From Mantes-la-Jolie to Colombia
What the `Gilets Jaunes´ are telling the developing world
(Consulta aquí el artículo original en español / check out here the original article in Spanish)
The first time I met the Gilets Jaunes or ‘yellow vests’ was by mid-November around Mantes-La-Jolie, a small industrial city on the north-western outskirts of Paris, while trying to reach the Normandy region. The news had warned that the roads would be closed, with several blocks by the demonstrators, and indeed we had to leave the highway at the height of Mantes-La-Jolie and take secondary roads, which also turned out to have blockades in the roundabouts.
The ‘yellow vests’ met at road junctions to stop traffic, talk with drivers, prepare a barbecue with a certain atmosphere of camaraderie while a weak November sun was not able to raise the temperature to more than five degrees. At that time they protested for the rise in the price of fuel due to a new carbon tax. Although in Paris the movement seemed somewhat distant (not to say illogical and populist), in the peripheral and rural populations it seemed to have great reception. The initial symbol of the protest, putting a yellow vest under the car’s windshield, was (and is) common. The yellow vest is a compulsory object to each car in France, which is used in times of emergency to be visible on the road. The symbolism that the movement found is powerful. It was not surprising that the blockades were not rejected, on the contrary, they found solidarity with other drivers. Today they estimate that around 70% of French people supports the movement.
There is something that needs to be said when one sees protesting people who for many Colombians have a dreamed life. What are you complaining about? Some will ask. They have work, they have food, they even have a car. In Colombia, car and motorcycle sales indicators are evidence of progress. But here they already reached that progress and something else is happening. Problems of rich countries? I do not think so. Probably, just human problems.
The ‘Gilets Jaunes’ are a spontaneous and decentralized movement that has grown thanks to an energy that was latent in French society, product of an accumulation of injustices that exploded with the proposal of a tax on fossil fuels, perceived as unfair after the government had eliminated the tax on large fortunes. For analysts it has been difficult to explain the movement, especially after the government announced that it will not charge the carbon tax and the Gilets Jaunes decided to go for more. They were listened, they found legitimacy and they managed to unite more people. At the bottom there is a collective reaction to an injustice: being asked to put more, while the rich get fewer taxes.
I believe that three recent developments in the relationship between politics, economy and technology have helped to trigger the situation. The most critical thing is that the developing world, including Colombia, insists on desperately pursuing them: clusters-based urban expansion, a development model that believes that it is enough to get people out of poverty, and the mistaken idea that the state must withdraw (as much as possible) to make room for the wealth creators. Clearly these ideas, already in practice for several decades, are taking us to a critical point that finds in the Gilets Jaunes the clash of the two highest tensions on the planet: climate change and growing inequality.
Sustainable and unaffordable cities
I must say that living or staying for long in Paris intramuros (the Paris inside the periphery, the ‘official’ Paris, the famous, tremendously expensive and dense) is to be in a bubble where everything is just around the corner and is very easy to walk or take public transportation. Most of the ‘yellow vests’ do not have access to this, they live mostly in distant areas and tend to commute to central locations, such as Paris, which concentrate the sources of work and many other services. But the high prices of the city and the amount of services it concentrates make it impossible for so many people to live in it. It is not strange to see that in Île-de-France (the region where Paris is located) there are people who travel every day, by train or car, up to 100 kilometers to get to work.
This geographical dispersion is not by chance. It responds to a model of complex and intentional development, which in the second half of the 20th century became a way of life leveraged by cheap consumption and the automotive lobby, and today it has encountered with the revival of urban centers as privileged areas for the digital entrepreneurship industry. Living in the countryside, far from the noise, at the expense of relying on the automobile for daily routines is both a dream and a necessity. It is unfeasible to live in urban centers, which the more they embellish, the more public transport they build, the more walkable and more sustainable they seem to be, the more companies they concentrate, the more they value their square meters and oust a large part of the population.
Cities like Paris seem to be an example for the whole world, except for a large majority of its inhabitants. And I do not mean the people who live in Paris, but those who inhabit it, but must leave every night to sleep in the peripheries. They are not just poor people, they are also middle-class people who have chosen to build their homes in a more secluded, safe and spacious place, thanks, mostly to a fossil fuels based individual transport system. Although this is not the case of Paris, because it has a great network of trains, it is the case of many other cities where the movement of the Gilets Jaunes has awakened.
