Delivered. This is called an aggiornamento. An “updating” which consecrates adaptation to modernity, as the bishops of the Church did at the Second Vatican Council in 1962. The new priests of contemporary religion are no longer bishops or historians but economists. They associate with power and believe hard as iron to show him the way to redemption.
But the world is resistant to them. As the Queen of England rightly pointed out, they neither saw nor understood the financial crisis of 2008, nor did they digest Brexit and the rise of populism and protectionism across the world. Each time, those which they consider to be sad passions cause people to make very bad choices.
Charting the path for the common good
Two liberal economists of pure obedience, authors in 2008 of a remarkable opus of rehabilitation of the market economy in France (The Big Bad Market, Flammarion), suddenly offer an update to themselves and their colleagues. For our authors, since Adam Smith, in the XVIIIand century, economists have learned to rigorously separate morality from economics, individual interest from collective preference. Although they cover the entire ideological spectrum, the majority of them share the primary conviction that only an efficient market economy can enrich a country, it being up to the State to redistribute this windfall with justice without destroying the engine of the growth. What Thesmar and Landier call “the circle of universalist reason”. An internationalized elite that claims to trace the path of the common good with blows of equation.
Yet people have values and often place them above economic considerations. For example, they say they are ready to pay more for their train ticket if the company that manufactures it is local, or to favor very unequal income, such as inheritance, to maintain a social bond or their feeling of freedom. These discoveries are not new. Since Emile Durkheim, the inventor of modern sociology at the end of the 19thand century, many economists have looked into the question of individual and collective preferences. Others, more recently, have explored the paths of behavioral economics by confronting knowledge in cognitive psychology with economic reason. David Thesmar and Augustin Landier take these paths and ask an economist’s question: how much are people willing to pay for their values?
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