LEuropean energy ministers met urgently in Brussels on Friday, September 9, to see how, in the context of the energy crisis, European countries will get through the winter. The European Commission expresses a ” major concern » on food security due to the war in Ukraine and extreme weather conditions. The world is losing ground in its fight to end hunger and malnutrition, according to FAO. Prices are soaring. In many sectors, supplies are no longer guaranteed. Is this a bad time to pass or the entry of our societies into another world?
Infinity is the horizon of market growth. This infinity has been expressed for decades in the perpetual growth of production, in the continuous development of trade, in unlimited consumption through purchasing power, credit or debt, in unlimited mobility by land, air or sea.
With digitization, this infinity has increased even further: unlimited Internet, videos on demand, music streaming, video games that never end, social networks and endless dating apps…
The market needs this prospect of infinite growth, in which the consumer also settles. And the famous quote from American thinker Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993) – “Anyone who believes that infinite growth can continue indefinitely in a finite world is either a madman or an economist” – omits the figure of the technologist. Because, in our Western societies, the role of technology is to abolish these limits, to push back this geographical, natural, environmental, social finitude…
Blind spots
Of course, infinity is not without its problems, which economists call “externalities”: we can undoubtedly produce and consume ad infinitum, but the sky will end up falling – literally – on our heads. This is why we rely on the technologies of tomorrow to solve the problems of today’s technologies. This is how the market-technology couple can offer this promise of infinity.
But this promise now seems broken by a pandemic coupled with a war and increasingly close climatic catastrophes. Tomorrow, will we have enough gas, wheat, energy, medicine? The answer is no longer so obvious.
One of the blind spots of the new economic issues of scarcity is the political one of societal resilience. Are our societies really capable of collectively coping with the limits? Certainly, the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that the capacity for resilience seems stronger than we thought. Countries quickly adapted to an exceptional situation; the populations have, for the most part, accepted willy-nilly to submit to new constraints and demands.
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