Recently something happened in the United States that reminded us how cities have developed intentionally to become epicenters of industries, mostly of services, given the advantages of spatially concentrating talent, infrastructure and capital. After a sort of contest, Amazon chose Crystal City, Virginia and Long Island City, New York to build its second headquarters. The first decided to give tax benefits up to 1 billion dollars and the second up to 3 billion dollars, in exchange for real estate investments and 50,000 and 25,000 jobs, respectively. The bet is to attract investment to generate economic opportunities. But the question is, opportunities for whom? Keep in mind that companies like Amazon seek their talent globally. Even if all the employment were to the nearby inhabitants, 50,000 jobs is not enough for cities of millions. It is not surprising that in New York they seek to renegotiate the deal. If the history that other tech hubs have experienced is repeated, in a few years we will see the prices of nearby homes and daily life rise so much that the original inhabitants will have to go to the margins, away from the city that promised them more jobs.
Does the story sound familiar? Developing countries live it continuously while managing foreign investment and, more recently, in the adoption of the model of technological clusters in several cities. This practice as a development model is a legacy of the Silicon Valley miracle (about that, more information is available here and here) and many cities in the world have adopted it as a formula for success. However, Silicon Valley was not the first cluster in the world. Recall Detroit, once a thriving city for automotive development, today a place almost forgotten due to manufacturing globalization. As investments come, they can also go. However, the technological reality makes cities a scarce commodity.
“The Entrepreneurial Age seems to reward large cities and nothing else, and old jobs have been radically displaced as a result. As factories are now empty, the occupied working class is now employed primarily in services — services that are more and more concentrated in cities. Hence, as Richard Florida puts it, the city has become the “new factory floor”, Hedge, Nicolas Colin.
But they are cities in which the working class cannot afford to live. Nicolas Colin elaborates a proposal that deserves discussion, around Proximity Services[1] as a solution to this current technological paradox of loss of purchasing power and concentration of economic activity in cities. It makes sense, hand in hand with recent calls for the takeoff of the caring economy. But it is still not enough to solve the urban expulsion that has generated the current mix of clustering and financialization, as has been studied by authors such as David Harvey and Saskia Sassen.
The illusion of getting out of poverty
I said in the first paragraphs how it surprised me, being Colombian, seeing the inconformity of the French working class, which has conquered the dream of the Colombian working class. Although we are talking about two very different contexts, it is still disturbing that, as a society, in Colombia we pursue an objective that proves more and more its futility.
In the dominant development discourse, it was insisted for a long time that the goal was to take people out of poverty. The UN Millennium Goals were permeated by this. However, today it is clear that it is not enough. Therefore, the UN now has other objectives, the Sustainable Development Goals, which include a broader view of what development implies. In addition, the 2008 crisis showed us how the world was full of wealth, but it was not reaching the entire population. We have talked a lot about inequality since then, although it has been difficult for us to gauge why it is relevant that public policy does not insist on trickle-down economics. It is not enough for the economy to grow, if a minority is going to keep the biggest profits.
However, this way of seeing the world is still common for many people. It is not strange, then, that the winning political speeches in Latin America insist on measures of greater liberalization of the economy, arguing that we cannot drown with taxes and regulations the true wealth creator. Thus, the promise of more jobs (no matter of what kind) is enough to relax all types of State interference in any economic activity, even if it is an extractive activity that leaves little work and value.
If the Gilets Jaunes tell us something to Colombians today, it is that paradise cannot be bought. I know, it’s funny to say it after listening to them talk about how they get frustrated each month just to be able to go out once to McDonald’s, or how they would like to to buy more and better things. The incoherencies of the movement cannot be denied, they have been asking “to consume at a low price, but to fight against globalization; develop the local, but favor long journeys; to congregate in a group without renouncing to the individual use of the car “as Michel Maffesoli said. We can fall, like Macron, into simplistic solutions of promising an increase in purchasing power, but this will not stop being a short-term measure if a much deeper problem of political inequality, the result of economic inequality, is not solved. In addition, will the planet endure the strategy of silencing the popular classes with consumerism?
The American anthropologist David Graeber recently wrote an essay on the growing bureaucratization of society, especially of companies (yes, the alternative to large and unsustainable States). In it, a simple and powerful sentence condenses the argument about how bullshit jobs collide brutally with the search for meaning: “… the pleasure at being the cause, that is the very foundation of our being “. In response, probably we will encounter with a universalistic and pragmatic discourse condemning such idealism: we are, after all, rational beings that seek to maximize their own utility, there is no more meaning than this. But this is the illusion that technocratic governments continue to act in. In real life, tensions of irrationality (or, say, desperate quests for meaning) accumulate and explode in many ways. Today the tragedy is that the most promising channel for them is the political narrative of hate and exclusion.
Is the State the problem?
