SECTION 3
FOR ENGLISH-SPEAKING INTERNAUTS
"Streetsmart" - "Crisis and Beyond"
This website - Nouvelle Societe - is in French. If you are only moderately
fluent with this language, you may be tempted to peruse the short "Textes
de vulgarisation" of Section 1, offering practical solutions to some
of the most frustrating social problems that our society has to cope with.
Interested you may be, but you may not feel like struggling through dozens
of texts in French, to find the one which would be of special interest to
you. You will find in STREETSMART one-paragraph
summaries of each one. The English titles are not a literal translation,
but an attempt to convey the colloquial tone of the French version.
&laqno;CRISIS AND BEYOND» was written in the Seventies and published
in 1987. At the time, most economists were convinced that there was nothing
more to steadily growing unemployment than the competition from developing
countries. The situation, they thought, would soon correct itself... It
did not.
This optimistic view does not prevail anymore. Indeed, it can be said that
Rifkin's &laqno;The End of Work» has nailed the coffin for this simplistic
view of the work crisis. Maybe the time has come to have a second look at
the phenomenon of growing unemployment worldwide, to find its real cause
and to propose a solution.
If I were to write CRISIS AND BEYOND today, I would
certainly make some changes. The downfall of the U.S.S.R, whose might used
to put a check on the unbridled domination of the American establishment,
turned the "swing of the pendulum" to the Right - which I foresaw
as a brief interlude - into something more permanent ... and makes a social
meltdown all the more plausible.
I would certainly like to make some changes to this book, but short of a
total revamping of it - (which I may undertake, still, but for which I have
no time now) - I thought it might be better to leave it alone than to introduce
minor and unsatisfactory modifications. So, what yo have here is the 1987
version of a document which was mostly written a decade earlier. I believe,
though, that it still provides food for thought.
Little effort has been spent to beautify this site. Therefore, the serious
reader is invited to download the material for easier reading.
All comments will be received gratefully and acknowledged.
Pierre JC Allard
