En juillet dernier, deux milliardaires, l’un britannique, l’autre américain, mirent en scène leur départ dans l’espace à bord de leurs fusées privées (un troisième, sud-africain, nourrit un projet similaire). D’un commun accord, ces trois larrons ont décidé d’aggraver la crise climatique pour leur amusement et leur profit¹.

Certes, tout le monde ne s’esbaudit pas devant leurs vaisseaux. Reste que la couverture médiatique de ces délires spatiaux est restée très positive, et – à ma connaissance – aucune manifestation n’a été organisée pour exiger le démantèlement de ces programmes. On pourrait pourtant, vu les sommes en jeu, financer à la place la vaccination de tous les humains contre le Covid². L’indignation reste faible, comparée par exemple à celle suscitée par la photo d’une tortue avec une paille en plastique dans le nez.

2001. J’y ai repensé hier en écoutant Le vent nous portera, de Bertrand Cantat et Noir Désir. Le single est sorti il y a presque vingt ans, jour pour jour. Vingt ans, c’est l’écart entre 1929 et 1949, entre les années folles et le rideau de fer. C’est l’écart entre 1968 et 1988, entre la révolution sexuelle et la révolution conservatrice. Entre 2001 et 2021, rien de tel.

Bien sûr, il s’en est passé, des choses. 12 millions de Français·es sont mort·es, 16 millions sont né·es. Mais les idées n’ont pas changé. Le Pen est toujours au centre de la vie politique. Le débat public reste obsédé par l’insécurité, surtout ressentie par ceux et celles qui ne la subisse pas. La plupart des intellectuel·les refusent toujours d’admettre que ce thème n’est qu’un appeau à haine, un code qui désigne les Noir·es et les musulman·es comme coupables, de tout. (Dans le même temps, les intellectuel·les étasunien-nes ont développé le concept de dog-whistle pour appréhender ce genre de discours).

In this essay, I argue that money does not command social status, but that social status brings with it monetary rewards. This could have profound implications for any policy geared towards social justice.

Consider these two situations:

1. A middle-class person finds a 12-kilo gold bar in her attic. Although it would fetch over 600,000€ on the gold market, there is no way our middle-class person could obtain that much in cash for her discovery. Converting the gold requires access to a buyer, who could easily steal the bar. If an exchange takes place, she would still have to justify the source of the funds to her bank, which might lead to an investigation. She could keep the money in cash, but this would raise security issues.
   Conversely, a very rich person who finds a 12-kilo gold bar in an attic would have no problem activating her network to find the goldsmith and tradespersons needed to convert the metal in cash. In other words, a conventional unit of value (gold) is not worth the same amount depending on the social status of the person who has it.
   This probably holds true at different locations on the social scale. A middle-class individual would have no problem changing a 500-euro bill for smaller banknotes. The same might not be true for, say, an 18-year-old Person of Color living in a hostile neighborhood.¹
   
2. An ambitious entrepreneur with very little capital manages to sneak his way in national politics and ends up sitting on a top-level committee. Using a photo that shows him shaking hands with the country’s president, he asks the bank for a large loan, although the financial situation of his business does not warrant it at all.
   This is the true story of a former boss of mine, who built a news start-up from nothing and mingled in France’s highest spheres (for a short while only ; his luck ran out after a few months). It shows that even without money, a man can pretend to be at a certain position on the social scale and leverage it to obtain money. (Gender is important, I’ll come back to that later.)

These two situations show that common units of value (banknotes, gold) are not worth the same depending on an individual’s social status. Conversely, an individual who can convince others that he has a very high social status can access money easily. Therefore, money does not provide status. The opposite is true: Status provides money, and money is just a reflection of status.

Dans Capital et Idéologie, Thomas Piketty raconte comment diverses sociétés ont géré les inégalités, depuis le 17^e siècle jusqu’à aujourd’hui. (Si vous ne l’avez pas encore lu, je vous conseille plutôt Prospérité, puissance et pauvreté : Pourquoi certains pays réussissent mieux que d’autres de Daron Acemoğlu et James A. Robinson. Vous aurez les mêmes arguments dans un livre plus court et mieux écrit.)

Piketty, Acemoğlu et Robinson expliquent bien comment les inégalités structurent les sociétés. Ils expliquent comment elles se perpétuent et détaillent par le menu les systèmes éducatifs et fiscaux qui permettent aux riches de payer relativement peu d’impôts et de transmettre leur patrimoine à leurs enfants. L’une des conclusions principales qu’ils tirent de leurs travaux, c’est que les inégalités sont des constructions sociales et qu’elles peuvent être rabotées par l’action politique.

Turn on the TV anywhere and chances are you’ll be served a law-and-order drama. Data is scarce about what’s exactly aired, but a review of one German TV channel in 2015 showed that over one-third of the prime time slots were filled with crime shows.¹ CSI and NCIS are worldwide phenomena, while Tatort and Polizeiruf 110 regularly top audience ratings in Germany.

Conversely, one would be hard put finding a law-and-order series on Netflix. The online streaming service, which invests over $10 billion a year in new content, has yet to produce a traditional police drama. On the contrary, Netflix shows tend to feature villains in the main cast. House of Cards, the story of a corrupt US president, Narcos, about drug dealers, Breaking Bad, about another drug dealer, are just a few examples of mafia shows.²

This essay was written for a presentation at SenseCamp in Berlin, delivered on November 16.

Like many of you, I went to university and, like many of you, I chose to study business administration. In my economics classes, I learned, as you probably did, that individual preferences could organize themselves on imaginary or, for fruits and vegetables, physical markets. I even had a class in economics of the environment where I learned that solving environmental disasters was not only possible but straightforward: Natural resources just had to be used in such a way that preservation of the environment would be more valuable to consumers than its destruction, for example by creating nature preserves and bringing in tourists.

The message and behavior of Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swede that started the Friday school strikes for climate, is such that it is becoming the foundation of an ideology - which I call Thunbergism. I think it is the most positive political development of the last decade. In 2016, I wrote that I took note of the death of Humanism and that I was waiting for a new ideology. This time might have come.

An organization’s main purpose is to give its members a certain social status. Whether employees do productive work or bullshit jobs makes no difference in the life of the organization.¹ Other theories, which state that organizations exist to achieve a specific goal, fail to explain how so many of them can still smoothly obtain resources and pay salaries while being totally dysfunctional (the kind of organizations whose own employees tell you “I don’t understand how it can still run!”).²