In this new book, Jacques de Larosière analyzes the causes of France's decline. Taking the elites to task, he calls for a quick and decisive end to the politics of denial and easy monetary and fiscal solutions.
"Why have we come to this point? And how do we emerge from it?
"The issue is ultimately a triple servitude that occupies the public sphere and overwhelms our thinking: servitude to a false doctrine, that of the continuous expansion of demand inspired by a poorly understood Keynesianism; servitude to reassuring propaganda, encouraged by public authorities; and intellectual servitude in which political correctness takes precedence over freedom of thought and expression.
"If we don't turn the tables, chances are good that our decline will continue, the point of catastrophe in a few years."
J. de L.
I had the privilege of being involved in some of these 'ways out of crisis'. I lived through their dramatic intensity and was, sometimes, able to contribute to pragmatic solutions which helped to steady the ship. This was true, for example, of the Latin American crisis, negotiation of the IMF adjustment programmes and aiding the transition of the Eastern European countries.
But the picture is still dark. The 2007-2008 crisis, with its trail of unemployment and recession, is an extreme example of what excess debt can do. And quantitative easing policies, implemented to minimize the effects of the 'great recession' despite its origins in the abuse of debt, plunge an observer like myself into an abyss of questions and doubts." From the collapse of Bretton Woods to that of Lehman Brothers, a first-hand account of fifty years of financial crises by a participant on the front lines of finance and currency.
The memoirs of an exceptional, influential man who worked alongside Jacques Delors, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Raymond Barre, Paul Volcker, and many others.
«I wrote this book out of my experiences during thirty years of teaching at the Collège de France.
In it I look both at culture and art - music and painting - as well as life in society, ethics, and the meaning of death; languages and writing, as well as the neural and molecular bases of memory and learning.
This book is a fresco that brings together a great amount of varied data, discussions, and hypotheses. It anchors the substance of contemporary science in the history of a range of disciplines: neurology, ethology, the biology of evolution, the biology of development, the study of consciousness, as well as experimental psychology and genomics.
Finally, this book attempts to show that it is up to us to relentlessly inspire the minds of humans to invent a future that will enable humanity to attain a life of more solidarity, a happier life for and with each one of us.» J.-P. C.
«Simplexity, as I understand it, is the range of solutions living organisms have found, despite the complexity of natural processes, to enable the brain to prepare an action and plan for the consequences of it. These solutions are simplifying principles that enable the processing of information or situations, by taking into account past experience and anticipating the future. They are neither caricatures, shortcuts, or summaries. They are new ways of asking questions, sometimes at the cost of occasional detours, in order to achieve faster, more elegant, more effective actions.» A. B.
As Alain Berthoz demonstrates in this profoundly original book, simplicity is never easy; it requires suppressing, selecting, connecting, thinking, in order to then act in the best way possible.
And what if we, in turn, are inspired by the living world to process the complexity that surrounds us?
«We all know that our world has become very indebted over the past decades and that its 'financialization' has reached proportions never observed before, at least in peacetime.
But how serious is this phenomenon?
What are its consequences on the solidity of our financial system, on the functioning of our economy and on the future of our society?
Above all, we must understand how our world has surreptitiously changed its model for the past two decades. It has slipped to a strange paradigm, one in which the bulk of economic activity is now reflected in the rise in the value of financial assets at the expense of growth, wage income and productive investment.
It is time to put an end to the reign of illusion and to reinstate the fundamental economic springs without which there can be no real growth.» J. de L.
«In this book I examine the extraordinary saga of life on Earth in the light of the most recent scientific discoveries. This saga has resulted in the extraordinary success of our species, and in the mortal threats that it has posed for the future.
By favoring immediate benefits, to the detriment, sometimes, of long-term advantages, natural selection, in my opinion, is the source of this remarkable success, but also of the perils that come out of it.
Modern science has established the implausibility of the Biblical tale for the origins of human beings; it has not, however, invalidated the intuition that inspired it. Humanity is, infact, tainted by an intrinsic defect, by a genetic «original sin,» that threatens to lead to its demise. We do indeed need redemption to save us, but it can only come from humanity itself.
We must find in the resources of our minds a wisdom that is not inscribed in our genes.» C. de D.
The book of a great biologist, but also of a moralist.
«Do people know that on average around 25 languages die every year? In one hundred years, if nothing has changed, half of all languages will be dead. At the end of the Twenty-first Century, there should therefore remain around 2,500, and probably many fewerif we take into account a very possible acceleration of the rate of disappearance. Granted, like civilizations, languages are mortal, and the chasm of history is big enough for them all. However, there is something completely unique, and exalting, about the death of languages, when we become aware of it: languages can be resurrected! But this requires vigilance, without which all are threatened, including French.» C. H.
Claude Hagège is a recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal, and professor at the Collège de France. He is the author of L'Enfant aux deux langues, Le Français et les siècles, both huge best-sellers.
