Grandstand. Isn’t the social, political, even identity crisis that has been getting worse over the years for more than a decade not ultimately the result of economics in turmoil?
Doesn’t this crisis of knowledge and economic knowledge carry with it this schism within national communities between, on the one hand, the elite, the knowledgeable or those who are supposed to know, and, on the other, the people, the non-knowledgeable or those who are supposed not to know?
The growing malaise of the middle class is highly understandable. Wealth creation is at half mast. It is penalized by speculation and an unfair monetary policy. Is it a coincidence that technical progress has never been so weak since the Second World War as during the last decade, which saw in the developed economies the installation of a monetary policy of quantitative easing (“quantitative easing”) creating an unprecedented amount of money, even before the Covid?
A sick system
The distribution of this “wealth” has always remained abnormally inequitable to the detriment of work: it maintains the illusion of an impressive growth in corporate profits, even though it is only the consequence of a reduction in the share of labor in a growth regime that is actually ever weaker.
But the scholars don’t want to see or hear these heavy trends, because they simply don’t understand them. Indeed, they do not belong to any economic theory. It is only when the return from the field is bad and the people growl that they become aware of the reality of a sick system. Unfortunately, often on a provisional basis, because they simply lack a compass and an economic guide.
Since economics can no longer explain what is happening today, it cannot offer them the regulation capable of preserving the stability of the community.
We need a new theoretical framework which extends the one we know today and which complements the existing theory. We need a new vision of economic and social stability and of crises, which includes the fundamental monetary instability of our liberal economies, an instability that must absolutely be controlled so as not to experience “the great crisis”, the one that could take out the whole system.
An unfair diet
This new theoretical framework, which can be called the “new patrimonial economy”, highlights the existence of two monetary regimes. One classic, inflationary, is the one that we knew in the years 1970 to 1990. The other non-classic, of bubbles, is the one that we have known for more than twenty years, highly inequitable: the revolution of new Information technology primarily benefits those who hold capital.
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