For more than two centuries, economic debate has revolved around three words presented as self-evident truths: labor, finance and growth.
Labor is supposedly the source of all wealth. Finance supposedly provides the capital needed for investment. Growth supposedly guarantees collective progress. These three claims form a kind of shared dogma, a common grammar for political currents that disagree on almost everything else. You can be on the left or the right, socialist, Keynesian or liberal: at the very least, everyone agrees to worship these three pillars.
Question any one of them, and you are immediately accused of wanting to destroy the economy. The vocabulary itself betrays this sacred status: we speak of "defending jobs," of "reassuring the markets," of "returning to growth." So many phrases that treat means as if they were ends in themselves — deities to be appeased.
Yet this Holy Trinity rests on a fundamental confusion.
Labor is not an end. Finance is not wealth. Growth is not progress.
They are merely means for bringing about a certain kind of society. Or rather, for maintaining a certain social order. Paradigmatic blindness and this social order sustain one another.
This sentence sounds trivial. It is in fact the pivot of the entire argument. For a means and an end do not obey the same rules. A means is judged by its ability to produce a result; the moment a better means appears, we abandon it without regret. An end, by contrast, is pursued for its own sake. To confuse the two is to condemn oneself to defending instruments that have become useless, and to sacrificing the very goals they were meant to serve. That is exactly what our economy does.
Labor is not an end
No one dreams of working more.
In theory, we work to satisfy needs: to feed ourselves, house ourselves, care for ourselves, to learn, create, love, protect our environment. Labor is the path, never the destination. If a technology makes it possible to obtain the same result with half the labor, that is, logically, progress. The time thus freed could be devoted to something else: to care, to creation, to relationships, or simply to rest.
And yet our system often treats the disappearance of a job as a catastrophe, even when that disappearance results from an improvement in productivity.
We have ended up defending labor rather than what it makes possible.
This contradiction is not irrational. It has a structural cause. In our societies, access to goods and services runs almost exclusively through income, and income runs almost exclusively through employment. To lose one's job is therefore not to lose an occupation: it is to lose one's right of access to material existence. What threatens people is not automation itself, but the weld between the distribution of wealth and wage employment.
This weld produces a perverse effect. Since income depends on employment, it becomes rational to preserve employment for its own sake — even when its real usefulness fades. We then multiply activities whose only function is to keep the distribution circuit turning: administrative tasks that justify themselves, procedures that burden more than they protect, jobs created to occupy rather than to produce. We defend the means against the end, the instrument against its object.
The problem, then, is not moral. It is not about people who love to work too much, nor about laziness to be fought. It is about an architecture that mechanically ties individual survival to the existence of a job, and that thereby turns every liberation of working time into a threat rather than a gain. As long as this architecture endures, full employment will remain a political objective, when it should be only one means among others in the service of a higher end: that everyone may live in dignity.
A discourse on alimentary servitude
You may be an excellent hunter: but if all the hunting grounds have become the property of a few owners, all you will be able to do from now on is sign a contract to earn the means of your subsistence. From then on, you will no longer take a beast now and then for the needs of your own household, but slaughter as many as possible to enrich someone else's trade.
When direct access to vital resources disappears in favor of a regime of exclusive property, everyone is forced to sell their labor power to gain access to what nature once provided directly. The labor contract then becomes less a choice than a condition of access to subsistence. This economic dependence constitutes one of the structural foundations of capitalism.
The right word can then be spoken: this regime, which makes access to life dependent on a contract, is a form of servitude. Not a servitude of law, imposed by force, but a servitude of fact, born of the deprivation of any alternative. The private ownership of vital resources and the capture of the surplus are not its excesses: they are its bedrock.
Finance is not wealth
Financial markets give the impression that wealth is created by money itself. Prices rise, portfolios swell, fortunes are made and unmade in seconds. Everything unfolds as if value were born from the circulation of capital.
In reality, no euro feeds a person, builds a house, or grows a tree. Money is only an information system that makes it possible to coordinate human activities. It is a language, a promise, an accounting entry that organizes who owes what to whom. A language cannot be eaten; a promise shelters no one. Real wealth is harvests, housing, care, knowledge, healthy ecosystems — not the figures that claim to represent them.
