Suffering from soaring growth

Daniel Cohen, who died in 2023, was one of the major figures of contemporary French economics. Professor at the École Normale Supérieure, founding member of the Paris School of Economics, he has had a profound impact on public debate through his rare ability to make major economic issues intelligible. A brief history of economicspublished posthumously in 2024, then in pocket format at the end of 2025, can be read as his intellectual testament.

Return to the sources of the economy

The work is part of a dual approach: historical, offering a clear synthesis of the history of economic practice and thought intended for a wide audience ; and critical, questioning the very presuppositions of the economic discipline as well as its practical and social consequences.

Although formally structured into nine chapters, the work is organized like a triptych. The central panel (chapters IV–VI) analyzes the mature market economy: the golden age of post-war growth, its challenge by the oil shocks, the rise of financial capitalism, then the increasing opening of economies within the framework of globalization. The left pane (chapters I-III) traces the genesis of the modern economy, from its birth as a practice of organizing societies and as a field of thought, to the outbreak of the industrial revolution and the painful learning of crises, culminating in the Great Depression. The right pane (chapters VII–IX) looks to the future and examines contemporary transformations: globalization now fragmented, digital revolution, ecological crisis, so many changes which today make the economy a question of meaning and purposes.

The title is resolutely ambitious: to write a brief history of the economy. This is not a history of economic thought, but of economics taken in its broadest sense. The author thus implicitly undertakes to present economics as a practice, as a science and as an art. And to put everything in a historical perspective. And in only a hundred pages. Cohen aptly focuses on what the preface describes as “ growing pains » (p. 10) that is to say growth which has lost its promise of happiness and meaning.

Why growth doesn’t lead to happiness

The author delivers three essential messages with remarkable mastery.

First, the idea of ​​a “ happy growth » should become a central horizon of the economic debate. For Cohen, growth only makes sense if it actually contributes to the happiness of individuals. He opens his work by asserting that economic growth has become “ religion of the modern world » (p. 21). This observation must be placed in the current context, where growth, today less central in discourse, is not abandoned but questioned as to its purpose. He concludes with a call to rethink the idea we have of a world in harmony with itself, capable of making us experience “ the foretaste of happiness and peace » (p. 161). Happiness constitutes, in the author’s eyes, the ultimate goal of economic growth. In this way, from the start, Cohen fits into the new field of “ the economy of happiness “. However, it is more of a fleeting ideal, perhaps doomed to never be fully realized. Cohen thus indicates the direction that the economy should take: going beyond the dogma of gross domestic product as the ultimate indicator of economic success, in favor of a broader concept, gross national happiness.

Furthermore, the very meaning of “ economic problem » must be re-examined. Keynes defined it as the challenge of producing enough goods to satisfy basic material needs. He believed that with technological progress, this problem would be resolved around 2030, allowing human beings to work less and devote themselves to more fulfilling activities (p. 22). For Cohen, the “ economic problem » thus conceived can never be definitively resolved. He is “ like a walker who never reaches the horizon » (p. 160), because it is not only due to the scarcity of resources, but to the very indomitable nature of human desire. Material abundance never puts an end to lack. The solution therefore does not lie in endless accumulation, but in the capacity to direct desires towards socially fruitful forms: by re-enchanting work, by redefining the boundaries between the free and the commercial, and by reinventing international cooperation.

Finally, the figure of “ Homo economicus » reached, according to Cohen, its limits. He criticizes it as that of a profoundly impoverished representation of the human being, reduced to the sole indefinite pursuit of material enrichment for its own sake. Far from illuminating contemporary challenges, theHomo economicus thus appears as a “ very poor prophet » (p. 161). By claiming to organize the world solely through the logic of rivalry, it crowds out other essential human dimensions, such as ethics, empathy and reciprocity. Through this critique, Cohen joins recent developments in behavioral economics, which deconstruct the supposed rationality of Homo economicus and tend to replace it with the almost caricatured figure of a Homo irrationalis. This paradoxical triumph leads to its metamorphosis into Homo numericusparticularly under the effect of artificial intelligence, a figure obsessed with consumption, measurement and permanent comparison. To this reductive vision, Cohen opposes neither the refusal of competition nor the utopia of a world without a market, but the search for a new balance, reorienting human desire towards collective and symbolic goals.

How the economy lost its way

What more could a grateful reader expect from this work? ? Given its vocation as both educational and popular, one might expect to find explicit answers to three fundamental questions: what is economics? ? What does the economy do? ? And where should the economy go? ?

