Towards an Economy for Coming of Age
and Paying People to Learn
Working English translation — draft 124
This essay is part of a journey that was not built alone.
To Fernand Pelloutier, who understood that emancipation could not come from work alone, but also from shared knowledge, and that understanding is already a form of liberation.
To André Bergeron, who brought to light the invisible mechanisms of the “taxing machine” and contributed, without formulating it in these terms, to shifting our perspective towards an economy based on human energy.
To Dr Mathieu Lacambre, who, by opening a path towards narratives through Bruno Bettelheim, made it possible to reconnect what is too often kept separate: economics, the psyche, and anthropological structures.
These influences do not indicate a model to be followed.
They remind us of a requirement.
To understand what we are doing before what we are doing ultimately escapes our control.
For a civilization is not lost only through a lack of wealth.
It is lost when it no longer understands what keeps it alive, nor what constitutes the real source of that life.
This essay proposes a complete re-examination of the foundations of contemporary economics, beginning with a simple observation: all wealth derives from human energy, whether mobilized directly or extended through machines.
From this premise, often obscured by monetary and financial constructions, the book develops a central hypothesis: the current organization of the economy rests on a confusion between the representation of wealth — money — and its reality — the human capacity to produce.
This confusion has led societies to organize themselves around monetary scarcity, making access to life — food, housing, healthcare — an indirect consequence of access to work and income.
The Joule Model proposes a shift in this framework:
guaranteeing vital functions outside prices;
refocusing production on its material reality;
transforming money into an instrument of organization rather than a condition of existence;
and placing learning once again at the heart of social organization.
The originality of the essay lies in its multidisciplinary approach.
It draws on anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, economics, and complex systems theory to shed light on the human mechanisms underlying economic structures.
Far from presenting an abstract model, the text relies on concrete orders of magnitude and proposes a renewed reading of fundamental concepts: work, value, capital, production, and social protection.
One of the book’s major contributions is to show that, in contemporary societies, real productive capacity — measurable in human and machine energy — greatly exceeds accumulated masses of capital, thereby calling into question the central role attributed to capital in economic organization.
Within this framework, capital no longer appears as a prerequisite for production, but as an accumulation resulting from it.
This reversal leads to a profound reconsideration of the role of institutions:
the bank becomes an organ for organizing capacities;
the stock market becomes a tool for directing activity;
savings become a reserve of security rather than a lever for enrichment.
But the essay is not limited to an economic proposal.
It forms part of a broader reflection on the evolution of human societies in the face of their growing technological power.
In a world where material production depends increasingly less on human labour, the central question becomes cognitive: how does a society learn to understand what it produces?
The project of “Paying People to Learn” is not merely one educational policy among others.
From this perspective, it constitutes a function of civilizational stability.
The book proposes neither a utopia nor a ready-made model.
It seeks to make visible mechanisms that often remain implicit and to open a space for reflection on the conditions required for an economic organization compatible with the real capacities of contemporary societies.
It is addressed to a broad readership: citizens, decision-makers, economic and social actors, and anyone wishing to question the foundations of the system in which they live.
We are stardust.
The human being is the emerging consciousness of matter.
In the human being, the universe seeks to understand itself.
Understanding what we make possible first requires understanding what we are.
We come from stardust. Hubert Reeves said: “I was told: you are nothing but ashes and dust. They forgot to tell me that it was stardust.” From that origin arises the human condition.
As a being of matter and consciousness, the human being seeks to understand the world and to find a place within it. Yet that understanding remains fragmentary: between myth and science, between belief and knowledge, humanity tries to establish a link between its cosmic origin and its collective destiny.
The human being is the emerging consciousness of matter. In us, nature observes and questions itself. But observation is not enough. We must understand, learn, and transmit.
Since the first spark of life, the universe has pursued a slow work of memory. Each generation inherits the knowledge of those before it and adds its own. Human history is written in this way: not as a simple succession of lives, but as an accumulation of knowledge, a weaving of thought, a slow rise of consciousness.
Yet knowledge erodes when it ceases to be transmitted. It becomes blurred, rigid, falls back into belief, then dogma, then oblivion. Human beings must therefore do more than merely exist. They must understand what they are, what they do, and why they act.
To learn is to recover the memory of the world. It is to reconnect with the primal forces from which we came. Whoever ceases to learn does not disappear only biologically: something within goes dark; that person gives up the share of consciousness that makes a human being more than a living creature governed by reflexes.
From this requirement came the central idea of this book: to make learning no longer a secondary activity, nor a privilege reserved for a few, but a vital function of civilization. For transmitted knowledge may be the only force capable of containing the instincts of survival and domination that continue to organize the human world. It is also what will allow us to understand that economic forms are not natural givens, but constructions produced by those same mechanisms.
Nothing comes from nothing.
Everything that is proceeds from what has been.
The universe itself is not a fixed state, but movement: a continuous transformation of energy into ever-new forms.
From the first particles to galaxies, from molecules to life, from life to consciousness, something never ceases to unfold: a dynamic of organization, fragile and unstable yet persistent, bringing forth structures able to endure for a time and then transform in turn.
We humans are not outside this process.
We are one particular expression of it: a form of matter that has become capable of looking at itself, telling its own story, projecting itself into the future, doubting, and sometimes choosing.
Our history is not a break with nature.
It is a continuation of nature that we still struggle to experience consciously.
And within that continuation, one thing distinguishes us without removing us from reality: language.
We do not live only in a world of things, but in a world of names. We call “tree” what grows, but the tree we carry within us is not the tree itself: it is a mental form, a compact story, a way of dividing reality so that we can share it, anticipate it, and transmit it.
Through language, conscious matter creates narratives, rules, prohibitions, rights, debts, and values. Through language, something such as “wealth” or “work” can exist — not in nature, but between us.
This prologue begins with an ancient self-evidence: nothing comes from nothing.
Science has placed us back within the cosmos. We now know that we are neither at the centre of the world nor separate from it. Our ancestors populated the heavens with gods; today we know that those heavens are made of matter, energy, and physical laws.
This knowledge can no longer be ignored without consequences. The universe is still in its early stages, and humanity is only a recent and fragile expression of it. To behave as though this had no bearing on the way we live is a mistake.
And if this cosmic knowledge matters, it is also because the cosmos is not merely a backdrop: it transforms. It expands. It changes scale.
That transformation is not external to us: it has settled on Earth in the form of biological evolution and then cultural evolution. In other words, what moves “up there” also moves “here,” and eventually moves “within us.”
Civilizations that succeed one another do not emerge from nothing.
They arise from the limits of those that came before them.
Each time, their forms of organization become inadequate, too violent, too narrow, too dangerous for collective survival. Then, slowly and painfully, other ways of forming society emerge. Oppositions arise.
What we call progress is not a triumphant march.
It is a succession of transitions, often conflictual and sometimes tragic, through which humanity has learned, by trial and error, to contain its own powers a little better over roughly the past 10,000 years.
We can call this simple reality “geo-historical”: our history is never independent of the environment that sustains it. Climate, soils, water, disease, migration, resources, and shocks shape the possibilities of an era.
Human beings often imagine themselves to be the sovereign authors of their civilizations; they are also their products. Geography gives rise to constraints; history tries to answer them; and each answer in turn transforms the environment.
This circle does not stop. We cannot abolish it; we can only learn to read it.
To do so, we use here the neologism “geo-historical,” to make these constraints graspable in the same way that political constraints on the environment are made graspable through geopolitics.
History also teaches us another lesson: civilizations reach an apogee, then decline and collapse because they failed to question themselves in time, remaining attached to systemic powers of domination, as in the past with those rooted in religions, some of which still survive.
Frozen institutions, defensive elites, logics that have become blind to their own consequences: everywhere, the same pattern.
Until now, these collapses were endured as fatalities; they came after the fact, when nothing could any longer be corrected.
But our era introduces a radical novelty: we know. We possess a history our ancestors did not have. We have the means to learn.
We know that civilizations are not eternal.
We know that ours produces systemic risks.
We know that certain dynamics — the race for profit, depletion of resources, technological runaway, growing inequalities — lead to dead ends.
The Last Effort of Reason
Humanity does not move forward in a straight line. It progresses through thresholds, crises, and slow ruptures, often invisible to those living through them, absorbed in their day-to-day lives.
Every civilization believes it has reached a summit, then discovers that the summit is also an edge.
History shows that societies unable to question themselves eventually collapse, not through malice, but through an inability to understand what they have become, enclosed from childhood within their cultural and social stories.
They are not shaped to become adults and attain freedom, but to become another stone in the social edifice already built, within which alienation is experienced as naturally as though it were part of nature itself.
Through the abolition of sacrifices, the end of slavery, the retreat of torture, and the progressive recognition of rights, a fragile but real tendency can be seen: civilizations becoming increasingly humanistic.
Not because human beings become better, but because their institutions slowly try to limit what is most destructive in them — with little success, often replacing bodily suffering with psychological suffering that is emotionally less visible.
All attempts at religious, philosophical, or political solidarity have traced a humanitarian path that states, in their conflictual relations, have failed to preserve, stockpiling means capable of destroying humanity and the living world beyond their humanistic discourse — discourse that can sometimes be hypocritical in the mouths of those who possess such means.
But we must also look at the other side, more material and more brutal: the appearance of organized scarcity.
When agriculture becomes established, when stocks become possible, territory becomes a stake. Food no longer depends only on hunting or gathering; it depends on soil, season, and protection.
Human beings then discover that they can lose what they have produced — and that they can also take what others have produced.
Technology follows: extracting, smelting, forging. Copper, then alloys, harden violence into tools. The blade does not create domination, but it makes domination durable.
War ceases to be an accident: it becomes a method.
Kingdoms rise, empires expand, and peoples become “resources” for other peoples.
Nothing comes from nothing: capitalism does not appear by magic. It is the distant heir to this long economy of extraction, plunder, and protection paid for through submission.
And yet there is no reason here to judge our history as though we stood outside it. Everyone does what they believe they must do, just as we do today, caught within what seems self-evident to us.
The difference is that we possess what they did not: archaeologists, historians, researchers. We know where we come from.
We can therefore measure a trajectory instead of enduring it as fate.
Throughout this journey, religions and narratives have occupied a structuring place.
When ignorance is immense and fear omnipresent, human beings seek a meaning that keeps them standing: they create gods, entrust their hopes to a beyond, organize duties and prohibitions, and turn the invisible into a social bond.
Cosmogonic narratives — Genesis, but also the stories of other worlds, other continents, and other traditions — are not only explanations of the world: they are architectures of cohesion, ways of soothing terror and containing violence.
Even as the West becomes secular, these structures continue to act: elsewhere through Islam, through Eastern philosophies, through African tales, through centuries-old forms of wisdom, and everywhere in new forms — ideologies, political myths, narratives of success, promises of economic salvation.
Human beings never stop telling stories about themselves. They only change language.
And so long as they tell those stories without understanding what determines them, they may serve their own domination while believing they are fighting it.
Why could such an obvious fact remain invisible for so long?
Because human beings do not spontaneously think in terms of global mechanisms. They think in narratives, roles, and immediate situations.
As long as survival is at stake, they think first with the archaic brain: the brain of preservation and urgency, commonly referred to as the “reptilian” brain.
A job, a wage, visible protection are enough to calm this urgency, this sense of lack. As long as the system holds, as long as it guarantees a vital minimum, it is not questioned.
The fear of losing what was painfully won prevents people from analysing the deeper structure.
Domination changes its mask, but not its mechanism.
It can take the form of the tyrant, king, emperor, caste, lord, oligarchy, bureaucracy, monopoly, rent, debt, or economic dependence.
And on the side of the dominated, it can take the form of slavery, serfdom, servitude, domestic service, assignment to a fixed place, and today more diffuse forms: endured wage labour, precarity, forced competition, the obligation to sell oneself in order to gain access to the means of existence.
This is not “evil” embodied: it is a form of organization born of fear and scarcity, hardened by technology, and stabilized by narratives.
This biological limitation is reinforced very early by family and social education.
From childhood onward, we learn words without learning the mechanisms they cover: “work,” “earn a living,” “contribute,” “be protected.”
These words are transmitted as natural self-evidences, never as historical constructions.
We are not taught that protection has a price.
We are not taught that it is financed by activity itself.
We learn to enter a role, not to read the structure.
In this context, capitalism prospered because it spoke directly to this archaic part of the human being.
It promised an individual escape route: become rich, become a millionaire, rise above the common condition, escape ordinary life.
It mattered little that this promise was statistically out of reach for the majority; it was enough to sustain belief in the system.
The system did not present itself as a mechanism for capturing wealth, but as an opportunity offered to everyone.
Yet some thinkers understood.
The most universal of them was Karl Marx.
He identified labour as the source of wealth, understood exploitation, surplus value, and dispossession. He tried to think through a fairer model.
But he remained constrained by the limits of his time. In correcting capitalism, he reconstructed models in which the State became the central organizer of redistribution, without succeeding in making the source of wealth readable, simple, and indisputable to everyone.
Labour remained central, but understanding of the mechanism remained theoretical, reserved for a few.
Long before him, Étienne de La Boétie had already perceived the heart of the problem: tyrants do not endure through force alone, but because people themselves participate in their own domination, through habit and fear.
He spoke of the “old man,” of animal instinct.
Today, we speak of the archaic brain. The mechanism is the same: as long as fear governs, intelligence abdicates.
