A Brief History of the Economy E-Book

Daniel Cohen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 141

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Economic growth is the religion of the modern world. It promises a solution to the most basic drama of our human existence: wanting what we don’t have. But we live in a time when the frenzied pursuit of economic growth is jeopardizing the planet’s viability and our very survival as a species. How did we get to this point in human history? How did we allow the pursuit of growth to become the apotheosis of human development?

To answer these questions, the distinguished economist Daniel Cohen takes us on a journey to understand human desire and the different registers on which it has expressed itself throughout history. He brings his panoramic grasp of the subject to bear on the key stages of social and economic development, from the Neolithic revolution to the digital age. The ideas of the great economists – from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Joseph Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes – are situated in their historical contexts and explained clearly and concisely. The result is a triumph of ambition and brevity: a history of the economy in 100 pages.

This book – the final work written by Daniel Cohen – will appeal to anyone interested in the economy and in the tension between a limited world and unlimited desires that lies at the heart of the great challenges we face today.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Quote

Preface

Introduction

1 Genesis

The birth of the economy

The agricultural revolution

The birth of civilizations

Malthus’s law

2 Prometheus Unbound

The Industrial Revolution changes everything

Coal and slaves

The great thinkers

Karl Marx tackles ‘capital’

3 Prosperity and Depression

The crash

And the financial crisis appears …

An international crisis

Keynes, the iconoclast

4 The Golden Age, and its Crisis

Legendary years

The oil crisis

The rise of the hardcore economic liberals

5 The New Financial Capitalism

The new age of inequality

The subprime crisis

The spectre of 1929

6 Globalization

The East India Company, the first multinational

The Japanese model

The new international division of labour

China returns

The new reserve army

7 The Digital Revolution

Homo numericus

The age of the thinking robot

The Taylorization of affect

8 The Environmental Crisis

A congested planet

9 Gross Domestic Happiness

Everyone’s looking for happiness!

Richard Easterlin

Epicurean happiness

Conclusion

Afterword

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Quote

Preface

Introduction

Begin Reading

Conclusion

Afterword

End User License Agreement

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A Brief History of the Economy

Daniel Cohen

Preface by Esther Duflo

Translated by David Broder

polity

Originally published in French as Une brève histoire de l’économie © Editions Albin Michel – Paris 2024

This English translation © Polity Press, 2026

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6831-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2025938383

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

‘How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!’

Marcel Proust,Swann’s Way

Preface

by Esther Duflo, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

Daniel Cohen passed away on 20 August 2023, at the age of seventy.

It is at the age of seventy – as he tells us in the final chapter of this book – that we return to a thirty-year-old’s level of happiness. He further tells us that we sometimes achieve the creativity that Beethoven enjoyed at the end of his life when, finally freed from the obligation to please others, he exploded the norms and the musical codes of the day. Indeed, it was then that Beethoven composed his five late sonatas (opp. 101, 106, 109–11),1 a ‘twilight’ music of exceptional originality and brilliance. Unfortunately, Daniel Cohen did not have time either to enjoy the happiness of this age, or to treat us to a work from the twilight of his life.

The book in your hands makes me think more of another end-of-life work, the Mass in B minor by Johann Sebastian Bach. Completed a year before the composer’s death, the Mass in B minor is a masterful work, largely assembled from pieces composed throughout his career. It is often considered the enshrinement of a whole life, a synthesis of all Bach’s stylistic and technical contributions, as well as being a profound spiritual reflection. For the neophyte, the Mass in B minor is an unforgettable introduction to Bach’s choral music. For those who have been weaned on Bach, it is a refuge, a musical site where they can rediscover, like old friends, the essential moments of his work.

Similarly, this book takes up themes that ran throughout Daniel Cohen’s work. Unlike the Mass in B minor, which is so long that it is rarely performed in its entirety, this is a concise work. In about a hundred pages, it takes up the essential themes that run through his work and his thinking: that of the suffering that comes from soaring growth, that of the tension between a limited world and an infinite desire, of globalization, the decline of civilizations, the tensions of the digital age, meaning and the pursuit of happiness. We also find familiar characters here: Marcel Proust, Jared Diamond, Richard Easterlin, Jean Fourastié, Leonard Cohen, Milan Kundera, and also Barbie …

All this is told in Daniel’s unique voice. He submitted the manuscript in January 2023, a few weeks before a sudden illness forced him to be hospitalized, and he did not have the opportunity to revise it. If there is any glimmer of luck for us in this misfortune, it is this raw manuscript. For what we lose in ‘polishing’, we gain in immediacy. Even in the written text we perceive the modulations of tone, the passages in high notes, the animation of the hands, and Daniel Cohen’s characteristic brilliance.

In the section in Chapter 7, ‘Homo numericus’, I was especially moved by the sentence: ‘The idea that we can resurrect the dead by tapping into their “history” is utterly terrifying and entirely credible.’ The passage refers to an episode of the TV series Black Mirror in which a young woman uses a (fictional, anticipatory) version of ChatGPT to bring back to life her husband who had died in a car accident, using his text messages, emails and writings to predict what he would have said in all and any situations. In this book, Daniel has given us the gift of his – wholly natural – intelligence. He leaves us something of himself by offering us a condensed version of his work, in a little nugget. There is surely nothing terrifying about this. Still, for his many friends and students it will be difficult to read this book without a certain sadness: he is so present in these pages that more than one person will yearn for the chance to go to lunch with him to talk about it.

