The Economics of Discontent Quotes

“money, and wealth, like water, has to flow and circulate, as the number 8. Stagnating water loses its energy and encourages putrefaction, while flowing water, at the opposite, brings life; so should be money circulating in the economy and wealth in society.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“A major culprit is the valuation and financing of real estate. Banks are lending for real estate on the basis of the real estate’s value. They typically lend, according to where we stand in the real estate cycle, between 80% to 100% of the value. This is because real estate is allegedly a “safe” asset. This is by itself extraordinary. First, the historic volatility of real estate prices and the history of economic cycles reveal that real estate is not a safe, but a risky asset. Its physical nature does not guarantee its value. This over-lending to real estate buyers comes at the expense of lending to small business, which necessarily captures a smaller share of lending.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“Young people’s incomes are depressed, while the state makes every effort to support elderly pensions.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“I believe the populist insurgents, contrary to the impression given by prevailing media coverage, are largely correct about what has gone wrong, but, dangerously, know far less about how to make it right. I believe we should listen respectfully, to acknowledge that the populists have a valid point, that they are not just simpletons nor backwards, racist xenophobes. I believe it is time to reflect on what policies would restore some necessary balance, a renewed role for core government and a renegotiated, reinvigorated, social contract.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“The success of everything depends on intuition, the capacity of seeing things in a way which afterwards proves to be true, even though it cannot be established at the moment, and of grasping the essential fact, discarding the inessential, even though one can give no account of the principles by which this is done.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“Western societies have to make a painful moral choice. They can continue to provide an internal safety net for all inhabitants by rejecting low skill migrants and enforcing deportation. Or they can accept there will be two classes of citizens that will be treated very differently and fundamentally renounce the universality of social protection and basic public services.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“When low skilled immigrants flood a labor market, it makes high-skilled workers rarer as a share of the total workforce, increasing the ratio of low skill to high skill workers. This benefits high-skilled workers by improving their relative position in the marketplace, increasing their bargaining position and raising their incomes.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“Depending on the country, a 70-year-old is about four to five times more likely to vote than a 25-year-old. The compounding effect of a more numerous elderly population and a higher voter participation rate implies that in the next 20 to 30 years OECD countries would systematically have an above 65 majority of voters at each election”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“Indeed, be it in Singapore, Japan, Europe or the U.S., when I ask young parents if they would consider having a second or a third child, I nearly always get the same answer: “We could not afford it.” We want the best for our kids, and even though we are allegedly wealthier than before, middle class families can no longer afford the “luxury” of paying for this extra child.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“In response to this budget squeeze and rising education costs, middle class families have been having fewer children. Reducing the number of offspring alleviates education costs and preserves children’s opportunities to excel. From this perspective it is worth noting that there has been a documented correlation between lower natality and increasing protest votes.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“The traditional left-right debate over distribution versus efficiency is increasingly replaced by a nationalist versus internationalist paradigm. The latter school is best represented by French President Emmanuel Macron, who described himself as “ni de droite, ni de gauche” (neither conservative nor liberal). It wants to maintain the internationalist status quo while acknowledging its excesses and reforming it from within.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum … (Chomsky)”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions. (Aristotle)”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“Since the end of the ’70s, the percentage of GDP allocated to philanthropy has remained relatively constant in the Western world, reaching at most about 2% of GDP in the U.S., even as wealth concentration has dramatically increased. In other words, the contribution of the wealthiest to legitimizing their social claim to wealth via philanthropy has remained stagnant while their relative wealth has been growing (Philanthropy”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“The reason for this pressure on the wages of all but the highest skill Western world workers is not an inability to generate additional income or profit to pay for labor. Rather, there is downward pressure on the price of labor. There are multiple sources for this pressure, but three in particular have been thoroughly documented: Automation, Globalization, and deunionization.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“Western countries are rarely in budget surplus and thus end up building debt over the cycle.The increase of the debt-to-GDP ratio is a fundamentally negative development for the lower and middle classes. The debt acts as a transfer of wealth from average taxpayers to the better off. The mechanism of this wealth transfer is relatively simple, as the interest paid to finance payment to the bond holders is funded by the general budget. Thus, bondholders, by definition people with savings, receive payments financed by the tax collected from the general population. Effectively, the debt sucks in a percentage of income revenues and spits it back out to wealthy savers in the form of interest payments.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism

“The numerical collective illusion called wealth, is, ultimately, society’s recognition of someone’s right to use part of its resources as a reward for past contributions to the common good.8 The recent rise of the populist parties must be interpreted as a belated recognition of the break-up of the Western world’s social contract.”
― Jean-Michel Paul, The Economics of Discontent: From Failing Elites to The Rise of Populism