The current context makes it inevitable to draw a comparison with the populisms of the 1930s. After a world crisis, politicians emerged with a simplistic but popular explanation of the world. The hate and exclusion of the ‘enemy’ became their cohesive force. Today we cannot deny the crisis, nor the populisms. It is an economic crisis, for some, but ecological and social for all. It is a context of change, precariousness and inequality, founded on the forces that has unleashed the entry of the new paradigm of digital technology (globalization and financialization), and the consequences of the previous paradigm of mass production (especially the exhaustion of the planetary capacity). Carlota Pérez’s technology cycles model is probably the most recognized framework for understanding the situation we are going through. She explains that the recent political-economic history occurs in cycles of around 50–60 years marked by technological revolutions. Every technological revolution consists of two phases, one of installation that usually ends with a financial crisis, after passing through decades of domination of finance and creative destruction, disrupting the paradigm of the moment and creating real social tensions. But there is a second phase of deployment that marks a period of maturity and appropriation of technology. It allows extending its benefits to the rest of society through the construction of new institutions, until a new technological paradigm arrives and starts a new cycle.
The old paradigm of mass production is in jeopardy because it has reached the planetary limit (both by the emission of greenhouse gases, and by the depredation of biodiversity) and because, given the new economic dynamics that the digital paradigm has brought, it is increasingly difficult to sustain welfare states and the ‘organizational man’ model. The last two financial crises of 2000 and 2009 have marked the end of the period of installation of the digital paradigm. The argument, taken to a new level by Nicolas Colin in his book Hedge, is that we will continue in a state of crisis unless we build a “new safety net” (or welfare state 2.0) capable of dealing with new forms of production and using them for benefit of all. It is the moment of a forceful public action with a mission that reconciles the economy of innovation with the environmental crisis and social exclusion.
However, there is an obstacle. From the decade of Reagan and Thatcher, the idea that the State is the problem has grown extensively. The influence of rational choice theory, together with its son, public choice theory, have produced a withdrawal of the State from many areas of society. Its role should be limited to solving market failures and regulating some sectors, because, they say, the market is more efficient in allocating resources. The story has been so successful, that today we believe that the technological revolution we are living is the product of innovative geniuses who fought to achieve their dreams thanks to their incredible private initiative. Their great fortunes are the reward for the value they have given to society. Of course, that idea has been refuted.
Is it possible to build the deployment phase with a State that only appears to solve problems? What the Gilets Jaunes tell us is that the State only appears to solve market failures, such as climate change, with taxes that place a bigger burden on a sector of the population that already bears the externalities of the urban development model of the old paradigm. Clearly there is an absence of mission, both in the State and society. There is a clamor for leadership, we have huge problems in the world to which people want to devote their energy. Like the Gilets Jaunes, they are willing to abandon their situation in the quest for meaning. Will our sole response be to intervene only to increase the power of consumption?
This time the situation is difficult and virtuous for developing countries. They cannot look for solutions in developed countries, but the institutional innovation that is required can find a relative advantage in underdevelopment, especially in the lack of installed capacity based on fossil fuels. However, inequality and the absence of technological capabilities and knowledge will remain a challenge that can only be faced with a different vision of development.
A principle is to start by changing the conception we have about innovation and the generation of economic value, from one based on individual initiative, to one that recognizes that they are collective constructions in which companies, the State, civic associations or universities play an important role. If history has shown us something (I recommend this work by Mariana Mazuccato and this one by Bill Janeway) is that technological progress has gone hand in hand with a mission traced by State. Wars, generally, have marked the course, mainly because they allow to invest large amounts of money without having to pass the cost-benefit filter.
Today developing countries face the typical models of urban growth, poverty alleviation and public austerity. As its inhabitants, we ask if we will continue waiting for them to generate the miracle that the developed countries are not even living. We cannot remain apathic to the growing calls to mobilize the political and economic will of States towards the war against climate change and the caring economy, especially when we preserved an enormous biological and cultural wealth. It is a decisive moment. As they say in Bogota, “change or fear?”
[1] “All sectors in which the work routine is constantly broken by frequent and direct interactions with customers — be it in retail, hospitality, education, healthcare, personal care, or last-mile logistics. Because these sectors never become truly routine, the tasks performed by their workers are difficult to standardize and optimize through scientific management”, p. 91, Colin, “Hedge, a Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age”.
This post was written for the course History of Technology Revolution at Sciences Po Paris. The course is part of the policy stream Digital & New Technology of the Master in Public Policy and is instructed by Laurène Tran, Besiana Balla and Nicolas Colin.
