Es el mejor de los buenos Quien sabe que en esta vida Todo es cuestión de medida

Antonio Machado Campos de Castilla, Proverbio y Cantares (1912)

Curiously, both economists who are confident in the effectiveness of freed markets and sociologists who forecast an impending end to capitalism seem to share a similar vision of the future world. For both, new technologies would create conditions for the existence of a society composed of free and anonymous individuals, who are at the same time consumers and producers. In this virtual world, consumers representing standard economic theory would be as comfortable with it as independent producers dispensed from wage chains. Central currency and large banks would disappear in favor of local currencies and participatory financing, a curious reminiscence of the monetary and financial neutrality assumed or claimed by this standard theory.

Only the issue of growth would remain open to discussion. Some think that it is time to abandon it and that in any case its sources have dried up, since the new technological revolution does not have the same virtues as those that preceded it. Others believe in a new less turbulent growth, one that is more friendly to people and environment, made possible by the properties of this digital economy. In either case, history has come to an end and technology would dictate its law. The fate of each is drawn. A predetermined and sacred future would command the present. It would be impossible to derogate from it rendering any contrary attempt by public authorities unnecessary or worthless. Although of opposite sides, some seem to be in communion today, wishing for an extinction of the power of money and decline of the State, as did the monetarists and Marxists before them.

Political and social transformations are undeniable. It would be a mistake, however, to judge it in light of these popular beliefs that seem to transcend old cleavages that overlook the unfolding of events, ignore multiple and uncertain transitions, as if it were possible to substitute an already fully identified state of the world with the existing state.

Wage employment would give way to the proliferation of start-ups enhancing individual initiative. As a matter of fact, jobs in the area of new entrepreneurship are often more volatile, less productive, less well paid and less protected than in the rest of the economy. More surely, stable employment concedes to precarious employment.

Small businesses, promoting new technologies, would be the main source of growth and job creation. In fact, growth mostly comes from established businesses and proceeds from the improvement of existing product varieties rather than radical innovations. Statistically, small businesses do not create more jobs than larger ones. Only new businesses do so. More importantly, in the years following their creation, cohorts of new enterprises lose more jobs than they create, as market exits surpass job creation by those that survive.

Thus, the multiplication of start-ups, most of which disappear, is less characteristic of the transition than the formation of very large new companies, particularly in the digital area, starting with those that act as platforms, usually intermediaries, in final goods markets. This concentration, which reflects the classical phenomenon of economies of scale, naturally fosters possible diversions rather than value creation.

The decline in employment would make a drastic reduction in working hours inevitable, but also the introduction of a universal income that would supplement if not replace social benefits.

Institutionalized solidarity peculiar to the welfare state, envisaged in a spirit of social justice and macroeconomic regulation, concedes to the wide gap between recourse by the wealthiest for their protection to private institutions and the development of a limited assistantship to the poorest in a context of job polarization, qualifications and remunerations. Social protection, designed to smooth fluctuations, gives way to assistance to the poorest, which is intended to be conditioned by individual responsibility and subjected to the requirement of balance of public accounts making them pro-cyclical.

Individuals would regain their autonomy following the withdrawal of the State and corporatist institutions. They withdraw into ethnic or religious communities or those simply based on their belonging to a class of income and wealth. These individuals would become individual entrepreneurs as well as consumers. In fact, many of them are likely to experience alternation between employment and unemployment periods, will have to hold less skilled jobs or receive decreased permanent income, both of which are difficult to offset by the reduction in the price of certain services or gains from the shared utilization of their real estate or other assets.

Modern metropolises would stimulate growth. In effect, wealthy rich regions increasingly refuse to pay for poor regions, the gap widens between cities fully involved in trade globalization and marginalized peripheral urban areas, and metropolises become the place of risk-free real estate investments carried out by the wealthiest to the detriment of excluded populations and productive investments.

Policy makers are henceforth obliged to comply with the rules that prevent them from yielding to electoral calculations. They are abandoning general programs in favor of community clientelism. The idealized market seems to benefit from it. The capture of rents, made possible by the fragmentation of society and transformation of demand structures, prevails to the detriment of the implementation of productive investments.

The peculiarity of ultimate libertarian utopias, of which we presented an overview above, is ignoring the weight of the passage of time, imagining an immediately accessible new world on condition of complying with the requirements of an essentially technological novelty that would control benevolent behaviors and allow to proceed without any intermediation. The specificity of these utopias includes obscuring the disorders that arise and spread, not in an old world that no longer exists, but in the real world, that of disorders inherent in the change that reason commands, and not thinking being able to eliminate but to control them. For decision makers, those in charge of coordination, far from projecting into a previously written idealized future, this involves controlling fluctuations perceptible in the short term to prevent chaos from occurring in the long term.

The digital revolution, like the industrial revolutions that preceded it, is the product of the institutions that govern such revolution and which guarantee or not the effective management of distortions that result from the ruptures caused. It makes it possible to expand the range of goods and services available to the entire population, and to develop a dual, slow growth economy dominated by rent seekers whose goal is to capture the value created by others with the consequence of negatively influencing the amount of wealth created. Everything will depend on the institutional changes that will certainly continue. A selection, which would result in the elimination of institutional and organizational forms to ensure the mastery of time, far from allowing the restoration of a perfect market, will have no other effect than the emergence of groups with conflicting interests.

The major novelty regards the increasingly assertive perception of a finite world because of the irreversible nature of the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources and pollutant emissions. This physical world is, indeed, a world without borders and its finiteness requires a global approach. However, the question cannot simply be posed in terms of growth or stagnation, which implies having only its physical dimension in perspective. Moreover, it cannot be raised by sticking to the implementation of a global price system that would regulate resource extraction and pollutant emission flows and by imagining that this system can be optimal. If there is to be an energy or more generally ecological transition, aimed at saving resource stocks, such transition runs against traditional obstacles including the costs and period of building new productive capacities and also the difficulties in formulating new environment-friendly demands. It is dependent on the decision-making horizon of actors as is any transition and thus, institutional and organizational forms that end up prevailing. The sine qua non condition for a successful transition is that all actors should fit into the long term, which means not sacrificing the present to the future, but minimizing present disorders, minimizing regrets in the immediate term more than maximizing profits, in order to ensure the future viability of the economy and society. The most urgent requirement is to create institutional bases that set limits preventing predatory behaviors and reestablishing the sense of measure in the use of resources.