A humanity governed by fear does not understand the systems it produces; it adapts to them, survives within them, but does not know how to read them.
Fairy tales, which we think of as being intended for children, nevertheless tell precisely this story: passages from one age of life to another.
They describe worlds ruled by fear, magic, and submission, until the moment when the hero understands what had been acting in their place.
The economic history of humanity can be read in the same way: as the story of an unfinished maturity.
We have produced wealth without succeeding in reading it.
We have financed our protection without understanding how.
And we have been able to be dispossessed of what we produced while still believing that the system was functioning.
The aim is not to frighten, but to make tangible the consequences of primitive selfishness in a world that has become complex.
Individually, many of us will die before these risks are fully realized. After all, dying is our common destiny.
But we possess consciousness.
And that consciousness can judge a future of destruction to be acceptable, or unacceptable.
If we consider such an outcome a matter of indifference, then consciousness no longer has a function: all that remains is to give instinct free rein.
The “reptilian” brain, with neither past nor future, seeks to dominate without knowing that it is condemning itself.
It is upon this part of us that the capitalist narrative has long relied: the individual promise of power, accumulation, and victory over others.
To say this is not to fantasize; it is to describe an ancient anthropological mechanism.
Capitalism has perfected a systemic form of exploitation: one in which the dominant satisfy their mechanisms of self-preservation by protecting what they have acquired, while others also seek a dominant position, even if it is illusory.
For centuries, human societies have sought to free themselves from domination.
This domination has taken many forms: brute violence, exploitation of labour, dispossession, arbitrariness.
Throughout the world, women and men have risen up to demand more than survival: dignity.
The red flag became the international symbol of these struggles. It belongs neither to one country nor to one regime.
It has flown wherever peoples believed they were gaining access to freedom, sometimes with lucidity, sometimes with excess, but always against what they perceived as unjust domination.
This flag is not an ideology: it is the trace of a real struggle, often waged in violence, to win elementary rights:
to limit working time;
no longer to die from exhaustion;
to gain access to healthcare;
to protect broken bodies;
to ensure a dignified old age.
These gains were never simply offered; they were won through struggle.
And here an essential distinction becomes necessary: these struggles are not, in the abstract, “one camp” against “another camp.”
They are a movement of maturation, sometimes confused, sometimes violent, sometimes magnificent, through which humanity attempts to prevent force from being the only law.
In this text, the red flag is not a dogma: it is a historical scar, the trace of a real effort to make life less crushing.
And if this resembles an existential threshold, it is because a civilization never changes through calculation alone.
It changes when enough human beings cease to believe that the world as it is is the only possible world.
The Joule Model does not present itself as an invention detached from reality.
It is intended as a hypothesis of transition: an attempt consciously to accompany a possible passage in our civilization, by seeking to direct our powers towards greater pacification, greater responsibility, and greater recognition of what truly constitutes our wealth: human energy.
But nothing guarantees that we will know how to seize this opportunity.
For knowing is not wanting. Understanding is not acting.
The ultimate question may therefore not be: are we capable of transforming our civilization?
But more profoundly: will there be enough human beings who want to do so?
Enough to prefer a conscious transition to a rupture imposed upon us.
Enough to accept losing certain illusory securities in order to avoid very real destruction.
Enough to believe that another way of inhabiting the world is worth the effort of attempting it.
This essay cannot answer that question on behalf of humanity.
It can only contribute to the answer.
By offering words, reference points, and hypotheses, so that those who wish to do so may take hold of them.
After placing our history back within the history of the universe and of civilizations, a simpler, more intimate question imposes itself on the reader: does this text concern me? Does it speak to me? Do I have something to lose or to gain from it?
For, ultimately, it is not great ideas that move the world.
It is ordinary women and men, with their fears, hopes, fatigue, and attachments.
Each person may live in a world where one has to work in order to live, where one has learned that one must “manage somehow,” where one fears falling behind, no longer keeping up, no longer counting.
Perhaps some are doing well. Perhaps you are doing well. Perhaps you are struggling.
Or perhaps you are simply observing, telling yourself that “this is just how it is,” accustomed to a form of resignation, as other human beings in past centuries may have believed that subjection was their natural condition.
Then the first real question becomes: why change?
Not out of a taste for rupture, not out of ideology, but because many people vaguely sense that something is no longer working:
that work wears people down more than it builds them up;
that stress invades lives;
that fear of tomorrow persists despite progress;
that entrenched inequalities create the feeling that we are running without knowing towards what.
To change is not to deny what exists.
It is to recognize that what carried us yesterday may no longer be sufficient today to secure a peaceful future.
Then comes a second question, even more direct: what does this change for me?
Changing the organization of society does not mean changing economic rules alone.
It touches what holds a life together: security, recognition, the feeling of being useful, the dignity of being able to say: I am worth something.
The Joule Model, which this essay proposes to explore, does not promise to make everyone a millionaire.
It proposes something else: no longer having to buy back one’s own life; guaranteeing access to the essential means of existence; recognizing human energy as true individual wealth; and giving a full place to learning, caring, transmitting, and connecting.
For many, this could mean:
living without the permanent anxiety of falling;
no longer confusing survival with obedience;
being recognized without having to be profitable;
having the right to learn and transform oneself throughout life.
And for the powerful of this world, who will not take their fortunes with them, the question may be asked differently:
is it not greater, more lasting, and more prestigious to help lay the foundations for an evolution of humanity?
Wealth is not what we accumulate, but what we make possible for one another.
If we place human history within the deep time of the Earth, one fact becomes clear: our species is extraordinarily young. Only a few hundred thousand years separate us from animality, and barely a few millennia have taken us from caves to cities, from chipped stone to satellites, from tribes to States. At this scale, what we call “civilization” is only an instant. We have not yet learned how to inhabit our own power sustainably.
We operate nuclear power stations, global digital networks, and planetary financial markets with a brain shaped to survive in groups of a few dozen individuals. The disproportion between our technological power and our psychological maturity has become the central fact of our time.
A technological society is not only a more powerful society. It also becomes a more fragile society.
In ancient societies, survival rested on relatively simple forms of knowledge: cultivating, hunting, building shelter, transmitting skills. Such knowledge was widely distributed across the population and could be passed directly from one generation to the next.
As civilizations grow more complex, this situation changes profoundly.
Industrial and technological societies rest on a gigantic accumulation of specialized knowledge: engineering, medicine, energy networks, computer systems, logistical infrastructure, legal institutions, scientific knowledge. No individual can master the whole.
The stability of a civilization therefore comes to depend on a phenomenon that is new in human history: the collective capacity continuously to maintain and renew this knowledge — in other words, to learn.
A technological society does not collapse only through lack of resources. It can collapse through loss of skills, disorganization of knowledge, or inability to transmit what allows its infrastructure to function.
The greater a civilization’s technological power becomes, the more it depends on the continuity of learning.
In other words: a technological society becomes a knowledge society.
And when knowledge ceases to be a living common good, accumulated power turns into fragility.
This is why learning is not a cultural supplement. It becomes a condition of civilizational stability. Even today, 53% of citizens believe that wealth should be taken from the rich and given to the poor, without knowing that in this redistribution, through the accounting organization, the rich would take back from the poor three times more than they had given them.
Human history as a whole can, however, be read as a struggle against scarcity. For tens of thousands of years, survival meant taking, keeping, defending. Appropriation, predation, and fear of shortage were behaviours adapted to a dangerous world. They were not vices: they were vital reflexes.
But these reflexes remained active far beyond their biological necessity. What had been a response to natural scarcity became a cultural model, then a social organization. We built entire societies on the same impulse: take before the other person does, accumulate in order to reassure oneself, dominate in order not to disappear.
Scarcity, initially endured, changed in nature. Increasingly, it became a scarcity of access: access to resources, rights, protection, status, money, recognition. It no longer appears only as a physical limit, but as a social architecture. And when survival depends on abstract mechanisms — prices, employment, status, property — anxiety ceases to be an event: it becomes a climate.
This climate is not spectacular. It is diffuse. It appears in fear of downward mobility, in permanent competition, in the obsession with “holding one’s place.” It establishes a chronic tension that silently influences collective behaviour.
The great Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions attempted to contain these instincts. They named murder, greed, and domination as faults and sought to restrain the animal in the human being. Philosophical traditions pursued the same objective: learning to limit oneself, to know oneself, to transform impulse into conduct. All understood one essential point: the human being is not born human; the human being becomes human.
But no spiritual or philosophical tradition, by itself, could suffice to transform deeply the material structures that sustain anxiety and rivalry. They worked upon consciousness, sometimes magnificently; they could not refound the concrete framework in which the fear of shortage is played out every day. As long as existence depends upon that fear, instinct governs. One may appeal to goodness, reason, and solidarity: the body remains on alert.
History shows that morality advances faster than institutions. Equality can be proclaimed while dependence is organized. Fraternity can be celebrated while competition is structured. This contradiction exhausts individuals and discredits ideals.
It is here that Bruno Bettelheim’s reading becomes valuable. In The Uses of Enchantment, he shows that becoming an adult is not simply a matter of biological growth, but an inner process: learning to give meaning to what passes through us, transforming chaos into narrative, containing violence through understanding. A child does not become an adult by becoming stronger, but by becoming capable of bearing complexity without destroying themselves.
Transposed to the collective scale, this intuition reveals something vertiginous: humanity resembles a powerful adolescent. Not through moral fault, but through historical asymmetry: it possesses immense power, acquired rapidly, and a slow maturation that remains incomplete.
To grow is not to accumulate power. It is to learn to live with it, to limit it, to direct it, and not to confuse it with protection.
A civilization can be technologically adult and psychologically adolescent. It can know how to manufacture thermonuclear weapons and not know how to calm an identity-based rivalry. It can master the atom and fail to master fear.
Théodore Monod already spoke of an unfinished humanity. He called for a slow hominization: not one more technical advance, but an inner maturation of the species. What we are living through today may not be a passing crisis. It may be a delicate moment in this growth: a threshold at which power finally requires a corresponding maturity.
The Joule Model belongs within this perspective. It does not claim to moralize human beings. It does not ask them to be better than they are. It begins from a simple observation: one does not become an adult by injunction. One becomes an adult when the environment ceases to keep the individual in fear. We do not ask a child to master their impulses while leaving them in insecurity; we transform the framework so that they can grow without breaking. The Joule Model is not a rupture against the human being: it is a hypothesis of collective maturation.
It does not propose a moral conversion. It proposes a transformation of the economic framework so that maturity becomes possible rather than heroic.
The survival instinct, often described as “reptilian,” is not an enemy. It is a fundamental biological fact. It protects living beings by seeking to conserve energy, reduce effort, and avoid danger. Without it, no species would endure. The problem is therefore not instinct; the problem is the environment in which it is forced to express itself.
An instinct is neither moral nor immoral. It is adaptive. The environment determines whether it will produce cooperation or predation.
For most of human history, that environment was genuinely hostile. Scarcity was not a social construction: it was a natural fact. Finding food, protecting oneself from cold, escaping predators required rapid, defensive, sometimes violent behaviour. In that context, instinct was adapted.
But with the emergence of organized societies, and later industrial societies, scarcity changed in nature. It became largely cultural: produced, maintained, administered — not in the sense of a conspiracy, but in the sense that access to life depends on human rules: money, prices, rights, employment, status, and no longer only on nature. When access to vital resources depends on abstract mechanisms, instinct shifts: it no longer manifests itself in response to an immediate natural danger, but in response to social constructions that have become threatening because they are not understood.
Losing a job today activates the same biological circuits as losing a territory in a primitive environment. The anxiety is not imaginary: it is physiological.
Losing one’s job, losing one’s income, losing one’s place, losing one’s dignity become biological triggers.
In such an environment, behaviours that would be pathological in a peaceful world become rational: accumulating beyond what is necessary, accepting absurd or harmful tasks, dominating in order not to be dominated, obeying in order not to fall. These are not moral failings. They are biological responses to structural insecurity.
A society can therefore produce violence without being composed of intrinsically violent individuals. It can produce greed without being populated by monsters. It can produce submission without everyone being cowardly. The framework often precedes character.
When existence is suspended from performance, the brain no longer reasons: it survives. And in a prolonged state of survival, thought no longer directs action; it justifies after the fact what instinct has already decided, outside the field of consciousness.
The Joule Model takes this reality into account. It does not seek to correct human beings through morality. It seeks to modify the framework in which human beings live.
The aim is less to transform individuals than to transform the environmental conditions, including interpersonal relations, that make certain behaviours dominant. In effect, it is to redirect the shared capacity for domination towards conditions that do not call upon violence.
There are moments in history when humanity, exhausted by its own conquests, is forced to reinvent the very meaning of its place. After making force the engine of its expansion, then production the measure of its value, it now stands at the threshold of an era in which neither war nor work is sufficient to justify collective effort.
War can no longer serve as a horizon of cohesion without threatening the very existence of the species. Work, for its part, can no longer absorb all human forces without becoming artificial or destructive. The two historical pillars of collective mobilization are wavering.
Automation, the “algorithmization” of tasks, the financialization of exchange, and the commodification of desires have shifted the centre of gravity of our societies. Industrial civilization rested on an implicit moral equation: work in order to live.
This was not only an economic organization, but an everyday metaphysics.
One deserved to exist through usefulness, earned one’s place through effort, and received recognition and rights in proportion to production. This equation made the exploitation of human beings by other human beings bearable by presenting it as a necessity, sometimes even as a virtue.
