Productive Economy, Contributory Economy. Genevieve Bouche

rulers, encourage us not to change.

      In our daily lives, it seems that we need to “save jobs”: everyone seems to agree. And yet, redundancy plans clutter up the news. Even if journalists and ministers try to make each drama specific, everyone understands how the wave of unemployment is unfolding, against which allegations have no effect. Low-cost countries are becoming our own competitors, and now robotization never seems to stop distressing us, the ex-flamboyant Europeans!

      Another way should be possible: our communities have unmet needs and our citizens are willing to roll up their sleeves to meet them. The question is how to encourage and reward this form of value creation.

      One idea naturally emerges: to redirect the capacities for initiative, freed up by digitization, towards the development of the common good, which will become our new source of competitiveness. This obvious idea seems unattainable and yet quite logical. The solution exists, and we are going to talk about it.

A natural law says that we never give up on progress, we adapt to it, because progress has always ended up improving the living conditions of man, thus allowing him to rise in his human condition.

      At the moment, we are witnessing the loss of efficiency of our institutions, which is one of the symptoms of a civilization that is breaking down.

      We cannot say with certainty that Western civilization is dying. We can imagine, for example, that it splits into a European and an Anglo-Saxon version.

      In June 2019, Sciences & Vie published a dossier devoted to “Collapse”. Several teams of researchers attempt to identify the invariants that have characterized the collapse of prestigious civilizations, which have now fallen into disuse, are still in agony or have disappeared altogether. They point out that the poor distribution of wealth and the depletion of resources are the two most dangerous signals.

      They note that resilience depends on the ability of citizens to stay connected. Of course: to adapt, you need to be able to innovate, and to innovate, you need to be able to cooperate.

      It is therefore on these points that Europe must concentrate in order to bring out a reinvigorated version of its fundamentals: organized and stimulating solidarity, protection of its resources and, if possible, sufficiency for a maximum of vital elements. This requires digital and monetary sovereignty.

      But in order to achieve this, we have a number of denials to overcome, while taking care to respect the richness of our European culture.

      Initiatives to think collectively are multiplying, which gives hope for the vitality of our fellow citizens. Fragments of ideas are emerging from these movements. Everyone is beginning to understand the complexity of the task and is thus preparing for a change that will require some renunciations while opening up entirely new and promising possibilities.

      Among them are the ideologists who boast about getting to the point by proposing short-term solutions and actions. They are not useless. But time should also be spent on deeper thinking.

Europe is the “Old Continent” that dominated the world for 500 years and ended up curled up in its beautiful palaces, with a supposedly eternal elite that is sure to be respected. The transformation we are experiencing is global, and we must provide responses that suit us, but that are compatible with the responses of other geopolitical zones… And vice versa!

      So we need to look at our roots, not just the top of our lawn and our neighbors’, then adapt by making trade-offs with our beliefs and values. These trade-offs are going to be locally specific, even though we will draw on the initiatives of others.

      The world to come is not based on the same values as the one we are leaving: we have loved wealth, the younger generations prefer prosperity. Wealth is something to be captured, and prosperity is something to be shared.

      Changes are going to be made at all levels of our social model: from small details to major upheavals! We are going to have to deal with them if possible without “turning the table” because we do not have the means to do so. This will therefore take a few centuries. We are going to go about it by trial and error, so we must go about it with foresight and determination.

      The purpose of this book is to make an inventory of the components of change – perhaps not all of them, there are so many! The aim is to enable everyone to take stock and identify priorities. Indeed, what is most to be feared would be to let ourselves go towards chaos, as has been the case in comparable circumstances in the past and in many places on the planet. Our children would not forgive us this because, unlike our elders, we have the means to know what the risk of a change of era is.

       1.1.4. Going through “a good war”?

      That is what my grandmother, who has been through the war, used to say whenever she thought her children and grandchildren were irresponsible consumerists.

      That is also what she said when industrial relocations multiplied on the grounds that low-cost countries were willing to sacrifice themselves for our benefit.

      At the moment, we do not have a world war, but we do have climatic and geological changes, as well as pandemics. Everyone starts to think, and this brings out certain realities:

      – what makes us strong: cohesion, which allows us to be more reactive and combative than egoism;

       – our weaknesses: our organizations. Too focused on financial efficiency, our organizations have become very fragile. Too legally protected, they have become blocking.

      And then the social and environmental reality shows us that:

       – we produce poorly;

       – we consume poorly.

      We already know all this. The question is how to make sure that we take it into account in the way we develop our life together.

      Thousands of researchers, from various disciplines, are working on these subjects, especially economists. They work in laboratories, others in trade unions, Masonic lodges, churches or in informal circles.

      As far as the findings are concerned, they are quite convergent, but regarding solutions, there is little that is concrete. This is reflected in the 17 SDGs (see section 4.6.2)!

      As is often the case in periods of profound change, it is not within institutions that creative proposals are drawn up, but outside of them, in places designed to unleash serendipity. These are in particular in think tanks.

      The path that is developed here is the result of the compilation of work by a number of them, including the “sustainable development” working group of the Conseil de l’Ordre des experts-comptables. The work carried out in this forum indirectly contributed to the creation of the Institute for the Circular Economy. Other important sources include the Atena Forum, which focuses on digital sovereignty; Orée, which brings together the concerns of sustainable development professionals; FAIR (Forum des autres indicateurs de richesse, Forum for Alternative Wealth Indicators) and the Fabrique du Futur, which, as its name suggests, imagines the opportunities of the future.

       1.1.5. Expanding our field of certainty

      We are in a situation comparable to that of physicists in the last century: in order to move forward, they had to decide to listen to the inventors of quantum physics, which turned their way of thinking upside down and opened up new horizons.

      Physicists had to make a great effort to get out of their certainties. But the rewards have been immense if you look at all the progress that has followed this acceptance.

Economists, sociologists and all the specialists called upon to think about the “next world” must now agree to thoroughly overhaul their ways of thinking and the theories on which we have based our respective sciences.