapter 2, “Ezio Tarantelli: Sketches of an Intellectual Biography” in Giovanni Michelangoli, Ezio Tarantelli—Economic Theory and Industrial Relations. Springer, 2012.
Italian Documentary by Monica Repetto: Ezio Tarantelli, La forza delle idee.
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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Lloyd Ullman
Uhlman: …I became heavily involved with Bob Flanagan and David Soskice, whom I had met in Oxford, on a Brookings project which ultimately materialized in Wage Restraint: A Study of Incomes Policies in Western Europe (1983). While working on this project, David Soskice and I were invited to give back-to-back talks to Ezio Tarantelli’s class in labor economics in Rome. My topic was the role played by collective bargaining as a second-best choice when employers were confronted by an existential threat to the capitalist order. It just so happened that Italy was experiencing considerable unrest and inflation at the time. Furthermore, Tarantelli, our host, was attracting a good deal of attention as an advocate of moderating the Scala Mobile, the national system of wage escalation which was regarded at the time by many as an important generator of inflation. Which made him a prime target of the Red Brigade on the far left.
Koya: Was the Scala Mobile between the laborers or employers or was the state also involved?
Uhlman: Laborers and employers.
Koya: No state intervention here in Italy?
Uhlman: More of a neo-corporatist arrangement.
Ezio Tarantelli was a very accomplished and very intelligent, imaginative fellow. So he invited David and me to give twin seminars in a single meeting of his class one day. I spoke about the threat of radicalism as an employer inducement to bargain collectively. He regarded it as very provocative, as he put it. That evening he took Lassie and me out to dinner. David had something else to do. And so in the usual Italian style, we ate at about ten o’clock. The restaurant was quite empty. There was a couple across the room and Lassie noticed they were looking at us all the time. Later, Tarantelli said, “Look,” he said, “when I was a student, I was a guide, a tour guide, and I’m now going to drive you through Rome in the moonlight.” It was an enchanted, lovely ride. We said goodnight and spoke about getting together soon again.
The next morning I had a meeting with the head of the non-communist labor federation at the time, the CISL [Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori or Italian Confederation of Workers’ Trade Unions]. Someone broke into our discussion and then left. The CISL head said, “Excuse me, but a friend of mine has just died and I have to see some television people.” Then we learned that Tarantelli had been killed by members of the Red Brigade[s]. That morning when he came to class, somebody shouted, “Professor Tarantelli!” He turned around, and they shot him. That was the most horrendous episode in my life, I can say.
Koya: So the provocation?
Uhlman: What? The provocation was that he was on the wrong side. That’s the provocation. That evening a small group of us had a meeting. David’s friends in the academic community met at the home of Ida Regalia, a well-known labor economist. We all brought over some bottles of wine and we sat around talking all evening and that was that.
Everything has a comic side to it, I guess. The next morning I had to get a haircut. My previous barber was an Oxford product, of course. The Italian barber took a look at me, walked all around me, my head, and said, “Atsa a bad haircut.” Later I walked back and Lassie and I met with David. I said, “David, sit down. I must tell you something.” I told him the story. It was just a horrible thing.
Source: Lloyd Ulman: An Oral History. Riyad Koya interviewer (Audio File 16, Interview October 20, 2011) pp. 233-234. University of California, Berkeley. Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library.
Image Source: Screen shot from Monica Repetto’s Ezio Tarantelli, La forza delle idee.