The Digital Era 2

Preface Assessing Digital Society

“By mixing up the principles that make up a good government and on which the increase in wealth is based, it is not surprising that many ideas have been confused instead of cleared up”.

Jean-Baptiste Say¹, Preliminary address, Traité d’économie politique, Paris, 1803

Whether I am in the office, at home or abroad, in Germany, Holland or Canada, the objects that surround me demonstrate the consistency and intensity of the multilateral exchanges that are available: fuels, household products, fruits and vegetables, fabrics, clothing, shoes, carpets, furniture, lighting, etc. All of them have crossed the seas in order to fill my home; none of the brands that occupy the shopping centers, these “agoras” of modern times located on the outskirts of cities of any size, escape this observation: their logistics platforms are supplied with the contents of thousands of containers from China, India, Brazil and the Philippines, which the supermarkets make available to us at unbeatable prices!

Can this empirical observation be reconciled with the idea that the Wealth of Nations can still be measured by the yardstick of a territory and that this wealth can be measured at the borders of a country, even if it is continental like the United States? Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, France and Spain, all of these nation-states, which are constitutive of a European Union which now covers most of the European continent, owe a good half of ...