A wage was not only an income: it was a symbolic legitimation. To be employed meant to be recognized. No longer to be employed meant becoming suspect.
Yet this equation is cracking. The machine, then the algorithm, perform an increasing share of the tasks that once grounded the legitimacy of work, and make employment, as the universal pivot of social integration, increasingly unstable — hence the expression of a broken social elevator.
The economy continues to require human beings to justify themselves through employment, even as technological dynamics and accounting treat human life and employment as costs.
The contradiction becomes brutal: the more technically efficient we become, the less human labour we need, and the more human labour we demand in order to grant the right to exist — what we shall call buying one’s life.
At the same time, society persists in making work the moral condition of existence, not as a necessity in the struggle against scarcity or in order to preserve productive comfort, but in order to establish a measure of national wealth. This contradiction produces disorder: stress, downward mobility, resentment, a permanent battle for places that are becoming scarce in another way.
But the issue is not merely economic; it is anthropological. For millennia, human beings have stood upright through effort: producing to survive, struggling to protect, labouring to deserve a place. Even when alienating, work offered a symbolic framework: a place, a rhythm, a narrative. What becomes of a society when this narrative unravels? What becomes of an individual when recognition is no longer anchored in visible usefulness and existence floats between consumption and competition?
When work ceases to be a foundation, identity becomes fragile. The individual looks elsewhere for proof of existence: in exposure, reaction, opinion, confrontation.
In this void, societies seek substitutes.
For more than a century, growth played a major psychological role: it promised a better future, upward mobility, possible improvement. Even those who suffered could believe that their children would live better. When this promise disappears, a psychological void opens. And this void never remains empty for long, because nature abhors a vacuum.
Deprived of a common project, societies look for culprits. Difficulties become faults. The adverse effects of the world become enemies. Structural causes are no longer examined; visible figures are designated for elimination, scapegoats are identified.
Thus scapegoats reappear: the poor, foreigners, the sick, the marginalized, the “deviant.” Politics then ceases to be an art of collective transformation and becomes a management of fear. The CEVIPOF Political Trust Barometer illustrates this extensively in its studies.
When collective intelligence weakens, simplification imposes itself. Where mechanisms should be analysed, visible people are instead designated as responsible.
“Zero tolerance” replaces judgement, and precaution can turn into exclusion. Recent history has shown that, in an anxious society, proposals once considered unthinkable can return under the guise of protection, such as setting HIV-positive people apart or calling for the return of the death penalty. This shift has a decisive consequence: the dilution of responsibility. We no longer respond through understanding and construction; we respond through tension, reaction, designation.
A civilization that no longer knows why it acts becomes a civilization that reacts.
The hypothesis of this essay is that a way out remains possible, but that it requires a radical shift in the moral foundation of the economy. If material production requires fewer and fewer human forces, then the challenge becomes to produce something else: discernment, lucidity, understanding. In other words: living knowledge, because this is what such a society depends upon.
This shift does not deny material reality. It recognizes that material survival is no longer the only challenge. The challenge becomes cognitive: humanity is no longer confronted with a lack of production, but with a lack of understanding — including the understanding of the complexity of our own existence. In other words, humanity is moving from a problem of production to a problem of understanding.
This shift is not a luxury. It is a civilizational necessity. A humanity deprived of work but also deprived of learning does not enter a new freedom; it falls into a dangerous availability: people consume in order to feel that they exist, react in order to feel alive, abandon themselves to impulses for lack of an inner horizon, and lock themselves into forms of collective hardening without even noticing it — into a process of fascist drift without realizing it, because the environment gradually makes those forms normal, because what such a drift advocates becomes normal within an environment that generates it.
Paying people to learn is not granting a privilege: it is replacing the constraint to produce with the responsibility to understand.
Learning ceases to be preparation for employment. It becomes a function of civilizational stability.
The point is not to eliminate all production; ontological scarcity will not disappear. The point is to transform an economy of subsistence into an economy of knowledge: to make knowledge no longer a competitive advantage, but a vital function of the community.
The aim is to create the conditions for a common intelligence, the only durable barrier against emotional manipulation, regression of judgement, and the return of authoritarian forms.
A society that does not invest in understanding will invest in repression.
Ivan Illich had already reminded us that if the educational institution merely adapts citizens to the market, it produces dependence. It must become a space of permanent emancipation: a place of curiosity, exploration, and questioning, where people learn not only how to do things, but to understand what they are doing. Fernand Pelloutier had preceded him in this field in 1892, as the first secretary of the labour exchanges, working to foster workers’ emancipation.
One further point must be added: learning is a singular activity. It cannot be delegated. It cannot be automated. Nor can it be transferred. It is not exhausted, yet human beings do not naturally acclaim it. By nature and instinct, imitation takes the place of teaching.
Production can be delegated to a machine. Lucidity cannot.
For millennia, human societies have attempted to contain their instincts of rivalry and violence through laws, institutions, religions with practices that have become obsolete, and educational systems that have become insufficient within the time available.
Until now, however, these efforts relied solely on human intelligence itself, with its limits, its contradictions, and all the paradigms that allow it to believe that it has become civilized.
A new situation is now emerging. For the first time in its history, humanity possesses tools capable of helping it analyse its own complexity: artificial intelligence systems.
The recent appearance of these artificial intelligence systems nevertheless introduces an unprecedented situation in human history. These tools are capable of assisting analysis, modelling, and the circulation of knowledge on a scale previously unknown. These systems do not constitute an autonomous intelligence. They are themselves the product of human intelligence accumulated over centuries through discoverers and the work of those who implemented their discoveries: mathematics, science, engineering, languages, and cultures. They extend the past cognitive memory of the human species that their designers have selected and integrated, while developing the capacity to search through it.
But we should not expect artificial intelligence to invent the future, because what it brings back consists of memories that no longer exist except in material traces that have not yet disappeared.
When we write that our existence unfolds around narratives, we mean this in the primary sense of the word: it is impossible for human beings both to recount their existence and to live it in full. This forces us to construct a simplified narrative that may report perhaps about one percent of what we have lived. There are no scientific data establishing such a percentage; we know only that an ordinary human brain makes tens of thousands of decisions each day. While some of these decisions are based on rewards, most belong to the category of intentional decisions, of which those that mark trauma are easier to retain. This impossibility prevents us from living in determinism and facilitates evolution through the forgetting of perhaps 99 percent of our existence. On average, a complete life narrative takes between twelve and eighteen weeks to produce.
Used without discernment, these tools could reinforce mechanisms of domination, manipulation, or surveillance. But oriented towards knowledge, they can also help illuminate collective decisions and make the complex systems on which the stability of societies now depends more accessible to understanding.
The issue goes beyond technical innovation. It concerns a possible stage in human cultural evolution. A species capable of creating artificial intelligence systems faces a choice: use these capacities to perfect old rivalries in the art of war, or mobilize them to understand the world that it has itself made extremely complex.
From this perspective, artificial intelligence can become a tool for collective learning. It does not replace human consciousness, but it can help illuminate the consequences of our actions, spread knowledge, and support the effort of understanding on which the stability of technological societies now depends.
A civilization capable of creating artificial intelligences no longer needs to devote most of its intelligence to preparing for war, to preparing the most effective means of killing one another without pain. It can choose to use this cognitive power to prepare its future, to continue the evolution of its species away from the means of its own self-destruction, and to become, within its geological history, a peaceful “cultural adult.”
As Edgar Morin noted, the “storehouse of unknowing” is inexhaustible: every genuine piece of knowledge enlarges the territory of the unknown. Learning is therefore not merely the accumulation of answers; it is the acquisition of lucidity about our limits, a condition of possible wisdom.
Learning means placing time between impulse and action. It means giving reason an environment in which it can still act.
Paying people to learn means recognizing that understanding has become a vital function, just as producing was in past centuries.
Before organizing institutions, before speaking of the Joule Bank or economic partner income, we must return to something even simpler than economics.
Since the dawn of history, human beings have invented ways of representing value: shells, metals, coins, banknotes, then book money, and so on. This process has always rested on social convention and shared trust.
Money is useful because it performs three essential roles: as a unit of account, as a medium of exchange, and as an imaginary store of value around which people convince themselves of its reality.
But it has no intrinsic value. What a euro, a dollar, or a yen is “worth” is only the result of a collective fiction maintained by power relations, markets, and States. It does not compare life or real effort; it merely translates the accounting and speculative value of production.
GDP per capita creates a simple illusion: that of an average wealth shared by everyone.
But this average corresponds to no lived reality.
Wealth is not produced by “the inhabitants” in general.
It is produced by:
working people who are economically active;
machines resulting from past human work;
and the collective organization that enables them to function.
By dividing this production by the entire population, a concrete reality is transformed into a statistical abstraction.
This calculation conceals two essential facts: not everyone produces in the same way, and not everyone benefits from the wealth produced. And the richest 10% of the inhabitants of our planet own 83% of the world’s wealth.
A significant share of this wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority.
GDP measures a volume.
It measures neither effort, nor justice, nor distribution.
GDP per capita does not describe the wealth of individuals; it describes the average of wealth produced by some and held by others.
GDP per capita transforms a real inequality into an acceptable average.
In everyday life, a human being gets up in the morning and eats.
It matters little what: meat, vegetables, cereals, fruit. The culture, diet, or morality of food does not matter here. What is absorbed is not an opinion. It is energy.
This energy circulates in the blood. It is not political; it feeds the muscles. It enables the brain to function. It maintains body temperature. It enables a person to act, to be alive.
Without energy, there is no work, no thought, no exchange, no civilization.
Now imagine this person going to collect coal. For an hour, he digs, lifts, and carries coal. He sweats. His breathing changes. His muscles burn. At the end, fifty kilograms are there, extracted from the ground.
The question arises: how much is a kilogram worth?
We answer spontaneously: it depends on the market, naturally, because that is what we have been taught since childhood. For each of us, that is how things have always existed.
But before the market, before price, before money, a more primitive reality imposes itself: through his activity, the man’s energy has been transformed into available matter. Every act of his life is transformed energy.
This coal is the result of human energy expenditure. It has no price in itself. Who can say how much it is worth in euros, dollars, yen, or other currencies? If the man wishes to sell it in contemporary money, he must cross the whole history from barter to the present day. It took humanity centuries to establish the value of all the imaginary currencies that appeared through successive struggles.
Why not take food as the unit of measurement? The Aztecs used the bean, after all.
Why not say: one kilogram of coal is worth so many grams of food, carrots, chicken, and so on?
The answer seems simple, but it is decisive.
Because food varies. He could have eaten something else: richer or poorer, more caloric or less caloric, meat-based, vegan, festive, frugal.
If we take food as the standard, the norm becomes unstable. It depends on diet, culture, season, and preferences; it becomes relative and makes it impossible to define a stable standard.
What matters is the energy that his body was actually able to mobilize.
Food is only a means of supplying the energy required for life.
And it is this energy that can be measured universally.
Whether he eats bread, rice, or lentils, his body transforms them into the same physical reality: joules, from one end of the Earth to the other, for all human beings.
The joule depends on neither religion, taste, nor country.
It measures a universal biological transformation, expressed in 1843 by James Prescott Joule.
A kilogram of coal has a real human-energy cost that precedes any monetary convention.
It represents a quantity of life expended.
Money comes afterwards. It translates. It simplifies. It organizes the circulation of coal through exchange.
But it does not create wealth.
It is not the euro that makes the heart beat. It is not the dollar that contracts the muscle. It is not the yen that extracts the coal. Money does not create wealth. It merely translates human energy already transformed into visible reality.
In other words: wealth does not arise from money. Money is only the translation of human energy already expended.
It is human energy.
For centuries, we have mistaken the symbol for the source. We have allowed people to believe that value arose from numbers.
When in fact it arises from the body.
The Joule Model does not propose an abstract utopia. It recalls a forgotten fact: every form of wealth we have imagined is a transformation of dissipated human energy.
Because once we see the source — its source — we can no longer claim that it lies elsewhere: in a banknote, in gold, in precious stones, in shells.
We can no longer conceal that it is human.
We can no longer make people believe that it springs from capital itself.
The man collecting coal does not create money.
He transforms the energy of his life into available matter.
And every economy, since the Neolithic, begins there.
It is from this simple, physical, universal, almost intimate truth that another peaceful organization can emerge, in continuity after the violent organization of capitalism. If we accept this starting point — that all wealth is a transformation of human energy — then several assumptions are overturned and other horizons appear.
The first concerns wealth itself.
Wealth is not created by money. It is produced by human activity that transforms energy into material and social reality. Money merely translates this transformation into a language of exchange whose beneficiaries have been determined over successive centuries by instinctive behaviours and relations of power.
The second reversal concerns ontological scarcity, which compelled human beings to produce the food that nature no longer gave them directly as in the age of gatherers.
For millennia, humanity lived under the constraint of real material scarcity. Production was difficult, slow, and uncertain. Societies organized themselves around this shortage.
But industrial civilizations have accumulated considerable productive power. Machines, technical networks, scientific knowledge, and energy infrastructure today form a reserve of power that greatly exceeds elementary survival needs.
Scarcity is no longer only material: it becomes organizational. This is no longer simply the scarcity created by coveting what others possess; life is organized through scarcity maintained in order to enhance financial power. This is what we call economic waste, particularly in agriculture.
The third reversal concerns the role of work.
