Chapter

The Dissident Knights of Professor Walras, or Economic Droit de Seigneur

EXCERPT

One of the consequences of the very good health of the American economy…is that the financial world and the stock market are getting worried.
Le Monde, September 19, 1994

For less than 100,000 francs a month, you can only get imbeciles.
A banker, cited by Claude Julien, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1995

If he were to have visited the Great Campus or one of its scale models, the Great Yoghurt-Maker of Singapore, Monsieur Prudhomme may have been worried: ‘Haven’t my postindustrial great-grand-nephews killed the goose who laid the golden eggs?’ Monsieur Prudhomme is quite right: in a state of perfect competition, there is no longer any competition, and the promise of a ‘purely informational’ world of thermostat-citizens is a phantasm just as puerile as the perpetual motion machine!…