Sobriété: Le regard de l’économiste
Published:
What happens to our economy when we intentionally consume less? This is the question I was asked to elaborate on to an audience of law students and professors. The challenge was to highlight core tensions and policy solutions when envisioning consumption reductions.
In more detail:
- Employment & Inequality – Less consumption means less production and fewer jobs is the basic idea. Without work-sharing policies or public employment guarantees, joblessness rises and wages fall, particularly for vulnerable workers.
Finance & Monetary Stability – Reduced consumption contracts lending, slowing monetary creation and destabilizing the entire financial ecosystem—from corporations to pensions to public investment.
- Prices & Deflation – Sectoral shifts create temporary price volatility. Poor management risks deflationary spirals. Worse: if only wealthy nations reduce demand, global commodity prices collapse, weakening exporters.
I also tried to pinpoint how our toolbox as economists will need to evolve to tackle these issues. Markets don’t naturally coordinate what we should produce or how to democratize it. We need parallel accounting systems coupled with economic models to see the real environmental feedback loops. Navigating sufficiency requires adressing not just economic theory, but the distributed effects, sectoral dependencies, technological lock-ins, and long-term risks that simplified models struggle to capture.