For those who are new to Daniel Cohen, this book will offer them an overview of his thinking, a guided tour highlighting the important milestones, which they can explore in more depth by reading each of his previous books. I really discovered economics by reading (in one night in my dorm room at the brand new humanities faculty) the manuscript of The Misfortunes of Prosperity. Reading it changed my life, by opening me up to the richness of the discipline when it is practised, as it should be, as one among the human sciences. Let’s bet that this book will have the same effect on young aspiring thinkers, whether they dream of becoming economists, historians, philosophers or politicians.

Although this is a posthumous work, it was never intended as a testament. At the time he was writing it, Daniel was full of life and plans, an early retiree from the École normale and the new president of the École d’économie de Paris, the institution that he had helped to found, thereby contributing to a profound transformation of the study of economics in Paris. He wanted to understand the world we live in, with its divisions and its tensions, the better to change it.

So, like the Mass in B minor, this book is more than an anthology of a career. Applied to a new context (the full Catholic Mass for Bach, the post-COVID world for Cohen), the lessons of built-up experience produce new perspectives.

What demands this new perspective is a certain anxiety, which dominates the last part of the book, before the concluding pages. There is no shortage of sources of concern. ‘I’m worried about China’, writes Daniel, quoting Proust’s Madame de Guermantes. The management of the COVID-19 crisis in China, which banked on a zero-COVID policy at the expense of economic activity, accelerated a transition that was undoubtedly inevitable: China’s demographic decline, extreme levels of saving and economic dependence on global demand were bound to cause growth to taper off, in a slowdown similar to that experienced by France at the end of the Trente Glorieuses (the so-called Thirty Glorious Years after 1945). But the difference is that, in China, the implicit contract between the regime and the population after Tiananmen was ‘growth in exchange for (no) democracy’. As growth slows down, the political equilibrium is broken. ‘China is still a cause for concern.’

Artificial intelligence, as we have seen, is ‘utterly terrifying’. However, what ‘makes the blood run cold’ for Daniel is not the idea that robots could one day be as (or more) intelligent than us, but dehumanization – the prospect of going to a supermarket and not meeting anyone there. There is a deeper logic driving this dehumanization: for as long as services to people are performed by humans (whether they be doctors, bank or insurance employees, judges or waiters), productivity growth bumps up against the limits of the human being. If machines can replace humans, it becomes possible again, in principle, to increase productivity infinitely by honing the machines. For companies, there is an irresistible temptation to enter this race. But by losing human relationships, we lose the raison d’être of our activities, and undoubtedly our own raison d’être. A robot with the softest skin will never be able to replace the kindness of a nurse taking care of an elderly person.

Climate change is a new source of possible disaster. Here again, unlike most authors addressing this subject, Daniel does not dwell on the physical description of the problem or on identifying its possible technical solutions. Rather, he focuses on the political difficulty that humans have in agreeing on the importance of climate change, and thus on the solutions. He sees no easy way out of this conflict, which is battled out both between nations (poor and rich ones) and within them.

Yet his suggested way out of the climate crisis brings to light a new idea that he would surely have elaborated further in future books: the suggestion that we cannot wait for a complete solution before taking the first step to change the world. Rather than despair at the idea that, if the Chinese and the Americans do not change their ways, changing our own behaviour is futile, we must start by changing what we can do, on our own level. This does not only, and perhaps does not even necessarily, mean changing the outside world. Above all, it means changing ourselves. ‘It would be a mistake to counterpose thought and action’, we read, for ‘it’s by doing things that we transform our imaginary. We have to start living differently, even if the initial gestures are symbolic, in order to learn how to invent a new world. We need to feel not just sadness about the old world that is crumbling, but joy for the possible future one.’

I have always admired Daniel for his ability to provide a comprehensive vision. He had a gift for painting a masterful tableau of the economy, politics and international relations with just a few brushstrokes. I believe that he always appreciated my determination to tackle ‘small’ problems as rigorously as possible, one after the other.

But, for a few years now, a doubt has been gnawing away at me: will this approach through many small steps suffice to deal with the vast problems that we are confronted with today? The last pages of this book clearly show that a mirror-image doubt was gnawing away at Daniel: that he could not describe any simple solution to the problems that he raised.

From the synthesis of these two concerns comes a new hope, his last gift to me (and to all of us). Daniel Cohen’s ambition was immense, and so, too, are the objectives he sets for the reader in this book. The task is nothing less than to rethink work, our set of values, and international cooperation. But the only way that we can do this is to start this transformation of ourselves somewhere, at our own level.

What’s left for me now is to try and fulfil, in honour of Daniel Cohen’s memory, the project that he sets for us: ‘It’s up to us now to rethink our idea of a world in harmony with itself, one that makes us feel “a foretaste of happiness and peace”.’

1.

I’d strongly recommend Igor Levit’s rendition (published by Sony) – remarkably, his first album.

Introduction

Economic growth is the modern world’s religion. It is the elixir that soothes conflicts. It is the promise of boundless progress. It offers a solution to the most basic drama of our human existence: wanting what we don’t have.

So, we may well bemoan the fact that, today, growth has become an intermittent and elusive prospect. Bust follows boom and boom follows bust. Like the shamans who say they can make the rains come, politicians raise their hands to the sky to summon up economic growth – and then, when it doesn’t arrive, they stir up people’s resentment. But while the modern world is ever on the search for scapegoats, it skirts around the central problem: whatever would become of us if the promise of indefinite growth turned out to be an illusion? Would the world be able to find other satisfactions, or would it slump into despair and violence? We live in a time when, through the frenzied pursuit of material wealth, billions of human beings are jeopardizing the planet’s very viability. In such a context, it is crucial that we think rather deeper.