In a world where material production can be largely provided by the combination of human energy accumulated in machines and living human energy, the central question is no longer only to produce.
It becomes a question of understanding.
A civilization possessing such technological power must learn to master it, direct it, and limit it when necessary.
In other words, the major problem of modern societies is no longer producing enough to survive.
It is learning to organize the abundance they have already made possible, rather than leaving that responsibility to the organization of scarcity.
To make this idea concrete, we must now return to an extremely simple example.
An example that starts from the human body rather than from money.
Because that is always where any real economy begins.
A man has lunch.
Two hundred grams of meat (200 g) and one hundred grams of bread (100 g).
Or lentils and rice.
It does not matter.
What he absorbs is not a food culture, apart from that of his palate.
It is energy.
Suppose his meal provides approximately 750 kilocalories for the day.
A day has twenty-four hours.
On average, each hour therefore mobilizes about 31 kilocalories (750 kcal / 24 h).
After eating, he goes to work for one hour collecting coal.
At the end of that hour, he has extracted fifty kilograms.
The question arises: how much is one kilogram of coal worth?
If we reason in monetary terms, we will say: it depends on the market, transport, demand, and the economic context.
But if we return to physical reality, the answer becomes different.
During that hour, he mobilized approximately 31 kilocalories.
With that energy, he produced 50 kg.
The human-energy cost of one kilogram of coal is therefore:
31 ÷ 50 = 0.62 kilocalorie per kilogram.
One kilocalorie corresponds to 4,184 joules.
Therefore, 0.62 kilocalorie = 2,590 joules.
In other words: one kilogram of coal represents approximately 2,600 joules of human energy expended.
Here is a real basis.
It depends on neither a currency, speculation, nor a narrative.
Money is not the source of wealth. It is only its translation.
At this point in the demonstration, a fundamental clarification must be recalled.
Human societies have never freely chosen to work. They have responded to a deeper constraint: ontological scarcity. Every living species must mobilize energy in order to survive.
A human group that ceased producing its subsistence would disappear.
Human beings therefore do not decide whether work is necessary. What they do decide is how that necessity is organized. Economic history is not the history of the constraint to produce, but the history of the possible exploitation of that constraint.
In other words: ontological scarcity imposes effort, but it never imposes the domination of one human being by another.
It rests on a measurable transformation of human energy expended in work.
A misunderstanding must nevertheless be avoided.
Human beings do not freely choose to work. Every living society is subject to an ontological constraint: producing the energy necessary for its subsistence.
A human group that permanently ceased producing the means by which it lives would disappear. This constraint is neither political nor moral: it is biological.
What human beings actually decide is not whether work is necessary, but how this necessity is organized within antagonistic and conflictual relations.
Economic history is therefore less the history of production than the history of the social organization of this constraint.
And this energy can be expressed in a unit common to the whole planet: the joule, or another unit such as the calorie, which we have retained for our examples.
The example is simple.
It does not claim to set all the prices of a modern economy; it demonstrates something more fundamental: all human production is a transformation of energy, and this energy can be monetized for convenience.
Within this framework, the reference currency organizes this transformation; it does not create it.
Human societies have built their economic systems around a particular unit of measurement: money. This unit makes it possible to organize exchanges, record transactions, and coordinate collective activity. But it is not wealth itself.
The real wealth of a society always rests on a more fundamental capacity: its ability to mobilize energy. Human energy first, which works, learns, cares, and builds. The energy of machines next, which extends and multiplies human force. Finally, the energy of natural resources, transformed by knowledge and techniques accumulated throughout history.
Money does not directly measure this physical reality. It is only a conventional representation of the relations of power, conquest, and domination that have marked human history, built over centuries by successive victors. It organizes the circulation of goods and services, but it does not reveal the material and energetic basis on which all production rests.
When money becomes the exclusive measure of wealth, its real basis gradually disappears from collective sight. Economics then ceases to describe reality and manipulates only its own signs. Prices seem to create value, although they merely reflect, often imperfectly, the human and technical energy mobilized to produce over a given period of time.
The Joule Model begins from a simple observation: a technological civilization cannot sustainably organize its economy around a measure that ignores the physical basis of its activity. To understand and govern a modern society, it becomes necessary to restore a measure corresponding to the material reality of production: the human and mechanical energy that make all activity possible.
From this perspective, money does not necessarily disappear. But it ceases to be confused with wealth itself. It becomes again what it should always have remained: an instrument for organizing exchange, not the fundamental measure of value.
The joule is therefore not an ideological invention.
It is the physical measure of what we have always done: transforming life into material reality.
This example is not an intellectual game.
It may seem unnecessary to return to such elementary situations.
But this simplification has a pedagogical role: to recall what modern economic systems have gradually made invisible.
It does not claim to reduce the complexity of a modern economy to a primitive equation. It does something else: it recalls the source.
We have explained in detail why food cannot be used as the standard, because it varies.
We have seen that money is only a convention: useful, but abstract.
We have shown that what remains stable, universal, measurable, and independent of cultures and political preferences is the energy mobilized.
For this reason, the Joule Model chooses human energy as its reference. This decision opens a simple but decisive question.
If human energy is the real source of wealth, then every society possesses a measurable quantity of available energy.
This quantity constitutes a collective reserve.
The first task of the Joule Model is therefore to identify and account for this reserve.
Not out of scientific fascination. Not out of a taste for technicality. But because it is the only common and indisputable basis capable of unifying the world through recognition of its species, which carries this energy wherever it exists.
This observation now makes it possible to summarize what human history has accumulated without ever accounting for it clearly.
Industrial societies today possess productive power that greatly exceeds immediate survival needs. Yet in economic accounts this power appears only in the form of costs to be reduced: wages, social protection, public expenditure.
But these “costs” are in reality the life of populations: eating, receiving care, learning, protecting existence.
In other words, the modern economy does not recognize what it already possesses: an accumulated reserve of human energy.
Thus uncertainty is not a flaw in the world: it is its breathing. Humanity will truly have learned only at the moment when it knows how to value what it cannot predict.
In this world where networks give a voice to ordinary people, contributions multiply and speech circulates freely. A new abundance has appeared: debate.
But, as in every era of new freedom, merchants of empty talk also appear; over time and through readers’ discernment they will eventually disappear. For draining the flow of current events also feeds rumour, and rumour often becomes deadly.
Thinking is a gigantic task, even more difficult than speaking. It requires us to suspend the tumult, look beyond the immediate moment, and probe the very structure of our perception of the world. Today, that world is accessible through the circulation of information that people receive or endure from those who collect and convey it. It is therefore no small matter to discover and understand a world through those who report it. This is why acquiring multidisciplinary knowledge requires education throughout life: to possess effective means for reflecting upon and analysing the information we receive from the world in which we do not directly live.
Our world is only the world of our senses, translated by our brain through linguistic and mathematical coding.
All sciences rest on this double translation.
The observation of regularities makes it possible to distinguish reality from illusion, but does not eliminate the paradigm that filters our vision.
When Murray Gell-Mann discovered the first quark, was he discovering ultimate matter, or a figure produced by his mind?
Our faculty of thought kneads matter just as it was itself kneaded by the world. What we call “reality” may be nothing more than the resonance between our malleable brain and the flows of information passing through it.
Buddhists see this as commonplace; the West sees it as a revolution. But in both cases, the intuition is the same: reality is never entirely external to the consciousness that observes it.
Everything we imagine exists as a potentiality in time. We repeat this in order to understand that there are no utopias, but only moments when the realization of what we have formulated is not possible.
Our innovations are only temporary forms of forces and energies already present in the universe.
We create nothing: we reveal.
Our inventions make concrete possible combinations that would otherwise have remained virtual.
Thus, the human being is not an absolute creator, but a transformer of potentialities.
Every word, every idea, every image carries within it a potentiality of being.
And when we say “I think,” we are already activating a cosmic flow of transformation.
To think is to enable the universe to recognize itself.
If the universe is the circulation of information from its origin, then we are that information, within it and through it. This is only the contemporary translation of the gods of former times, reformulated through scientific discoveries — what believers call the soul, although nothing physical connects it to the human being and to living matter.
We produce information, but we are not subject to it.
We are conditional beings: conditioned by what we understand, but capable of extending those conditions.
This understanding changes everything: we are no longer merely subject to the forces of the world; we become forces conscious of themselves, capable of adapting to the planetary environmental transformations to which we are subjected.
Culture is therefore not separate from the fundamental laws of nature: it is their living continuity.
Through knowledge, the universe thinks itself, because it has given us the means to think it.
Thus, reflection is not merely a human activity: it is participation in the cosmic expansion of meaning.
We find this meaning again in human history, where it can be read since the Neolithic as a succession of closed models: each dominant power invents its civilizational order, locks itself within it, and dies there for having believed it could endure. It dies there because it was unable to adapt to the evolution it had itself generated, having gathered only the information that confirmed its domination.
The order of contemporary capitalism, founded on infinite growth and immediate profitability, does not escape this rule.
The analysis developed in this chapter leads to several fundamental observations about the human condition and the choices facing our civilization.
Human consciousness is not complete. It evolves with the cosmos and with the knowledge accumulated by humanity. Imperfection is not a defect: it is the very condition of evolution and learning.
The work of Robert May shows that any living species in a closed environment ultimately self-regulates and may die from its own waste if it receives nothing from outside. John Calhoun shows that, under conditions of overpopulation in an enclosed space, instinctive behaviours become distorted. In human beings, such regulation exists even if it remains difficult to grasp outside specific situations — for example, birth regulation in wealthy countries, fewer than two children per couple, psychological distortions in enclosed spaces such as prisons, hospices, armies, monasteries, and so on. Today, however, another and more dangerous form is added: war, now amplified by the power of nuclear weapons.
Space exploration is not merely a matter of scientific imagination. In the long term, it may become a necessity linked to the physical and ecological limits of the Earth.
Even behaviours we judge abhorrent may play a role in evolutionary processes. The objective world does not experiment in order to attain moral perfection: it experiments in order to transform and bring forth new forms of organization. In this sense, everything that exists has a reason for being, and we must discover and understand what those forms indicate.
Two paths are open to human societies:
the logic of predatory capitalism, founded on accumulation and competition;
a logic of self-interested solidarity, which recognizes human interdependence and permits a more mature collective organization.
Human cultures are not separate from the laws of the physical world. Like every organization of matter and energy, they obey the fundamental principles of thermodynamics and irreversibility.
Humanity now faces a choice:
to persist in the logic of predation and scarcity, at the risk of self-destruction;
or to accept its imperfection and invent a self-interested solidarity capable of ensuring its expansion and dignity.
Self-interested solidarity refers to the collective organization through which a society takes responsibility for the fundamental conditions of life — health, income, protection, education, security — not out of moral altruism, but out of shared interest.
It rests on a simple idea:
everyone has an interest in others living with dignity, because the stability of their own existence depends upon it.
It is not solidarity founded on sacrifice or charity.
It is solidarity founded on lucidity.
In a complex, interdependent, and highly productive society, leaving part of the population in a state of fragility or insecurity means weakening the system as a whole.
Self-interested solidarity recognizes that:
protecting others protects each person;
collective health conditions individual security;
the education of some strengthens the capacity of all;
social stability is a common good.
It therefore transforms a moral constraint into a rational fact.
In the Joule Model, this solidarity is no longer financed indirectly, fragmentarily, and repeatedly through prices, contributions, and taxes. It is organized upstream, explicitly, on the basis of recognizing human energy as the foundation of all wealth.
In other words: we do not protect others out of generosity, but because we cannot live sustainably without them. Understanding life also means understanding that what we see happen to others can happen to us, and that some of those conditions will one day affect us.
If wealth is not what we accumulate, but what we make possible for one another, then we must first return to its real source, understand its origin, and reread economics from this starting point.
Before entering the architecture of the model, it is useful to summarize what we have established.
First, all wealth is a transformation of energy.
Second, this energy always comes, directly or indirectly, from human activity.
Third, industrial societies already possess immense productive power that is never recognized as a collective reserve.
If humanity does not understand the real source of wealth, it cannot organize the power it possesses.
But this invisibility of wealth is not merely an error in accounting interpretation.
It has consequences. When a society no longer sees that its productive power rests on living and accumulated human energy, it eventually accepts the idea that this power comes from elsewhere: from capital, from money, from the enterprise itself.
This shift then opens the way to a second operation, even more formidable: leading populations to love the very structure that keeps them dependent.
What is no longer recognized as collective wealth becomes a cost; what is no longer understood as accumulated human energy becomes the exclusive merit of the organization that employs it; what is no longer seen as a social relationship becomes a shared adventure.
From that point on, the discourse of happiness at work is not merely the vocabulary of communication specialists. It becomes one of the instruments through which a society learns to confuse a tool of production, a framework of existence, and a promise of salvation. It is this mechanism that we must now examine closely.
The question of happiness at work is not self-evident, whether etymologically, historically, or sociologically; nor is it self-evident either in practices that would supposedly foster it “naturally” within the enterprise or in the testimony of those who work there.
Yet today it stands at the centre of managerial discourse, human-resources departments, media representations, and even the aspirations expressed by some employees.
On the corporate side, for example, MEDEF devoted a workshop to it at its 2005 summer university, and a “company celebration day” was created at the initiative of ETHIC (Entreprises de taille humaine indépendante et de croissance, presented as a “movement of enthusiastic employers”) and Publicis Consultants.
