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NON-FICTION | ECONOMY

After the success of Our Economic Mythologies, Éloi Laurent, one of the most read French economists, openly goes through appearances in order to demonstrate in details the deep crisis hitting cooperation.

We are seemingly living in a communication and collaboration golden age. Thanks to the digital revolution, we are connected to everything, all the time, and collaborative work is the obvious choice everywhere from school to the professional market. However, what is cooperation? It is this collective power that allowed us to map space and then fly to the Moon, to classify animals and plants throughout the planet and to decipher the human genome… And cooperation is in crisis. In this case, can we trust humanity?

To understand this current crisis, this book clarifies in a distinctive way the fundamental difference between cooperation and collaboration. If, on one hand, collaboration is an effective way todivide work in order to increase productivity and wealth, cooperation, on the other hand, isn’t limited to the achievement of one joint endeavor: cooperation is the unleashed quest of shared knowledge, which coordinates our social world and, above all, allows innovation.

Brisk and smooth, this book lays the foundation for an honest and brave reflection on economy and society, and offers three paths to restore cooperation.

In a few words…

Today, cooperation is eaten up by collaboration: in schools, where the systematic use of evaluation confines the young minds in a performing habit; in the work place, where collaborative management smothers workers’ independence; in the research and science fields, where all kinds of classifications and financial returns are now expected. The danger is obvious: hyper-collaborative societies, edgy but instable, are announcing the end of the cooperative spirit.

Éloi Laurent, one of the best contemporary economic analysts, is an economist, member of the OFCE, a professor at Sciences Po- Paris, at Sanford University and at Harvard. He has already published The Bright Future of the Welfare State and the very-well received Our Economic Mythologies, among others.