When it comes to the question of what the economy is, Cohen offers a resolutely panoramic vision. He presents it both as the set of practices by which societies produce, exchange and distribute resources, as a science aimed at understanding their mechanisms, and as a form of art understood as an art of management based on necessarily imperfect human judgment. On the other hand, he never provides an explicit definition of the economy as a delimited field of knowledge. For the non-specialist reader, it may then seem that economics encompasses everything that concerns human beings.

Cohen goes well beyond the framework of classical economic thought. He summons anthropologists, such as Lévi-Strauss and Sahlins ; historians, such as Braudel and Polanyi ; sociologists, such as Weber and Durkheim ; psychologists, such as Kahneman and Tversky ; and writers, from Shakespeare and Molière to Balzac and Zola. This openness is the richness of the work, but it leaves open the question of the very frontier of the economy. Is it a specific domain of human experience or a reading grid likely to apply to almost everything? ?

When he addresses the question of what economics does, Cohen strikes a decidedly opinionated tone. He begins by recalling that “ the only economic problem of humanity has been that of feeding itself » (p. 27). The agricultural revolution, then the industrial revolution, gradually allowed this fundamental constraint to be loosened. The economy is then assigned other functions: produce, exchange, redistribute and consume.

Cohen recognizes that modern economics generally performs these functions. However, he insists on the profoundly ambiguous nature of this transformation. Although it now produces abundant goods, services and knowledge, it guarantees neither the universal satisfaction of essential needs nor the alignment between production, employment and well-being. Neither globalization, nor digitalization, nor artificial intelligence can achieve this. On the contrary, these efforts lead to an ecological crash, “ the cluttered planet » (p. 131).

All this leads to an obvious question: are we not now expecting too much from the economy? ? It is clear that we are seeing a continued expansion of what economics is supposed to do. Cohen only mentions certain aspects, such as the social consequences of digitalization with the image of “ thinking robots » (p. 118) or even « ecological collapse » (p. 135). But it largely leaves aside a long list of other issues that have been gradually reclassified as economic problems: gender issues, pandemics, inclusion, aging, governance, and so on. Cohen even adds to this composite an additional ambition, that of happiness itself (p. 141) ! Such a panoramic approach is hardly justified. Economics, as a practice, science and art, seems to have lost its focal point. It is high time to refocus the economy on its own domain.

Moreover, the history of the economy, even brief, could have presented more history. The left panel of Cohen’s triptych, devoted to the origins of contemporary economics, remains remarkably elliptical. In just five pages on the birth of the subsistence economy, we already find ourselves at the end of the XVIIIᵉ century, in Malthus. A more marked recognition of ancient and medieval economies (Greek, Roman, Islamic), commercial networks as well as mercantilism would not have harmed the exposition of the historical side of his story. The cover of the pocket edition reproduces a fragment of the painting The lender and his wife by Quentin Metsys (1514), evoking precisely a moment in economic history little discussed in the work: the domination of the mercantilist mentality in Europe.

The work oscillates between a general public essay and an academic synthesis. This hybridity constitutes both its strength, by making the subject accessible, and its weakness, by sometimes exposing it to a certain lack of academic rigor. The publishers could have offered an annotated appendix of his works, allowing the points developed in the work to be better situated and explored in greater depth.

Economy as an art of living

Esther Duflo, who prefaces the work, compares it to the Mass in B by Johann Sebastian Bach. The analogy is apt. Bach, at the end of his life, assembled this mass from fragments composed throughout his life. The same goes for Cohen. His disappearance gives the book a testamentary dimension.

A brief history of economics constitutes a valuable contribution to intellectual mediation. She is part of a line of French economic essayists: Jacques Attali, Thomas Piketty, Jean Fourastié. Its originality lies in the combination of a long history and a methodological critique. Cohen adopts an implicit normative stance, identifying the end point of economics as “ epicurean happiness » (p. 149), a serene and measured life, where simple and lasting pleasures prevail over the unlimited quest for wealth.

The work invites reflection as much as it enlightens. For researchers in economic history, it opens a new avenue of analysis of the economy as balance and serenity. For the general public, it constitutes an invitation to conceive of the economy, in the sense that Bernard Shaw understood it, as “ the art of getting the most out of life “. Basically, Cohen invites us to go beyond the “ suffering from soaring growth » to rediscover the true meaning of economic activity.