The justification given for this event was as follows:
It is observed that employee well-being and fulfilment are increasingly important factors in company effectiveness, in an increasingly difficult economic context in which ever greater productivity and performance are required, but also ingenuity and imagination.
The company celebration day is therefore a day of truce on which only the positive aspects of life within the company are emphasized.
Seventy-nine percent of French people say that they like their company, and 76% consider it friendly.
The company is often much more than work. It is a second life within “life.”
Media representation also participates in this symbolic construction.
Media sociologist Éric Macé observes that, in many television productions, work is presented as a privileged space for personal fulfilment. In his analysis entitled “Work Is Ecstasy,” he notes how strikingly the corpus overwhelmingly adopts the view that work is a place of personal fulfilment and a community of interests that abolishes divisions of class, gender, and race.
Likewise, a large survey by Christian Baudelot and Michel Gollac devoted to happiness at work shows that, for those interviewed, professional activity plays a central role in the perception of happiness.
Happiness at work therefore appears in two forms:
having a job — a fundamental economic dimension;
fulfilling oneself through work — a psychological dimension.
These two dimensions are, however, strongly shaped by age, gender, and social position.
Those groups most exposed to insecurity or arduous working conditions associate happiness first and foremost with the simple fact of having a job. By contrast, the most privileged groups place greater emphasis on self-fulfilment.
The authors nevertheless recall that work has historically been marked by a tension, present since the eighteenth century, between two opposing conceptions: on the one hand, work regarded as a contribution to human progress, a foundation of social ties, and a source of fulfilment; on the other, alienated work that condemns people to lose their lives in the effort to earn a living.
In classical industrial societies, the enterprise was identified as a place of production, structured by a relatively clear contractual relationship: working time in exchange for remuneration.
Contemporary transformations in management have profoundly altered this representation.
The enterprise no longer presents itself only as a place of production, but as an emotional community: family, tribe, team, collective adventure.
Employees are no longer merely invited to work; they are invited to belong.
This transformation is far from anecdotal.
It constitutes one of the major developments of contemporary capitalism: the progressive capture of the emotional dimensions of human existence.
In the past, feudal structures organized loyalty through personal belonging to the lord.
Today, certain forms of management seek to produce comparable loyalty through symbolic mechanisms: corporate culture, enthusiasm, passion, commitment, and a sense of belonging.
Work must no longer merely be performed; it must be loved.
For if the enterprise becomes an “emotional community,” it nevertheless remains an economic organization oriented towards the production of value and the remuneration of capital.
The rhetoric of happiness at work can then play a particular role: that of symbolic mediation between two realities that remain fundamentally distinct, forming a mask that makes them invisible.
It allows the enterprise to be presented as a space for personal fulfilment even though the structures of power and ownership remain unchanged. The enterprise as an existential horizon represents an anthropological regression: the enterprise is a totalizing space, a space of submission. Confirmation can be found in the Labour Code, whose origins date from 28 December 1910 with the codification of the first laws protecting workers, such as the law of 7 December 1909 guaranteeing the regular payment of wages and that of 5 April 1910 on workers’ and peasants’ pensions from the age of 65. The first code would nevertheless not be completed until 1927.
This contemporary development does not arise solely from a transformation of management.
It also reveals a deeper transformation in collective representations.
An opinion survey conducted in 1999 by the CCA (Centre de Communication Avancée) already revealed a significant phenomenon: a majority of citizens surveyed said they expected companies to “invent the future.”
Such an expectation may appear harmless. Yet it constitutes a considerable anthropological shift.
For centuries, society’s horizon was defined by political, religious, or cultural institutions. The future belonged to collective debate, democratic conflict, and philosophical and political deliberation.
The idea that companies should “invent the future” signals a shift in society’s symbolic centre of gravity.
The enterprise ceases to be an economic tool and gradually becomes an institution onto which the collective future is projected.
This development also corresponds to anticipations formulated in several strategic foresight exercises, notably those considering the horizon of 2040 in certain American geopolitical analyses, where a world can be seen emerging in which very large transnational groups possess economic, technological, and informational power exceeding that of many States.
In such a configuration, economic power tends to become the principal organizing force of human societies.
The convergence between these strategic anticipations and the evolution of social representations is striking: populations themselves come to expect major corporations to define the collective future.
In other words, symbolic authority gradually shifts from political institutions towards economic organizations.
From this perspective, the enterprise may appear as a new form of soft feudalism: no longer founded on direct coercion, but on emotional adherence.
Conversely, the search for a corporate form of organization can also be found in political demands. What is then sought is a charismatic leader who guarantees order and security, the paternal figure that characterized all forms of fascism and that accompanies a retreat of democracy.
But within an anthropology of the enterprise, and more specifically of the multimedia and Internet start-ups studied by Savignac and Waser — organizations marked by contemporary networked, project-based forms of organization and management “through affect” — the question then becomes:
what actually happens to the emergence of happiness, its expression, and its collection, outside the discourses that prescribe it?
How can one distinguish, to return to Baudelot and Gollac’s question, authentic passion from mere conformity to the norm of “professional happiness”?
Taking up this question requires analysis at two levels:
the subjectivity of those engaged in work;
the organizations and managerial theories that structure these environments.
In this context, a phenomenon characteristic of contemporary societies appears: the multiplication of symbolic discourses intended to produce emotional adherence to economic structures that nevertheless remain unchanged in their operation.
Modern organizations thus develop entire lexical universes — enthusiasm, passion, creativity, commitment — that give the enterprise the appearance of a community of fulfilment.
But this symbolic production can also be understood as a form of imaginary construction of social reality.
A society can therefore end up functioning like a Republic of Windmills, in which discourses and representations gradually take precedence over the material structures that actually organize the production and distribution of wealth.
In such a context, the question of happiness at work becomes less a description of reality than a central element in the staging of the economic system.
We are faced with the skilful use of scientific knowledge of human emotions to take precedence over reflection by the cerebral cortex. Between approximately AD 5 and AD 67, the apostle Paul of Tarsus did not know the language of modern communication specialists; addressing slaves, he recommended that they serve their masters with respect, since they too were subject to the Lord. He did not feel obliged to transform dependence into happiness in order to make exploitation through wage labour acceptable.
This development also corresponds to a subtler transformation in the psychological relationship to work.
As Éric Macé’s sociological analyses of media representations of work show, the dominant narrative today increasingly presents the enterprise as a place of personal fulfilment, collective adventure, and self-realization.
The enterprise is no longer described only as a place of production, but as an almost existential human community.
In contemporary societies, the individual may come to depend on the enterprise for far more than income.
Their entire place in the world can become attached to it: identity, recognition, relationships, and even the capacity to imagine a future.
The enterprise is no longer merely a place of work.
It becomes a framework of existence.
This shift is decisive.
For what once belonged to subsistence becomes a system of belonging.
The signs are visible.
Employees wear the colours, logos, and dress codes of the company that employs them, just as, in feudal societies, people bore the coats of arms of their lord.
Belonging is no longer merely lived; it is displayed.
It is made visible.
And this logic extends far beyond the enterprise.
With the development of naming rights and sponsorship, individuals themselves become media surfaces. Athletes provide an extreme example: their bodies are transformed into advertising space, sometimes saturated with brands even in the most unexpected areas — the buttocks, when no other space remains available.
What is at stake goes beyond simple visibility.
It is a transformation in the relationship to oneself.
The individual no longer merely works for a structure.
They become, in part, a vector of that structure.
Economic dependence is thus extended into existential dependence.
It is no longer only material life that is conditioned.
It is the very manner of existing in the eyes of others.
Where a person believed they were selling their labour, they gradually come to commit their identity and to sell their freedom as a thinking being.
This representation contributes to producing a dependence that extends far beyond the simple wage relationship.
This phenomenon has a deeper anthropological dimension.
In many animist or archaic societies, human communities projected their vital dependence onto symbolic entities — spirits, divinities, or invisible forces — to which they made offerings in order to secure protection and prosperity. In return, they expected to receive more than they had offered. This principle extended as far as human sacrifice, in which such societies offered what they valued most: life itself. In this, we argue, there was no act of barbarism as such. Barbarism has a name: war.
The relationship that tends to develop today between individuals and certain large economic organizations sometimes presents troubling structural analogies.
Populations acknowledge their economic dependence on companies and show themselves ready to grant them increasing social and symbolic legitimacy.
Expected emotional adherence, enthusiasm, passion for the enterprise or its projects can then appear as modern forms of symbolic offering.
These are obviously not religious rites in the strict sense.
But the psychological structure of the relationship — dependence, recognition, loyalty — presents striking similarities.
This development is all the more paradoxical because it unfolds within a constant discourse about individual freedom.
At the very moment when the financialization of the economy allows some holders of capital to accumulate immeasurable wealth, the dominant narrative presents the enterprise as a space of personal emancipation.
The employee is no longer merely invited to work: they are invited to identify with the enterprise, to commit emotionally to it, and to find the meaning of their existence within it.
This dual dynamic — economic exploitation and emotional capture — constitutes one of the major characteristics of contemporary capitalism.
It obviously does not call into question the necessity of production, the decisive role of the enterprise as a tool for organizing work, or the effectiveness of entrepreneurs.
Any society confronted with scarcity must mobilize human energy to produce the goods necessary for its survival.
But confusing the tool of production with the existential horizon is a far more problematic shift.
To measure this confusion, one need only imagine a simple experiment.
If individuals were asked to organize their existence around a material tool — a jackhammer, a tractor, or the handle of a shovel — the proposition would immediately appear absurd.
These tools are recognized for what they are: instruments serving an activity.
They do not claim to define the meaning of life.
Yet the enterprise too is a tool: a collective arrangement intended to organize production.
But when this tool becomes the symbolic horizon of existence, society gradually loses the ability to distinguish means from ends.
This confusion reveals a deeper difficulty in the maturation of contemporary societies.
Even though human beings possess unprecedented technological power, collective representations may remain anchored in very old psychological structures: dependence on a protective authority, the search for belonging, the projection of salvation onto an external entity.
Under these conditions, the gradual disappearance of philosophical debate about the meaning of collective life becomes particularly troubling.
A society that entrusts its economic organizations with the task of “inventing the future” partly abdicates its political and cultural responsibility.
It then risks reducing human existence to participation in a productive system and access to the temples of consumption that this system supplies.
This development constitutes less a civilizational advance than a symptom of anthropological immaturity.
This development does not concern the organization of work alone.
It participates in a broader movement affecting political life itself.
For several decades, the social sciences have observed the gradual expansion of what might be called a strategy of emotion. Mechanisms of persuasion, adherence, and mobilization rely less and less on the confrontation of ideas and projects, and increasingly on the mobilization of affects: enthusiasm, trust, proximity, and a sense of belonging.
Within the enterprise, this development appears in the promotion of happiness at work, professional passion, and emotional commitment to projects. As Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello showed in their analysis of the “new spirit of capitalism,” contemporary capitalism has learned to integrate and recycle certain cultural criticisms arising from the movements of the late 1960s: aspirations to autonomy, creativity, and authentic relationships.
These legitimate aspirations were gradually reinterpreted in managerial language that transforms personal commitment into a productive resource.
In other words, what was initially a critique of the hierarchical organization of work becomes a tool for greater involvement in the very structures that had provoked that criticism.
In this context, emotion becomes a strategic resource: it can generate adherence without requiring discussion of power structures or mechanisms for the distribution of wealth.
This logic is not confined to the world of the enterprise.
It tends to spread throughout the public sphere.
Political communication itself increasingly adopts the codes of emotional marketing: emphasizing personalities rather than programmes, promoting image and individual narrative, and multiplying simple messages designed to produce identification rather than collective reflection.
This shift gradually contributes to weakening the culture of political debate.
Local elections sometimes offer a striking illustration of this phenomenon: some electoral lists now avoid any explicit reference to an ideological orientation, a structured political project, or party affiliation.
Programmes are then presented as sets of technical or managerial proposals, detached from any overall vision of society.
This apparent neutralization of politics may create the impression of a peaceful consensus.
In reality, it corresponds to a deeper phenomenon: the gradual erosion of the confrontation of ideas.
When projects for society disappear behind communication, democratic life loses one of its essential driving forces: collective discussion about the purposes of social organization.
In this context, the convergence with changing economic representations becomes particularly significant.
If citizens expect companies to “invent the future,” as the CCA survey showed at the end of the 1990s, and if political debate gradually recedes behind managerial or communication logics, society finds itself in a paradoxical situation.
Decisions that profoundly shape the collective future continue to be made, particularly in technological, financial, and industrial fields, but societies’ capacity to debate them publicly grows weaker.
Real power may then shift towards economic or technological organizations whose objectives are not necessarily defined through democratic deliberation, but by the particular interests of employers or investors.
Strategic forecasts that envisage the emergence of major transnational economic powers over the coming decades are not independent of this cultural development.
When societies cease to think collectively about their future, other actors may be tempted to define it in their place.
One of the major consequences of this transformation is the gradual narrowing of the existential horizon.
If the enterprise becomes the principal framework of social belonging and consumption becomes the principal space of symbolic satisfaction, human life tends to organize itself around a relatively simple cycle:
produce, consume, reproduce the conditions of production.
Within this pattern, fundamental philosophical questions — the meaning of collective life, the purpose of human activity, the nature of progress — gradually disappear from the public sphere.
They are replaced by indicators of economic performance, strategies of technological innovation, or promises of growth.
