Disorder and Public Concern Around Globalization

Introduction

Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality… But its blind impulse is to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral.

Albert Camus The Rebel (1951)

After many years of tranquility consisting of an uninterrupted and general improvement in living standards and a victory over the communist world, the Western world and especially Europe, who are committed toward achieving economic and monetary union, again face uncertainty. Governments seem to no longer have the compass that would allow them to find the way to a satisfactory growth, even while the idea that we could enter an era of secular stagnation emerged.

A disorder then establishes in acts and in minds leading to the irrationality that can emerge from a world’s state resulting from an undermined consensus and a return to old and discredited ideas. A demand for order in the midst of chaos is thus all the more necessary.

It is certainly difficult for the economist, concerned with rigor and recognition, to conceive disorder and irrationality. The economist wants to imagine a world in which equilibrium is assured by some sort of Laplace’s Demon, intelligence that knows all the forces that animate nature and for which nothing would be uncertain. He/she may think that the globalization of trade could enable the emergence of a global economy made up of ultimately autonomous individuals, who would no longer have to yield to any regulation impeding the proper functioning of ...