The Useless Man , livre ebook

Odile Jacob - Pierre-Noël Giraud

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142 pages

English

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Today, the “wretched of the earth” are no longer those oppressed by colonization, but rather the unemployed and the working poor, migrants and refugees, landless peasants depending on public or familial assistance to survive—in a word, the economically useless. Uselessness is the most pernicious form of inequality, because it drives these men and women into traps of poverty from which escape is all but impossible. Drawing on economic theory, political philosophy, and demographic and scientific projections on human population and natural resources throughout the twenty-first century, renowned economist and author Pierre-Noël Giraud exposes the alarming ways that the rise of uselessness defined as such—not only lack of value in a labor market, but also the inability to independently improve one’s own standing—fuels the global resurgence of populism, engendering social and political risks from demagoguery and intolerance to mass migrations and civil war. Like environmental change, economic uselessness is a reality from which nations and societies can no longer hide—and it is this urgency that may show us the way forward. The Useless Man concludes with a series of carefully reasoned recommendations concerning nature and climate, globalization, and finance, all evaluating potential public policies by how effectively they stand to stem the growth of uselessness. A lucid assessment of our current geopolitical situation and a stirring forecast of what will happen if we fail to act quickly and collaboratively on a global scale, The Useless Man is an essential, compassionate addition to the debate around economic inequality and its political consequences. Pierre-Noël Giraud is professor of economics at Mines ParisTech, Paris Dauphine University, and the EMINES School of Industrial Management in Morocco, as well as a member of the National Academy of Technologies of France. He is the author of a number of landmark books on economics, of which The Useless Man is the first published in English.

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Business

Economics

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Publié par	Odile Jacob
Date de parution	04 février 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782738156129
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Original French title: L’homme inutile. Une Economie politique du populisme © Editions Odile Jacob, October 2015.
The present English-language edition is published by Editions Odile Jacob.
© Odile Jacob, January 2021.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission of the publisher. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
www.odilejacob.com www.odilejacobpublishing.com
ISBN : 978-2-7381-5612-9
This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo .
For Ysé
Introduction

“A man who is of no use to anyone else is strictly worthless.”
–René Descartes, Discourse on Method 1