This reduction of human existence to participation in a productive system can be interpreted as a modern form of alienation.
Not an alienation imposed by visible coercion, but an alienation internalized, accepted, and sometimes even desired.
“But this reduction of existence is not maintained by economic necessity alone. It is maintained because it structures the very way in which we think.”
This shift is decisive.
For when an individual is trained from childhood to organize their existence around the enterprise, they gradually internalize a framework of thought whose limits they can no longer perceive. Thought, which always draws its references from the environment in which it develops, ultimately becomes unable to imagine itself outside that framework.
Thus the capitalist system of exploitation, as embodied in the enterprise, tends to reproduce itself.
Not because it imposes itself by force, but because it structures representations, aspirations, and imaginaries.
It becomes the “natural” form of social organization.
Under these conditions, the logic of competition that it carries continues indefinitely, until the tensions it generates reach a critical threshold. And in a world now equipped with unprecedented means of destruction, this dynamic raises a question that can no longer be avoided: how far can this system go before producing an irreversible crisis, including in extreme forms such as the use of nuclear weapons?
A further question then arises.
How can it be explained that leaders with a high level of intelligence, often measured by indicators such as IQ, struggle to develop a global, holistic reading of the world in which they act?
They are not responsible for the framework in which they were formed.
They are not responsible for the ideal they pursue.
But they operate in an environment that organizes their way of thinking and directs their decisions.
Yet this environment is not the only horizon available.
Knowledge exists.
Human history is documented.
Past crises are known.
The trajectories of civilizations are analysed.
It is therefore possible, without imposing an external truth upon them, to confront the ideals carried by the system with the historical reality of its effects.
For conditioning thought to a single narrative — in this case the entrepreneurial narrative — amounts to enclosing the human being within archaic patterns of behaviour.
It keeps the human being within a logic of survival, competition, and domination, far removed from the idea of emancipation that is nevertheless associated with the same system.
The paradox is profound.
Contemporary capitalism promises a future founded on work, growth, and individual fulfilment.
But material conditions are changing.
We can no longer consume indefinitely as we did in the past.
Technology is developing in a self-accelerating manner.
And the time available to human beings tends, structurally, to increase.
In other words, the system is organizing the conditions of its own contradiction.
It continues to produce a narrative centred on work even as the material foundations of that narrative are changing.
In this sense, leaders are not merely mistaken.
They are, in part, acting contrary to what their own system makes possible.
They steer an organization whose accounting tools and internal logics suggest one trajectory to them, even as the evolution of the world makes that trajectory increasingly unsustainable.
It is not only an economic system that reproduces itself. It is a way of thinking about the world that imposes itself as the only possible one. Capitalism does not merely organize production; it organizes the very limits of what we are capable of thinking.
A society in which individuals no longer perceive the structures that organize their dependence becomes particularly vulnerable.
Political freedom does not rest on legal institutions alone; it also rests on citizens’ capacity to understand the economic, social, and symbolic mechanisms that orient their existence.
When this understanding disappears, society can gradually become accustomed to delegating the definition of its future to powers that escape collective deliberation.
History shows that this type of situation constitutes particularly favourable ground for the emergence of more direct forms of domination.
When a population ceases to debate the meaning of collective life, it may come to accept that others decide in its place. This is one of the deep mechanisms that made forms of fascism possible, made particularly visible by the Second World War.
The notion often provokes immediate fear because it is spontaneously associated with Nazism. Yet it is not limited to Nazism. Forms of domination of this kind have existed in many countries and continue to do so. They run through societies, reappear in renewed forms, and are developing today, including in Europe.
This is not a moral accusation directed at populations.
These dynamics do not arise from the conscious will of individuals, even if they may resemble instinctive protective behaviours. Yielding to such logics is not an individual fault, but is often the result of social and political environments that tend to infantilize individuals, reduce their capacity for initiative, and delegate decision-making to a guide, a father of the people, a great helmsman, and so on.
Looking this reality in the face does not weaken democracy.
On the contrary, it can strengthen it.
Refusing to see these mechanisms means risking allowing them to operate silently.
Recognizing them means giving ourselves the means to contain them.
This observation is disturbing because it seems accusatory and because it evokes extreme images.
But there is nothing insulting in acknowledging that people can succumb to it.
Under these conditions, delegating becomes easier than understanding, obeying simpler than deciding.
And freedom retreats without noise.
The danger does not come from a sudden shift; it comes from a gradual slide, from habituation.
From a quiet abandonment of debate, complexity, and responsibility.
It is precisely for this reason that this phenomenon must be faced directly.
Not to condemn, but to understand, because a democracy does not protect itself by hiding its risks in order to reassure itself. The two greatest risks for a democracy are eugenics and fear of the foreigner.
Refusing to see these mechanisms means allowing them to take root.
Recognizing them is already to begin containing them.
It is precisely for this reason that the question of work, value, and economic organization cannot be reduced to a merely technical question.
It is a choice of civilization.
A society must collectively decide what work represents in human existence, how wealth is produced and distributed, and what role economic organizations should play in collective life.
The Joule Model belongs within this perspective.
It is not merely a matter of proposing a new form of economic accounting based on human energy.
It is also a matter of placing economics back within a broader anthropological and political framework, in which the enterprise once again becomes a tool of production serving society, rather than the existential horizon around which human life should be organized.
The most developed form of this today is the worker cooperative (SCOP).
To understand the significance of these transformations, it is useful to place contemporary developments within a broader historical perspective.
In feudal societies, economic dependence and personal dependence were inseparable. The peasant depended on the lord not only for the use of land, but also for protection, security, and social belonging. Economic, political, and symbolic authority were thus concentrated in the same hands.
The rise of industrial societies gradually separated these dimensions.
The enterprise became a place of production distinct from political institutions, and citizenship was constructed within a public sphere in which individuals could collectively debate the rules organizing common life. Work remained a constraint, sometimes harsh and unjust, but it was no longer supposed to define the whole of human existence.
Contemporary transformations, however, seem to be recomposing certain forms of dependence.
This recomposition no longer takes the form of direct domination, as in feudal societies. It relies more heavily on symbolic and emotional mechanisms.
The modern enterprise tends to solicit the emotional commitment of those who work within it: enthusiasm, passion, adherence to a common culture, a sense of belonging to a community.
This mobilization of affects can produce genuine and sometimes positive involvement in work.
But it can also gradually transform an economic relationship into an existential one.
When personal identity, social recognition, and prospects for the future become concentrated around the productive organization, dependence becomes more diffuse, but also deeper.
This phenomenon can be described as emotional feudalism: no longer founded on material or legal coercion, but on emotional adherence and symbolic dependence.
To understand such a phenomenon, we must examine what structures the lives we believe we control. We must therefore identify the Systemic Dominant. We shall define it and describe its dynamics before continuing, because we will use this concept in the economic analysis.
The Systemic Dominant does not primarily refer to individuals, or even to particular elites.
It refers to a function.
A constant, transhistorical function that runs through every form of human organization.
In every society, at every period, a structure emerges to organize, stabilize, and justify relations between individuals. This structure does not merely administer reality.
It tells a story about it.
It produces a narrative.
A narrative that gives meaning to the existing order, makes it acceptable, sometimes desirable, and organizes behaviour accordingly.
This narrative takes many forms: religious myths, political narratives, economic ideologies, promises of success, discourses on progress or freedom.
We often say that these narratives have structured human societies.
But we overlook an essential dimension: they do not create the structure.
They reformulate it.
They cover it over.
They make it intelligible.
For beneath these narratives a constant remains, older than every civilization: the innate dominant/dominated relationship, the relationship that Taoists personified in the “old man” who does not want to die.
This relationship is not an arbitrary cultural construction.
It is a biological invariance of living systems, a scale invariance that continues to reproduce itself.
Every organism, every group, every species develops forms of hierarchy, control, territory, protection, and submission.
Human beings are no exception, and civilization has not abolished this structure.
It has transformed it.
It has codified it.
It has made it more abstract, more complex, and sometimes more invisible.
But it has reproduced it throughout human existence.
Thus the great historical forms — kingdoms, empires, feudalism, capitalism, modern States — can be read not as radical ruptures, but as variations on the same fundamental pattern: paradigms.
The contemporary return of feudal logics described above, presented as a novelty, is in reality only a recomposition of a relationship of exploitation of the subordinate that has never disappeared.
In the same way, the modern narrative of freedom through commerce, so dear to liberals — the idea that each person can rise through exchange and accumulation — has functioned as a reconfiguration of this structure: a dominant master and a dominated person in servitude.
It transformed a relationship of dependence into a promise of emancipation that continues to nourish hope.
It made an order acceptable by presenting it as an opportunity.
This narrative is not simply an error.
It is a functional necessity.
For a structure of domination can endure only if it is perceived as legitimate.
This is precisely where the limit of contemporary democracy lies.
Democracy has organized forms of participation.
But it has not profoundly transformed understanding of the mechanisms that structure society. This is not a reproach; it is an observation that we are able to make only today.
A large part of the population therefore remains in a partial relationship to reality, within a conceptual narrative maintained inside frameworks of thought that do not allow access to a global reading of systems or to the reality that can be grasped.
Participation in the narrative exists, but it is not fully conscious, because it is framed and oriented.
Sometimes it is reduced to choices that have no purchase on deep structures.
Within this framework, leaders themselves are not outside the Systemic Dominant.
They are its products; they are formed by the narrative, selected within it, and in practice co-opted by it.
A democracy does not freely produce its leaders.
Most often, it validates those who are compatible with dominant frameworks of thought.
Those who depart too far from them are marginalized, excluded, or neutralized.
Not necessarily through conspiracy, but because they are incompatible with the narrative of the Systemic Dominant carried by those who have been co-opted.
Thus the Systemic Dominant does not govern only through structures.
It governs through minds.
Including the minds of those who believe they are directing it.
Under these conditions, democracy does not disappear; it remains.
But it does not emancipate itself. It does not move beyond itself to become something more than electoral democracy.
It therefore reproduces, in more acceptable forms, the logics it claims to overcome.
The issue is therefore not merely political; it is anthropological. It is not a matter of replacing one system with another.
It is a matter of crossing a threshold of understanding.
For as long as what is innate remains misunderstood, it is simply reproduced.
Myths do not create the social world.
Human beings dress what is innate in what they are able to understand, while failing to understand what they themselves are.
Civilization has not abolished domination; it has made it acceptable.
Behind every ideology stands a structure older than ideas.
History changes the forms; it does not spontaneously change the structure.
This observation does not lead us to condemn humanity for all the forms of barbarity that exist.
It leads to awareness.
If structures of domination reproduce themselves through the centuries, it is not because societies fail morally.
It is because, in endlessly renewed forms, they reproduce an organization deeply inscribed in living systems, in the objective world that we do not understand.
Changing narratives is therefore not enough; changing institutions is not enough.
As long as the structure that produces these organizations remains invisible, it continues to act.
It changes its mask and persuades us that something new has appeared, but it persists.
Yet for the first time in history, science opens a possibility.
Through it, we possess the knowledge necessary to identify and connect these mechanisms.
To understand that they are neither a moral fatality nor an absolute necessity, but an inherited structure.
In other words: through knowledge, we can begin to see what we reproduce within an expanded consciousness.
This is precisely where the Joule Model is situated.
It does not propose a new ideology.
It does not propose a new narrative intended to replace the old ones.
It proposes a shift — a fundamental shift.
Instead of organizing society around relations of power, ownership, or domination, it reorganizes society around its primary reality: human energy.
By returning wealth to its origin, to its owners — present and accumulated human energy — it becomes possible to make visible the mechanisms that narratives have long concealed.
What was abstract becomes measurable.
What was invisible becomes readable.
And what had been appropriated by some can be understood as belonging to a common heritage.
This shift does not immediately abolish inherited behaviours; it does not alter what is innate.
But it changes the framework in which they are expressed. It changes the environment from which they are expressed and within which they are thought.
It does not ask human beings to become different. It also educates them, simply to prevent them from reproducing, without seeing it, structures they do not understand.
Thus the Joule Model does not claim to transform human nature.
It proposes to create the conditions in which that nature no longer mechanically produces the same effects.
Humanity does not escape its structures by changing the narrative. It escapes them when it understands what, within itself, produces those structures, and organizes the world accordingly.
We live in societies capable of producing knowledge of unprecedented precision about the workings of the world, from matter to social systems, and yet we continue largely to ignore the functioning of the tool with which we will pass through our entire existence: our brain, the brain with which we will live for better or worse.
This ignorance is not trivial.
For the brain is not a neutral organ.
It structures our perceptions, directs our decisions, influences our fears, desires, attachments, and judgements. To a large extent, it determines our relationship to reality.
Not understanding how it functions means living in a world whose rules escape us.
It means confusing what we feel with what is.
It means taking as natural evidence mechanisms that are inherited and sometimes archaic.
Under these conditions, the human being does not think freely; they think from structures they do not know.
And as long as these structures remain invisible, they continue to produce the same effects: reproduction of hierarchies, attachment to existing frameworks, difficulty imagining other forms of organization. Ignorance of the brain’s functioning has contributed to every punishment, every cruelty, and every war. As recently as 1914, going to war was glorified.
Thus a society may believe itself modern, rational, and enlightened while remaining profoundly governed by ancient mechanisms it has never truly questioned.
Learning to read the world without learning to read ourselves constitutes a major limit of civilization.
