SSpeaking in 1959 before an assembly of clerics, the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, confided: “I have two types of problems, urgent and important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent. This is the dilemma of modern man. With your help, let’s try to give the important a touch of urgency. »
Prioritizing the urgent and the important, generations of management professors have phosphorus on this particularly rich idea in times of crisis… or to get out of it. Social crisis, economic crisis, geopolitical crisis, today there are many reasons to bring the question back to the table.
It’s a bit like the idea of Jean-Hervé Lorenzi, the tireless inventor of the Economic Meetings of Aix-en-Provence, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, who never gives up on finding a little hope in a landscape that the French like to see very dark, with some reasons at the moment. The meetings, which take place from July 7 to 9, will therefore seek reasons for hope throughout the dozens of debates accessible to the general public and which will see economists, politicians, activists and business leaders meet.
Simple social measure
And to help with reflection, Jean-Hervé Lorenzi and Le Cercle des Économies had the idea of publishing a manifesto submitted to civil society, which ultimately lists five priorities, important and yet rarely, or belatedly, considered urgent: l education, training, work, citizenship and public action. With, each time, a strong measure that could change a lot of things.
For example, set yourself the objective of reintegrating, in five years, the 1.5 million young people who are neither in education, nor in employment, nor in training. Addressing these disadvantaged young people suddenly seems to have become urgent over the past week… A simple social measure: impose in employment contracts an obligation for qualifying training to develop one’s career in the face of economic and technological shocks.
Another important emergency is to raise the employment rate: 67% of 15-65 year olds have a job. As the economist Patrick Artus regularly reminds us, if France had the rate of the Germans (75%), the increase in tax revenue generated (+13%) would make it possible to eliminate the budget deficit, with public expenditure unchanged. In seeking, one always finds reasons to hope.