“We must accept finite disappointment, but must never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
The time when Voltaire stated in Candide that “Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need” is over. Today, it is no longer appropriate to work regardless of the cost. In other words, less work could improve our living conditions and could undoubtedly improve the way we do work. The belief…
Employment is not an end in itself. It just allows us to subsist. This is why it’s productive jobs we need today: ones that will allow us to consume goods and services produced with minimal human labour or effort involved. In my opinion, economic development and prosperity should above all tend to gradually reduce the…
Trade and, more generally, cross-border transactions between nations have considerably improved our living conditions. But what would we do without trade? In other words, if we had to do everything ourselves without calling on other lines of work, other companies and other nations offering specialisations that are barely available in our country? One experiment on…
“The essence of secular stagnation: sick recoveries which die in their infancy and depressions which feed on themselves and leave a hard and seemingly immovable core of unemployment.” It is in these terms that the father of secular stagnation, Alvin Hansen, described to the American Economic Association the economic climate of 1938…which could just as…
Germany has a huge demographic problem, but not necessarily the one you might suspect. While its population is indeed stable at slightly over 80 million inhabitants, it is the age of the total payroll that threatens to derail the country’s economy. This is because they are dangerously increasing the dependency ratio, that is, the proportion…
Last summer, during a telephone interview with his American counterpart, German Minister for Economic Affairs, Wolfgang Schäuble, thought he was being funny by suggesting that they should swap Puerto Rico (which has nearly gone bankrupt) for Greece! In fact, the overwhelming majority of Germans have been convinced by the narrative which claims that their hard…
One after another, every establishment which has the power to print money has joined in on the feast. In the absence of public policies dedicated to openly relaunching growth and battling unemployment, and in the presence of indecisive politicians who are not versed in economics, only central banks have had the ammunition capable of neutralising…
Humans have always had to work to support themselves. However, in its current form, work is a very recent concept in the course of human history. Until the advent of the tradable joint stock company (Dutch East India Company) towards the end of the Renaissance in 1602, human beings had indeed worked for themselves. Creative…
The time when Voltaire stated in Candide that “Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need” is over. Today, it is no longer appropriate to work regardless of the cost. In other words, less work could improve our living conditions and could undoubtedly improve the way we do work. The belief that…