In today’s world there are many men who are superfluous, unfit, excluded, discarded into inescapable traps—in a word, useless to others and to themselves, and therefore worthless, as Descartes puts it. From being useless to being “one too many” there is only one step, which can lead to their destruction.
Useless men are not even overexploited; they are simply unused, or used very poorly. In labor markets, the value of their work—today we say their “human capital”—is worthless, or not worth enough for them to live decently from it. So they survive on various forms of assistance, more or less public, more or less willingly. Joan Robinson put it well in 1962: “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” 2 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the “damned of the earth” were the colonized and the overexploited; in the twenty-first century they are the useless men.
Uselessness is only one of multiple forms of inequality that exist today. It is, however, a particularly serious and stubborn form of inequality because it encloses people in traps from which it is very difficult to escape. When one falls into uselessness, there is a high probability that one will remain there and thus waste one’s life. Who are these useless men? The long-term unemployed and more generally those who, discouraged, do not even attempt to find work. But also the “working poor” and all those who work odd, insecure jobs that do not enable them to live without public or private assistance, and above all do not enable them to advance. This describes more than half of the youth in many countries. In the countries of the “global South,” we may add farmers who have so little land that they overwork it in order to survive. And the inhabitants of slums, disconnected from city centers, lacking basic public services, and vulnerable to flooding and hurricanes, who cannot even survive in the informal economy, those for whom the city fails to function as a city of opportunity and who thus survive on family or community solidarity.
Uselessness is a form, still poorly defined and understood, of inequality. This work, then, can be placed within a long tradition of analysis of inequality. Beginning in 1996, in L’Inégalité du monde , 3 I studied the dynamics of income inequality and ways to reduce it. My thesis was as follows: corporate globalization favors the emergence and accelerates the development of “countries with low salaries and technological capabilities,” thereby reducing inequality among countries. At the same time, however, it increases internal income inequality everywhere; in wealthy countries, this erodes the middle classes, the pillars of parliamentary democracy. Back then I was one of the only economists to offer this analysis and derive political consequences from it. Now, some twenty years later, my prediction has been proven correct. Indeed, since the end of the 1990s, a large number of scholarly books have meticulously quantified the rise of income and wealth inequality throughout the world. Comparative works have widely popularized these results and proposed various means to reduce inequality. 4 However, beyond the facts, the explanation I gave in 1996—namely that an increase in inequality has been the result of multiple globalizations and not just of technical progress and the digital revolution—is still highly controversial, though it is gaining ground.
While the debate over the root causes of inequality thus remains quite open, governments today, curiously enough, all say almost the same thing: “It is crucial that we reduce inequality, both internationally and domestically.” “Not to mention inequality with generations to come,” they now add. International organizations, naturally, follow close behind. As early as 2014, two reports, from the IMF and the OECD, 5 stressed the need to reduce increasing income inequality, lest it ultimately hinder the sacrosanct metric of “growth.” That all governments and most of their experts, from China to the United States by way of Brazil and Europe, now admit that inequality must be reduced, and more inclusive growth promoted, is unambiguously cause for celebration.
Let us acknowledge this and turn to the thirty years to come, which, as we are becoming aware, will be crucial for the fate of humanity between now and the end of the century. After that, humanity, endowed with technologies unimaginable to us today, will enter its second great anthropological revolution, after the settlement of hunter-gatherer groups around six thousand years ago: demographic decline. From there, everything will change. As we await that revolution, we must address serious issues of economic inequality among our contemporaries. Now, beyond the apparent consensus on the need to reduce inequality, the debate remains confused, to say the least, about which form of inequality should be addressed first, and a fortiori about the way to address it.
This work participates in the debate by pointing out the forms of inequality that must be treated as priorities. It analyzes how they will evolve if nothing is done, and recommends means to reduce them. It aims to show how our relationship to nature, to corporate globalization, and to financial instability not only increases income inequality—on which point just about everyone agrees—but also engenders a growing number of useless men. Let us add that both corporate and financial globalization have spread a thickening fog around direct economic conflicts over income sharing. Such conflicts manifest less and less directly, due to the mobility of “nomadic” jobs which global firms establish wherever they please. They are increasingly dispersed by market finance and public and private debt, and regulated in the recessions that follow crashes. This fog is politically very dangerous, as it paves the way for other conflicts—of identity, of religion, of ethnicity—that reinforce the locks on the traps of uselessness and, the more they are organized by political parties, threaten civil peace. It is thus essential to judge economic policies first and foremost by their ability to open these traps and release the useless men within.
This book proposes a three-stage approach. First we will address the question: “What do we want?” This is a purely political discussion, concerning the choice of a collective goal. The goal I propose is simple: to eradicate uselessness wherever it is found. In other words, to do what is needed for economic and state systems to enable everyone to live decently from an economic or social activity in which they feel, and are objectively seen as, useful to others and to themselves. Chapter 1 proposes an economic definition of uselessness and explains the reasons behind this choice of goal. It specifies why uselessness is a particularly serious and politically dangerous form of inequality, because it threatens civil peace. It justifies its claim to priority by way of a “minimal” economic plan and should thus meet, a priori , with vast collective approval, at least among those who desire civil peace.
Three analytical and forward-looking chapters then present an economic model of the dynamics of inequality while paying particular attention to the causes of the advent of useless men. In these chapters of economic analysis I will purposely employ a didactic tone regarding the way in which economics is reasoning and may help in public debate, in order to illustrate how we should make good use of it. The dynamics of inequality that give rise to useless men are at work in three overlapping and interacting strata of economic reality: the base stratum is demography and man’s relationship to nature ( Chapter 2 , “Goodbye to Malthus”); then the dynamics of creation and localization of jobs created by corporate globalization ( Chapter 3 , “Globalization and Inequality”); finally, the effects of the instability of global market finance on useless men and the fog around economic conflicts ( Chapter 4 , “The Instability of Finance”). Models and theories lead to projections conjecturing what is likely to occur if policies do not change.
Next, Chapter 5 , “Recommendations,” the third stage of our approach, describes policies that might allow us to achieve the proposed goal: opening and emptying the traps of uselessness. The contrast will be measured between a rather modest ambition and the difficulties of fulfilling it. The sixth and final chapter , “A Political Economy of Populism,” summarizes the political consequences of rising uselessness on civil peace, within the context of equally rising migration.
The useless man is a reality that remains essentially invisible in economics and politics. But with some effort, changes in models, and conceptual adaptations, it is not an impossible task to explain why so many men are reduced to uselessness today, to cite the reasons we should make them a priority, and to establish a broad outline for an economic plan that could eradicate uselessness. That is what the present book sets out to do.
CHAPTER 1
The Useless