Play for time
We should have asked for an effort of solidarity from this generation to cushion the financial shock to come. Beyond the failure of multiple attempts at reform considered socially unacceptable (by present generations), we remember the disastrous fate of the only serious attempt at intergenerational solidarity in this area, the Pension Reserve Fund.
The climate bears the same stigma. To stay below a 2°C rise, everyone should have made a lot more effort to decarbonize over the past thirty years, but we preferred to play for time. This will force us to make considerable sacrifices in the next thirty. It is again the social unacceptability of any climate policy involving sacrifices that has prevailed.
Work and free time
Without the right to vote for future generations, democracy is a dictatorship of the present. Our political system is fundamentally incapable of making the right intertemporal trade-offs, even if this system is the “least worst” of all. Intratemporal trade-offs are just as complex to perform in this system.
What does working for the common good mean today? We cannot define this concept without putting value on what is dear to us. The examples of pensions and the climate illustrate this perfectly. Our collective dilemmas are full of redistributive issues that tend to hide equally fundamental issues.
In the pension reform, the real subject is that of the relative values of work and free time. Working more means creating more prosperity and more wealth, which can be used to pay a salary, but also to finance our schools, our hospitals and our energy transition, for example.
Private interests and common good
Do we want to turn the large improvements in life expectancy of the past decades into more purchasing power and prosperity or more leisure? Ideally, everyone should decide this very personal question, but the multiple redistributive mechanisms of our pension system prevent a proper alignment of private interests with the common good.
In my December column on motorway speed, I used a value of time equal to the hourly productivity of work, which is 70 euros in France. Let me suggest that, for most of us, the value of an hour of free time is less than that.
Benefit and social cost
This suggests that working more in France has a social benefit greater than its social cost. I know so many teachers, nurses, lawyers or agronomists whose retirement represents a disaster for the country. The essential debate on the compensation of the losers of the reform and the means of keeping seniors in work should not burden this collective reality. In this same text, I also mentioned the carbon value, which I estimate at around 170 euros per tonne of CO2. This means that I advocate for all decarbonization actions that collectively cost less than this value.
In an answer on Challenges.fr, my colleagues Couppey-Soubeyran and Ekeland believe on the contrary that this value is infinite, which means that we should be ready to sacrifice everything to save the climate. The “yellow vests” will appreciate. By refusing to put a value on carbon, these two scientists reject the collective least-cost approach to decarbonization strategies.
Anti-capitalism hors sujet
They therefore ignore the fundamental problem of the social acceptability of our climate policies. By confusing the notions of value and price, it is easy for them to ideologize the debate with an irrelevant anti-capitalist pirouette. The search for the common good obliges us to value the impacts of policies on people’s well-being in order to compare the social costs with the social benefits, with a view to prioritizing our collective priorities.
Read alsoPension reform: why involving pensioners is not so simple
The impossibility of debating pensions or the climate also comes from the refusal to put on the table a system of values on which we could build consensus. But the battle is not lost: Europe has just set a value of 45 euros per tonne of CO2 for all emissions from mobility and residential in the Union. It’s too little, but it has the merit of existing!