For real transformation lies not only in the tools we produce, but in the capacity to understand the being who uses them.
In this respect, failing to teach how the brain functions — its biases, automatisms, and survival logics — amounts to allowing humanity to develop ever greater power without real mastery of what directs its decisions. For centuries the brain mobilized when a weapon struck the body; the risk became real to the reptilian brain. Tomorrow, when radiation reaches us, it may already be too late. The scale of risk is no longer the same.
And perhaps this is one of the most decisive issues of our time: moving from a technical intelligence of the world to a conscious intelligence of ourselves.
It is a condition of lucidity.
For as long as human beings are unaware of the mechanisms that orient their thought, they remain caught in logics they cannot perceive. They believe they are choosing when they are reproducing.
The human brain is not spontaneously oriented towards global understanding.
It is first and foremost an organ of survival. It privileges security, stability, belonging, and recognition.
It seeks to reduce uncertainty, avoid danger, and preserve what already works. These mechanisms enabled the species to survive.
But in complex societies they produce a particular effect: they favour the reproduction of existing structures.
A system, even an imperfect or unjust one, remains preferable to an unknown perceived as risky.
What is known reassures; what is uncertain causes anxiety.
Thus individuals adapt to organizations they did not choose, internalize them, sometimes justify them, and eventually regard them as natural.
It is at this level that the Systemic Dominant acquires its full force.
It is not imposed only from the outside.
It takes root within.
It relies on cognitive mechanisms deeply inscribed in living systems; it becomes compatible with the way human beings perceive the world.
And this is precisely why it reproduces itself: not because it is perfectly organized, but because it corresponds to the structures of thought of those who live within it.
A society can therefore maintain forms of domination without permanent coercion.
It is enough for those forms to be coherent with the expectations, fears, and needs of the human brain.
Under these conditions, changing a system does not consist merely in changing its rules.
It requires making visible the mechanisms that make the system acceptable.
Without this understanding, any transformation remains fragile.
It collides with what the human being does not see within themselves.
And most often ends up reproducing what it claimed to replace.
Any durable social organization must be compatible with the functioning of the human brain.
When a system conflicts with fundamental mechanisms of perception, security, and recognition, it does not disappear immediately.
But it generates tensions.
And sooner or later those tensions produce resistance, blockage, or crisis.
One of the limits of contemporary economic systems lies precisely in this contradiction.
They require individuals constantly to adapt, accept uncertainty, endure competition, and justify their existence through performance, while remaining stable, rational, and integrated.
In other words, they demand capacities that come into tension with the fundamental mechanisms of the human brain.
The brain seeks security; the system produces instability.
The brain seeks recognition; the system organizes competition.
The brain seeks meaning; the system reduces existence to production and consumption.
This dissonance is not resolved; it accumulates.
And it weakens individuals as much as collective structures.
The Joule Model proposes a shift.
It does not ask human beings to become something else.
It does not seek to correct their instincts.
It organizes a framework in which those instincts no longer produce the same destructive effects.
By guaranteeing the material conditions of existence, it reduces the fundamental fear associated with survival.
By recognizing human energy as the source of wealth, it restores a stable basis for recognition.
By valuing learning, it offers a direction compatible with the need for progression and understanding.
It therefore aligns three essential dimensions: security, as a condition of stability; recognition, as a condition of integration; meaning, as a condition of engagement.
Within this framework, the brain is no longer in permanent tension with social organization.
It can function without being constantly mobilized by survival logics.
And this is precisely what makes a deeper shift possible.
The individual is no longer forced constantly to defend their place.
They can begin to understand the system in which they live.
In other words, the Joule Model does not abolish inherited mechanisms.
It deactivates them as the principal motors of social organization.
It does not oppose human nature; it redirects human interest towards the knowledge that secures, or will secure, abundance and longevity.
It makes human nature compatible with a form of society that no longer rests on its most archaic part.
A society does not progress by demanding that human beings become different.
It progresses when it stops organizing the world against what they are.
We repeat: human societies do not change because they decide to do so.
They change because they can no longer continue as before.
For millennia, systems transformed under the pressure of external constraints: famines, wars, catastrophes, technical limits. Adaptation came afterwards, often painfully.
But our time introduces an unprecedented situation: for the first time, the constraints are no longer only external; they are produced by the system itself, through the logic of its own evolution.
The contemporary economic model still rests largely on logics inherited from a world of scarcity: produce more, work more, consume more in order to accumulate more.
But that world has changed.
Technological power now makes it possible to produce far beyond essential needs.
Machines extend and amplify human energy on a scale never before reached, as we describe in the passage on accounting for machine energy.
Knowledge circulates, accumulates, and accelerates; it can no longer be confined to a compulsory period of education.
At the same time, contradictions multiply: work remains central even as it becomes structurally less necessary; wealth increases but becomes concentrated; production grows while resources become scarcer; technology frees time while social organization continues to constrain it.
This gap is not insignificant.
It signals a growing incompatibility between structures inherited from the post-war period and the real conditions of the technological world.
A system that no longer corresponds to its environment enters into tension.
And a system under tension always ends up transforming.
Not through will, but through necessity.
To this is added a new dimension, unprecedented in human history.
The power acquired by our societies now makes forms of global destruction possible.
Humanity is no longer merely capable of harming itself locally; it can compromise its own conditions of existence on a large scale.
This reality changes the nature of the problem. It is no longer merely a question of economic efficiency or social justice; it is a question of viability.
A system that produces conditions incompatible with the continuity of life cannot be maintained indefinitely and still be regarded as good.
It must transform, or disappear.
In this context, the debate can no longer be framed in terms of ideological preference.
The question is not which model we like best. It is which model can function under the real conditions of the world without producing the means of its own self-destruction.
This is where the Joule Model takes on its meaning: not as one alternative among others, but as a response to a constraint.
It rests not on a promise, but on an observation already made: real wealth is already here, produced by human energy and amplified by machines.
The question is no longer how to produce more. The question is how to organize differently.
How to make what is produced visible, make its distribution coherent, and reconnect social organization with the reality of its own capacities.
This shift is not a comfortable choice; it is an adaptation.
And like any adaptation, it can be anticipated or endured.
But it cannot be avoided indefinitely, and a return to entrepreneurial feudalism does not constitute progress. Entrepreneurial paternalism, like Paul of Tarsus, proposes the figure of the happy slave.
Civilizations do not disappear for lack of ideas. They disappear when they persist in living in a world that no longer exists.
After this necessary development, we can better understand why emotion becomes central in this type of configuration: it is central because it is central to the functioning of our brain.
It can produce adherence without confronting ideas. It gradually replaces traditional mechanisms of political deliberation.
Enthusiasm, trust, or identification with an organization then become instruments of social cohesion.
But this cohesion may have a price: a reduction in critical space, a reduction in the space occupied by the cortex.
When economic or institutional structures are surrounded by a positive imaginary — success, innovation, collective adventure — it becomes more difficult to question their actual functioning or their social effects.
Criticism may then appear as a lack of enthusiasm, or even as a form of disloyalty.
Under these conditions, democratic societies may undergo a subtle but profound transformation.
Democracy rests in principle on the confrontation of ideas and on citizens’ capacity to debate collective orientations.
When this space for discussion is reduced, democracy can continue formally while losing part of its substance.
Electoral procedures continue to exist, institutions remain in place, but the collective capacity to think about the future becomes fragile.
Political life can then be transformed into a mere mechanism for selecting leaders, while major economic and technological orientations are decided elsewhere.
In such a situation, democracy risks being reduced to a paradox: citizens continue to elect their leaders, but they no longer truly determine the structures that orient their existence.
It may then be reduced to the periodic possibility of “electing one’s tyrant,” a formula often used to describe the possible drift of representative systems when citizen participation is reduced to the electoral act itself.
This phenomenon does not necessarily mean the establishment of a dictatorship in the classical sense.
It corresponds rather to a gradual transformation in the balance between economic power, political power, and symbolic power.
But history shows that societies that lose the capacity collectively to debate the meaning of their organization become more vulnerable to forms of domination.
It is precisely in order to avoid this drift that the question of economic organization cannot be left solely to market dynamics or the strategies of productive organizations.
It is a collective choice involving society as a whole.
Work, production, and the distribution of wealth are not merely technical mechanisms; they determine how human beings organize their coexistence.
From this perspective, economics must remain an object of political and philosophical reflection.
The Joule Model proposes precisely to reopen this debate.
By returning economic value to the human energy actually mobilized in production, it seeks to restore society’s capacity to understand the mechanisms that organize wealth and dependence.
The objective is not to abolish the enterprise or deny the role of entrepreneurs.
It is to place these tools within a broader framework, in which economics once again becomes a means serving society rather than a system around which human existence should be organized.
The idea that human life should be organized around the enterprise is one of the most seductive arguments in contemporary managerial discourse, as we have already discussed.
It rests on an emotional representation of the productive organization: a human community, a professional family, a collective adventure in which each person might find recognition, belonging, and personal fulfilment.
It would obviously be absurd to deny that interpersonal relationships exist within enterprises and that it is desirable for them to be happy. Human beings spend a significant part of their lives at work; it is therefore preferable for that time to be lived in humane, respectful, and sometimes even friendly conditions.
Nor is the aim to turn the employer into an enemy.
The evolution of social relations has, moreover, gradually led to replacing a logic of pure confrontation with one of partnership, which recognizes that the different stakeholders in an enterprise — employees, managers, investors — participate together in a common productive activity.
But recognition of human relationships must not conceal the structural reality of the enterprise.
For the enterprise remains above all an economic organization whose principal objective is the production of goods or services within a framework of profitability.
This reality becomes clear as soon as one leaves the emotional register and enters that of the accounting framework.
In a company’s accounts, employees — however happy, enthusiastic, or committed they may be — appear in a precise category: costs.
Accounting does not speak of passion, fulfilment, or human community. It speaks of payroll, production costs, and productivity.
And when those costs become incompatible with the company’s economic objectives, they are reduced.
The decision can take different forms: restructuring, outsourcing, automation, or dismissal.
Economic history shows that such decisions are not exceptional; they are an ordinary dimension of managing productive organizations.
In other words, the employee may be invited to regard the enterprise as an emotional community, but the enterprise itself can never forget that it operates according to an accounting logic.
In any social and economic organization, whatever its form, populations must have a place in which to defend their interests. This necessity does not derive from any particular tradition or specific ideology; it follows simply from the diversity of human situations and the inevitable divergences that arise in every organized society.
The interests of individuals, occupations, territories, or sectors of activity never coincide perfectly. Even when institutions are designed to seek balance and the general interest, their decisions always produce differentiated effects. Some groups may feel disadvantaged, others insufficiently recognized, and others still confronted with working or living conditions they consider unjust.
In this context, the existence of organizations capable of expressing, structuring, and defending these interests constitutes an essential democratic guarantee. Historically, this role has been assumed by trade unions.
Trade unions are not merely instruments for wage negotiation. They are places in which social interests are collectively formulated. They enable workers to transform dispersed individual experiences — professional difficulties, working conditions, perceived injustices — into collective demands that are intelligible and negotiable.
This function does not disappear in the Joule Model.
On the contrary, it remains indispensable and is strengthened.
The Joule Model introduces new institutions intended to organize the recognition and circulation of human energy within society, notably the Human Energy Council (HEC). Within this framework, trade-union organizations are called upon to participate in developing collective decisions concerning the organization of work, economic balances, and social orientations.
But this institutional participation in no way abolishes their function of contestation.
A living social democracy does not consist in abolishing conflicts; it consists in giving them a framework in which they can be expressed, confronted, and arbitrated without violence.
Trade unions can therefore participate in the decisions of the HEC while retaining the freedom to criticize, amend, or contest the real consequences of those decisions.
This possibility is not a contradiction. On the contrary, it is a protection against any authoritarian or corporatist drift.
If organizations representing workers lost their capacity to contest decisions on the grounds that they had participated in making them, they would cease to be trade unions and become mere administrative organs of the system. Such a situation would transform social democracy into a closed apparatus in which decisions could no longer be challenged.
Maintaining free trade unionism, capable both of participating and contesting, therefore constitutes one of the fundamental balances of the Joule Model.
In the current economic system, trade-union participation is often hindered by material constraints.
Weak purchasing power, insecure employment, or fear of professional retaliation discourage a significant proportion of employees from becoming durably involved in collective action.
Trade-union membership may appear as a cost or a risk.
The Joule Model profoundly changes this context.
By guaranteeing every individual material security founded on the recognition of human energy as the basis of collective wealth, it considerably reduces the economic obstacles to social engagement.
When populations have stronger purchasing power and security of existence independent of the wage relationship, membership of collective organizations ceases to be a financial sacrifice or a personal danger.
Individuals can then participate more freely in the democratic life of work.
Social partners — employees, self-employed workers, and people in diverse occupations — no longer have a material reason to turn away from institutions of collective representation. They can participate both to contribute to decisions structuring the economy and to defend their interests when the concrete effects of those decisions appear unsatisfactory.
Thus the Joule Model does not seek to neutralize social conflict. It seeks to place it within a framework in which it can be expressed without threatening individuals’ material security or the general balance of society.
From this perspective, social conflict is not a malfunction of the system. It is one of the normal mechanisms of democracy.
A living society does not abolish divergences of interest; it creates institutions capable of making them visible and arbitrating them.
Trade unions therefore remain one of the pillars of this balance.
