It took me a while to like economics. During my youth, I only saw it as a matter of greedy people, loving to make money while ignoring essential things, and that put me off.
You should know that I was a teenager and that I was starting to be interested in big issues at a time when Reagan and Thatcher were calling the shots. The economy, in those years, only sought salvation in ultraliberalism. For a young person from the working classes with a social conscience inherited from Catholicism, such a vision of the world has nothing to seduce.
When I read Marx, at CEGEP, on my own—he was no longer in the program—I understood that there were other ways of thinking about the economy than that of the supporters of the State. -Provigo. The problem was that this discovery coincided with the economic and human bankruptcy of countries claiming to follow Marxism. I wanted social justice, but also individual freedom and collective prosperity. What economy, in these conditions, should I devote myself to?
I got to know Keynes by reading texts by Léo-Paul Lauzon and Pierre Fortin. I thus got out of the impasse thanks to social democracy which, while retaining the dynamic elements of economic liberalism, put a brake on the inhuman potential of the market by regulating it. In this pragmatic left, in the words of the Nobel-winning French economist Esther Duflo, I had just found my way and reconciled myself with the economy. Since then, I have never changed my mind in this regard.
However, when it comes to economics, I remain a novice. Specialized works in the field often fall out of my hands. I read the economic pages of Duty as well as the chronicles of Pierre Fortin and Francis Vailles with pleasure and I consult regularly, if necessary, Economics for Dummies (First, 2015), by French professor Michel Musolino.
When the mathematical models rear their heads, however, I give up. I like the discipline, to quote Duflo again, “when it is practiced, as it should be, as a human science”, that is to say associated with history, sociology, anthropology and psychology.
It is such an exercise that the great French economist Daniel Cohen (1953-2023) undertakes in A brief history of economics (Albin Michel, 2024, 176 pages), published posthumously. Scholarly researcher highly appreciated by his colleagues, as evidenced by the collective work Daniel Cohen, the economist who wanted to change the world (Albin Michel, 2024), specialist in sovereign debt – he notably advised leaders during the debt crises in Greece and Ecuador – and traveling companion of the Socialist Party in France, Cohen was keen to make his material accessible to the general public.
Her Brief history of economics can be read in one go. It begins with the economy of the hunter-gatherer era and ends with the challenges of the digital age, while presenting, along the way, the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the great thinkers of the discipline — Malthus, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Schumpeter and Keynes -, the crisis of 1929, the Trente Glorieuses, the oil shock of 1973, the ultraliberal turn of the 1980s, globalization and the “ecological crash” that awaits us. In less than 150 pages, it’s an achievement.
Cohen is especially fascinating when he thinks about the links between wealth and happiness. In the West, we are much richer today than in 1950. Yet surveys indicate that we are not collectively happier, even if the richest in our societies are happier than the poor. How to explain this mystery?
First element of the answer: we get used to everything. An increase in income makes us more satisfied for two years. Afterwards, the effect disappears. Second element of response: if the wealthy nevertheless say they are happier than the poor in rich societies, it is because desire, the fact of succeeding better than others, plays an important role in our satisfaction. We are therefore doped not so much with wealth as with growth, to regain the satisfaction of the first two years and to surpass others.
“Intrinsic goods” – friendship, love, meaning of life –, according to the economist Bruno Frey’s formula, are more satisfying than extrinsic goods – wealth, social status – but we underestimate them because we struggle to understand our own emotions.
To succeed in the necessary ecological transition, to preserve the humanity of the world threatened by a digital economy which tends to make human relationships rarer, we will have to realize, in particular thanks to economists like Cohen, that competition without cooperation can only generate of misfortune.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.