When finance becomes an end in itself, it ends up diverting resources toward speculation rather than toward the satisfaction of real needs. The economy then places itself at the service of financial balance sheets instead of serving society. We have seen it in every major crisis: colossal sums circulate, appreciate, change hands, without a single house being built or a single sick person healed.
This reversal has an internal logic. A financial asset is never anything but a claim: a demand upon future production. As long as these claims remain proportionate to what the real economy can actually produce, all is well. But when they accumulate far beyond it, finance does not create wealth: it creates pressure. Pressure to extract more, faster, in order to honor ever more numerous promises of return. Claims demand their due, and that due is paid in matter, in dissipated energy, in labor, in living world consumed.
One point that is rarely stated must be added. Finance, as it is designed, knows how to value only one thing: what produces marketable revenue. An activity that earns money is financeable; an activity that is indispensable but does not earn money becomes, in the eyes of the system, economically invisible. This is not a moral failing of financiers. It is the direct consequence of an instrument that possesses only one rule of measurement. We will return to this blindness, for it lies at the heart of the paradox of our age.
Growth is not progress
GDP adds up expenditures. It does not distinguish spending that repairs damage from spending that genuinely improves our quality of life.
An oil spill raises GDP. A climate disaster raises GDP. An epidemic raises GDP.
Each time a disaster triggers spending on cleanup, reconstruction or care, national accounting records it as activity, and therefore as a gain. GDP measures the intensity of monetary flows, not well-being or the health of ecosystems.
One may recall Frédéric Bastiat's metaphor: a broken window will make the fortune of the glazier who replaces it. But what are we to make of a market economy that no longer knows what to invent in order to justify its own reason for being? Of an economy that creates problems in order to sell solutions?
Seeking growth for its own sake amounts to confusing the odometer with the journey. We have invented for ourselves a social dynamic in which labor has been elevated into a truth. The active person is glorified, the idle one despised. In this context, the relevance of your actions or their consequences for the environment hardly matters. To do and to produce: such is our destiny. To do for the sake of doing, even when there is nothing worth doing… To produce for the sake of producing, even when there is nothing worth producing.
It hardly matters that we create false needs to lure our desires, or false fears to lure our emotions. It hardly matters that we murder fertile soils in order to sell chemical seeds. It hardly matters that we murder the free natural in order to sell the lucrative artificial. It hardly matters that wars feed the arms trade, that diseases sustain the care industry, that false needs stimulate consumption, or that the destruction of the living opens up new markets: as soon as monetary flows increase, GDP records growth.
It hardly matters whether what we produce is useful or absurd, so long as the market runs and finance prospers.
Considering that nature, providing its treasures free of charge, constitutes unfair competition, a commercial shortfall, we will then seek to privatize it, as we did with water. Perhaps one day we will also have to pay for the air we breathe?
GDP is a flow meter, and a meter is blind to direction, to morality, to ethics. It records with equal value a hospital bill and a casino bill, so long as both pass through money. Above all, it is blind to stocks and to the nature of flows: it ignores the natural and social capital consumed to produce the flow it celebrates. A country can grow its GDP while liquidating its forests, its soils, its aquifers — recording the sale as income, without ever entering anywhere the erasure of the asset.
This logic must be pushed to its conclusion. A flow meter does not measure what exists, but what passes. GDP does not record a stock of wealth: it records a throughput — the speed at which money circulates from hand to hand over a period. The same euro that changes owner ten times is counted ten times; a thousand-year-old forest that is never exchanged counts for nothing. Strictly speaking, then, GDP does not measure wealth: it measures a velocity of monetary circulation. To confuse the one with the other is to mistake agitation for prosperity.
It is hard to imagine the number of absurd, useless and polluting things that human beings compel themselves to produce in the name of social success and to the glory of GDP.
This is where the confusion between growth and progress becomes dangerous, and not merely misleading. For growth, understood as the continuous increase in the flows of matter and energy transformed, runs into physical limits. One cannot extract, produce and dissipate indefinitely in a finite world. Progress, by contrast — better health, more knowledge, regenerated ecosystems, richer social bonds, more free time — knows no such ceiling. Nothing forbids improving the quality of a life without end; everything forbids increasing without end the tonnage we burn.
