Delivered. Economist Benjamin Coriat is one of the main commentators and disseminators in France of Elinor Ostrom’s ideas. The American, who died in 2012, received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her theoretical and empirical work on how human communities manage what the Anglo-Saxons call the commons, and that we translate into French ambiguously either by “the common goods” (nature, air, water, climate, energy – any object whose appropriation by some deprives others) , or by “the common good” in the singular (anything that advances the happiness of humanity). So his blood only made one turn when Jean Tirole published, in 2016, Economy of the common good (PUF), an essay in which he tries to put his work within reach of the public. For the Nobel Prize in Economics (2014) in fact, “The economy is at the service of the common good; its purpose is to make the world a better place ”.
But the common thread of his approach to the common good nonetheless remains the idea that a good economy consists in combining the play of special interests. However, as everyone seeks to obtain an optimum of wealth for himself, this common good can only be achieved under what Tirole calls the “Veil of ignorance”, which prevents everyone from acting rationally in their best interests, and allows regulated markets to reach a collective optimum. For example by encouraging consumers and companies to complete the energy transition by organizing a carbon market where CO quotas would be exchanged.2.
“Rhetorical pirouette”
This is precisely what refutes Benjamin Coriat, for whom the play, even regulated, of selfish interests can only lead to catastrophe, and for whom the justification of the search for the common good by the “veil of ignorance” n is just a rhetorical pirouette. It is true that the case of the European carbon market as it has worked so far, dissected by the author, is not convincing.
Also the economist prefers to show that the solutions proposed by Elinor Ostrom remain the best way to avoid climate catastrophe. Namely a model of “polycentred” economy, which would allow each level of human community to organize on its own scale a sober, sustainable and shared management of the goods necessary for the life of all, without any private appropriation or any level. higher policy or no overwhelming “market rule” to hinder it, but rather to support it.
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