It is very difficult, for the majority of us, to admit that we are now in the process of changing the world. And even those who say they recognize it are only asking, “How long will the crisis last?” As if the post-crisis world could be a return to the former order.
By the same token, all the current discussions on the nature of the necessary “recovery,” (by consumption or investment) reveal that the majority of politicians and economists continue to reason as if we were experiencing a classic crisis, necessitating such “recovery,” which is to say budgetary spending which would allow the return of the previous situation, like some counterbalance in a presumably harmonized equilibrium.
In fact, until this point, everywhere in the world, the economic policies of the states are limited to such recoveries, in which the real goal is nothing but preserving the old order and protecting the elites within it. Thus, recovery by consumption is merely an ersatz policy of revenue, handing out a few crumbs to the most impoverished without truly challenging the distribution of wealth, revenue, and power. In this way too, recovery by investment is for the moment just a way of protecting the dominant and deeply indebted sectors (banks, home insurance, automobiles).
Eitther of these recovery plans aims at temporarily saving past elites from disaster; and even allowing them to make new profits in speculating on accumulated debt; like for example the Geithner plan, prepared by Goldman Sachs bankers, which will provide the means to make a fortune on several speculative funds using taxpayers’ money.
Thus, in the looming shipwreck, everything will happen around the world, and particularly in France, as if there were only life vests in first class. While, on the contrary, it is crucial to direct the money that we are about to lose in struggling sectors instead to the industries of the future.
And first in education, the training of the young unemployed, the selection and payment of researchers. Then in the financing of small innovative business to make them into world-class job-creating firms, in particular in key future world sectors: new energy (above all solar and nuclear), biotechnology, artificial organs, the internet of appliances and nanotechnology.
To arrive there, having carried out inevitable nationalizations of the financial sector at the lowest possible price, it will be necessary to massively reduce debt and orient public and private savings towards these future businesses. The United States has recently understood this to some degree, in dedicating a small portion of their enormous recovery package to these strategic sectors; in particular by raising the budget of the principal health research institute, NIH, by a third.
Naturally, all this would have infinitely more meaning for France if this were done on the European level; if, instead of seeking to preserve their failing elites for as long as possible, the directors of the 27 EU member countries dedicated themselves, for once, to the future of their youths: those who don’t vote. Or those who, in any case, don’t vote for them. But that is undoubtedly far too much to ask.