To produce false wealth, we destroy the priceless!
Confusing the two condemns us to pursue precisely the magnitude that runs into a wall, while neglecting the one that runs into none. We measure what passes through the cash register, and we call it progress. The journey, meanwhile, unfolds elsewhere: in everything the meter cannot see.
This confusion between means and ends does not affect only one particular domain of the economy. It reproduces itself at every level of its organization. Labor ceases to be a means of securing a dignified life and becomes a political objective. Finance ceases to be a means of coordinating resources and becomes a speculative end. Growth ceases to be one indicator among others and becomes the ultimate goal of public policy. Three different domains, one and the same logical inversion.
What ought to be at the center
The economy ought to pursue a far simpler objective: to preserve the conditions of society's existence while durably improving the quality of life.
Labor, money, credit, markets and even growth ought to be judged solely by their capacity to attain this objective. When they contribute to it, we keep them. When they cease to contribute to it, we reform them. It is the most elementary rule there is — the one we apply to any tool.
This proposition is in no way a moral demand. It asks no one to be virtuous. It asks only that we change our criterion: that we judge our economic institutions by their function, and not by themselves. A hammer is judged by its capacity to drive nails; we do not worship it, we do not defend "the hammer in general." And yet we have kept our economic instruments — labor, finance, growth — while forgetting the function they were meant to fulfill. We have turned them into ends, and then hoisted them onto the altar of cultural and social morality.
To put the objective back at the center is simply to bring the means back down to their proper rank. Not to abolish labor, finance or growth, but to stop worshiping them — and to regain the freedom to reform them the moment they turn against what they were meant to serve.
Changing the compass
Our era does not suffer from a lack of work. It suffers from a lack of financing for what is indispensable yet barely profitable: prevention, the restoration of ecosystems, the commons, the resilience of territories, and the upkeep of the living world.
Work (in potential) becomes a job (in actuality) only when profitability is possible. But not everything that is essential is necessarily profitable, and not everything that is profitable is necessarily essential. It is precisely here that we must reprogram the compass.
The paradox deserves to be stated plainly. We have millions of available hands and millions of tasks essential to our collective survival. And yet we fail to connect the ones to the others. Not for lack of needs, not for lack of hands, but because those tasks do not generate the marketable revenue that our financial system requires before it will agree to finance them.
We have built a system in which finance knows how to remunerate only what produces marketable revenue. Everything else becomes economically invisible. To restore a soil, prevent an illness, tend a forest, keep a body of knowledge alive: all vital activities, yet ones that release no profitable monetary flow, and that therefore slip out of the field of what the economy is able to see and to finance.
We must take the full measure of what this means. The essential is not insolvable by nature. A restored soil is worth infinitely more than what it costs to restore; an illness prevented spares sums far greater than those of prevention. What makes the essential "insolvable" is not its real value: it is a particular monetary and financial architecture, incapable of recognizing a value that does not immediately translate into marketable revenue. In other words, the insolvability of the essential is not a fatality of nature. It is a fact of design.
And what has been designed can be re-designed.
The real question
Perhaps it is time to reverse the logic.
The question is no longer: "How can we create ever more growth?" That question assumes settled what is not — that growth is the goal, and not one of the means. It locks us into the worship of a meter.
The real question is: "How can we design a money and a finance capable of durably preserving the conditions of human prosperity?"
Dismantling the Holy Trinity destroys nothing. It finally renders visible what it was masking: that labor, finance and growth were never worth anything in themselves, but only through what they made possible. In ceasing to treat them as ends, we do not renounce the economy — we set it right side up. We restore its original vocation, which was never to keep meters spinning, but to preserve the conditions of a good life on a habitable planet.
What then remains is the real work: that of designing instruments equal to this objective.
For two centuries, we believed that labor, finance and growth were the foundations of prosperity. In reality, they are only its instruments. And when a civilization begins to worship its instruments instead of its objectives, it always ends up destroying what it claimed to protect. The real challenge of the 21st century is therefore not to produce more, but to give the means back their rightful place, so that the economy may once again become what it should never have ceased to be: the art of durably organizing the conditions of life.
Jean-Christophe Duval