During the 1990s Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history. The 2000s showed how it is an illusion to imagine a peaceful world without conflict.

In this book the authors explore how six major constraints are set to fix the trajectory of the global economy. Three of them are new: the aging population, the failure of technical progress, and the scarcity of savings. The other three have been at work for some time: the explosion of inequality, the mass transfer of activities from one end of the world to the other, and the limitless financialization of economy. They suggest that like seismic activity which depends on pressure between tectonic plates, the political and social tensions will be exacerbated in the coming years by these major forces. They propose that authorities will be incapable of preventing neither the date nor the intensity of the coming earthquakes, and ask the question: Are we able to cope with these future shocks and the violence they are sure to cause?

Autorentext

Jean-Hervé Lorenzi is Professor of Economics at Paris-Dauphine University and President of the Circle of Economists. Mickaël Berrebi is an actuary graduated from the Ecole supérieure des sciences économiques et commerciales (ESSEC) in Paris.

Inhalt

Contents
Introduction

Chapter 1

The Great Breakdown in Technical Progress
Innovation, a Phenomenon of Disruption
The Major Role of Technical Progress in Growth in the la croissance
Slowdown: the Great Debate
Increasingly Rarer Resources
The Intelligence War

Chapter 2

The Curse of Ageing
The Weight of Demography in History
The Three Impacts of Ageing
An Evil for a Good?
Towards Intergenerational Conflict

Chapter 3

The Irresistible Explosion of Inequalities inégalités
Inequalities and Growth: Return of an Old Controversy
The End of the Equality Myth égalitaire
The inheritance society versus the Middle Classes
Inequalities at the Heart of a New Conflict

Chapter 4

The Shock of Deindustrialisation
1995-2005: deindustrialisation and outsourcing
The London temptation
Hope from America
The terrible uncertainty of globalisation

Chapter5

The Illusion of Financialization
The Explosion in Liquidity
The Dismemberment of the Financial System
The Utopia of Regulation
The Impossible Debt Equation
Finance versus the Real Economy

Chapter 6

Savings, the Ultimate in Rare Resources
The Enigma of the Balance between Savings and Investment
Three Decades of a Surplus of Savings
The World is Changing, Savings decrease
The World is Changing, Investment incincreases
Towards a Major Imbalance

Chapter 7

Avoiding a Major Crisis in the 21st Century
Refocusing the World on Youth
Socialising Rare Resources
Taming Annuities
Considering a new Bretton Woods
Risk-sharing

Index