They participate in developing collective rules within the institutions of the Joule Model, but retain the capacity to organize contestation when those rules produce effects regarded as unjust or unbalanced.
This dual function — participation and contestation — is precisely what guarantees that social democracy does not turn into a closed system.
In this sense, the Joule Model does not replace existing social democracy. It creates firmer material conditions for it.
By making society’s real wealth visible — living and accumulated human energy — and by providing everyone with security of existence independent of monetary scarcity, it allows individuals to participate more freely in collective organization.
Trade unions then cease to be fragile structures dependent on economic crises or social fear. They become one of the permanent places of collective deliberation on the organization of work and the use of human energy in society.
In other words, the Joule Model does not abolish social democracy.
It finally gives it the material means to exist fully.
If modern societies want to prevent economic power from becoming social domination, they must therefore maintain these places of representation and contestation.
The Joule Model does not abolish these counter-powers. It places them within a new architecture in which real wealth — human energy — finally becomes visible and is organized collectively.
But if such an economic democracy becomes conceivable, it is precisely because we must first face the gap that still structures our societies: the gap between narrative and reality.
It is within this gap that the heart of the problem lies.
Managerial discourse may present the company as a place of fulfilment, creativity, and shared passion. But the economic structure governing that institution remains oriented towards the production of value and the remuneration of capital.
Happiness at work then becomes an attractive narrative that conceals a fundamental asymmetry.
The relationship may remain warm as long as economic interests converge.
It ceases to be so as soon as profitability is threatened.
This reality does not necessarily imply malicious intent. It simply corresponds to the very logic of productive organization within the current economic system.
But it makes illusory the idea that the company could constitute the existential centre of human life.
This promise nevertheless finds fertile ground in societies where understanding of economic mechanisms remains limited because people have never been required to learn them. The unavoidable consequence is that what has not been learned cannot be retained and used to construct reasoning. This is what we call a lack of economic culture, even when one possesses an intelligent brain like everyone else.
The functioning of contemporary capitalism remains largely invisible to most citizens.
The circulation of value, the structure of costs, the formation of profits, and financial mechanisms are difficult to perceive in everyday life.
This invisibility makes it possible to construct simplified narratives in which the company appears as an almost protective entity, capable of ensuring collective prosperity.
In this context, some employees may accept the idea of a life organized around the company as though it were a natural or benevolent structure.
The relationship then takes on an almost symbolic dimension, close to certain ancient anthropological structures in which economic dependence was accompanied by a quasi-ritual recognition of the protective authority.
The material reality of most wage-earning trajectories nevertheless reveals the limits of this promise.
In many cases, the assets accumulated over a lifetime of work amount to a modest objective: having succeeded in acquiring a home.
Yet even this acquisition often takes place under financial conditions that lead people to pay several times the initial price of the property because of interest and financing mechanisms.
This situation illustrates the gap between the promise of shared prosperity and the reality of wealth distribution.
While financial profits can reach considerable levels in certain economic spheres, a large part of the population devotes most of its working life to repaying the material conditions of its own existence.
Presenting this situation as the culmination of a “collective adventure” is less an economic description than a narrative intended to make the existing order acceptable.
For the reality is simpler: wealth does not arise from structures; it arises from human work, and particularly from wage labour, which represents the largest group.
And yet everything happens as though this obvious fact had disappeared.
A question therefore arises: how can such a glaring inequality remain unseen?
Or should we understand that what is invisible is not what is hidden, but what people no longer wish to look at? That would mean that some know, and remain silent.
In practice, wage earners play a central role that the system never names clearly.
They function like a human money-printing press.
Through their activity, they produce the value that feeds the entire economy.
Without them, nothing circulates; without them, nothing is created. And yet they are not the ones who appear as the creators of wealth.
The dominant narrative has reversed reality: those who produce are invisible, while those who capture appear indispensable. We have heard it thousands of times: the rich create wealth, jobs, and investment. But then why does a craft worker or a farmer working alone not become a billionaire? The reason is simple: to become a billionaire, one must employ wage earners, because they will serve as the money-printing press.
This reversal is not an error.
It is a condition of the system’s functioning.
In ordinary economic discourse, as we have just indicated, wealth appears to come from companies, capital, or markets. But this representation is misleading.
Real wealth is produced by: human labour — predominantly wage labour; machines — past human energy derived from wage labour; and the organization that makes their coordination possible — itself carried out through human labour.
Through their activity, wage earners are therefore the principal source of economic value.
It is therefore not inappropriate to use the metaphor of the money-printing press.
Certainly, wage earners do not create money directly, but all monetary creation rests upon the value of what they produce.
The current system reverses this reality because it is organized for individual enrichment, as Adam Smith explains. But as an unspoken rule, written in such a way that we cannot read it, one could add: “provided that not everyone becomes rich, otherwise no one would remain to serve as the money-printing press.”
Understanding this is essential if we are to read the economy correctly.
Money circulates within the system; value, however, arises from human work.
Wage earners do not receive wealth; they produce it.
We can interpret this circulation as follows: human money-printing press → made invisible → need for the Joule Model.
If wage earners produce real value, then one question becomes unavoidable: why is this reality not visible?
Why do those who create wealth appear to depend on those who organize it?
The answer lies in the way value has been measured and represented for centuries in response to instinctive needs for domination. The fact that money circulates is not the difficulty; the difficulty is that not everyone can accumulate it. To do so, one must occupy the strongest position within the organization of the Systemic Dominant.
In the current system, wealth is expressed in money.
But money says nothing about its origin, as we have already developed.
It circulates. It accumulates. It concentrates. But it does not show what produces it.
Thus the real source of wealth — human energy — disappears behind its monetary equivalent.
This displacement is not neutral. It allows a dissociation: on one side, those who produce; on the other, those who capture.
And this dissociation becomes difficult to perceive because the measuring instrument itself — money — conceals the reality it claims to represent.
Under these conditions, the metaphor of the human money-printing press remains invisible.
It operates through work, but it is not recognized; and as long as it is not recognized, it cannot be organized differently.
This is precisely where the Joule Model introduces a break: it does not seek to redistribute wealth that has been poorly understood.
It begins by making that wealth visible.
By replacing the monetary reference with an energy reference, it reconnects wealth to its origin: human energy, the human being.
What was abstract becomes measurable; what was diffuse becomes identifiable; what was captured can be understood as something produced.
The problem is therefore no longer posed in the same way.
It is no longer a question of taking from some in order to give to others.
It is a question of recognizing what is already produced and organizing its distribution accordingly.
This shift is decisive because it transforms conflict into understanding, and a demand for redistribution into a reading of reality.
Within this framework, wage earners are no longer dependants of the system. They appear for what they are: the largest source of the wealth that the Joule Model organizes.
As long as wealth is measured without being reconnected to its origin, those who produce it remain invisible.
This representation of life organized around the company, together with all the forms of invisibility that accompany it, also conflicts with the technological evolution of contemporary societies.
For two centuries, the principal effect of technical progress has been to reduce the amount of human labour required for material production.
Machines, automation, and now artificial intelligence make it possible to increase productivity considerably.
In this context, tomorrow’s society will probably need less human labour power, but more human capacity for understanding, learning, and invention.
In other words, the future of technological societies depends less on the availability of a dependent workforce than on the presence of individuals capable of understanding, thinking, and inventing.
The central question therefore becomes cultural and educational.
A technological society cannot rest upon individuals reduced to their productive function; it needs individuals capable of autonomous thought, human beings capable of continuing to observe living systems so as to pursue the learning and innovations we derive from them.
It is here that the question takes on a genuinely anthropological dimension.
A society that encourages individuals to organize their entire existence around their place in the productive system maintains a form of dependence. This does not mean that competence is unnecessary for production — it remains an unavoidable prerequisite — but education must continue throughout active life. If we possess associative thought, we must still provide it with the knowledge required for innovation.
Such a society perpetuates the idea that individuals must seek their protection, recognition, and future within an external organization.
Yet the evolution of technological societies requires, on the contrary, a cultural transformation.
It requires the emergence of individuals capable of understanding economic structures, exercising critical judgement, and consciously participating in collective choices.
In other words, tomorrow’s society will need fewer dependent human beings and more culturally adult human beings.
The real challenge is therefore not to reinforce individuals’ identification with the company, but to enable citizens to understand the mechanisms that organize the production and distribution of wealth and to know the innovations that have led to them.
This is precisely the perspective adopted by the Joule Model: to make visible the flows of human energy that constitute the real wealth of societies, so that individuals can understand these mechanisms, participate fully in their organization, and contribute to them.
If we observe contemporary economic mechanisms carefully, one difficulty appears immediately: most modern societies have lost the ability to see what actually produces wealth.
Money circulates, prices fluctuate, profits appear and disappear within complex financial accounts, but the material origin of value becomes increasingly invisible.
Yet behind this monetary and financial architecture, the reality remains simple: every form of production requires the mobilization of energy.
Producing a good, cultivating a field, building a house, transporting goods, developing software, or caring for a patient always involves transforming matter through an expenditure of energy.
In human societies, this energy takes two main forms.
The first is living human energy: physical effort, attention, intelligence, learning, and experience mobilized by individuals in their activities.
The second is human energy quantified and embodied in machines and infrastructure: energy accumulated in techniques, tools, buildings, and productive systems.
In other words, even when machines work, they extend past human energy.
Without the human beings who designed, manufactured, programmed, and maintained them, they would remain inert — and we would have disappeared. It is therefore human energy that has been set in motion, not money.
Modern economics has progressively reversed this obvious fact.
Instead of treating money as a simple accounting instrument used to exchange the products of human work, it has come to present wealth as if it arose from money itself or from financial capital.
Value then appears to emerge from monetary circulation, investment, or financial operations.
This reversal of perspective has a major consequence: the real source of wealth becomes invisible.
Societies can then believe that prosperity depends essentially on the quantity of money available or on their ability to attract capital.
Within this framework, human labour appears merely as an adjustment variable, a cost to be reduced in order to improve profitability.
This is precisely what corporate accounting reveals: the wage bill appears among the costs to be controlled.
The project of the Joule Model is to reverse this invisibility.
It is not a question of abolishing money or denying the usefulness of financial instruments.
It is a question of returning these instruments to their original function: measuring and organizing the exchange of human energy mobilized in production.
When value is brought back to its energy foundation, several realities become clearer.
First, the wealth of a society rests above all on the ability of its members to mobilize and organize their physical, intellectual, and technical energy.
Second, machines and technologies are not autonomous entities, but extensions of human energy accumulated over time.
Third, the distribution of wealth depends directly on the way a society decides to recognize and distribute that energy.
By reconnecting value to human energy, economics ceases to be an opaque system reserved for specialists.
It once again becomes a mechanism understandable by everyone.
Every productive activity can be described as a transformation of human energy — direct or mediated by machines — applied to matter in order to produce goods or services.
Collective wealth then appears as the sum of the human capacities mobilized within society.
This approach also makes contemporary transformations easier to understand.
Technological progress progressively reduces the amount of human energy required to produce certain material goods, while increasing the importance of knowledge, research, learning, and creativity.
Wealth therefore depends increasingly on collective intelligence and on societies’ capacity to learn.
Under these conditions, the central economic question changes in nature.
It is no longer only a matter of knowing how to organize work within companies.
It is a matter of knowing how a society organizes and recognizes the human energy that keeps it alive.
This requires rethinking:
the way individuals contribute to production;
the way that contribution is recognized;
the way the wealth produced is distributed.
This is precisely the question the Joule Model attempts to answer.
By establishing an accounting system based on the human energy actually mobilized in production, it seeks to make visible what constitutes the true wealth of societies.
Economics can then become what it should always have been: a collective tool for organizing the use of human energy in the service of common life.
Once we accept that all wealth comes, directly or indirectly, from human energy mobilized in production, an essential question appears: how can this energy be measured?
Every society in fact possesses a collective energy reserve.
This reserve does not consist of gold, money, or financial capital.
It consists of the real capacities of its members to produce, learn, invent, and transform their environment.
This reserve has two main dimensions.
The first is the reserve of living human energy.
Every individual possesses a physical and cognitive capacity to act. This capacity is expressed through measurable energy expenditure. Biological sciences have long known that human activity mobilizes a quantity of energy that can be expressed in calories or joules.
The human body transforms chemical energy from food into muscular work, brain activity, and physical effort.
This daily energy constitutes the material basis of all productive activity.
The second dimension is the reserve of human energy quantified and embodied in machines and infrastructure.
Every machine, every tool, every building, every technical network results from a past accumulation of human energy. Machines are, in a sense, human energy transformed and stored in matter.
They then make it possible to amplify societies’ productive capacity considerably.
Thus, when a machine produces, it does not create wealth out of nothing. It mobilizes past human energy invested in its design, manufacture, and maintenance.
To make this reality visible, the Joule Model proposes defining what may be called the Human Joule Reserve.
This reserve corresponds to the quantity of human energy available in a society at a given moment.
It depends on several factors:
the total population;
the general state of health of that population;
its level of education and competence;
the distribution of its time among different activities.
In a society of several tens of millions of inhabitants, this energy reserve is considerable.
Every day, millions of individuals mobilize their physical and intellectual energy to produce, maintain, learn, care, build, or transmit knowledge.
This collective activity constitutes the true wealth of a society.
To this living human energy is added a second form of reserve: human energy accumulated in machines.
Industrial societies have progressively built immense technical systems: agricultural machinery, factories, transport infrastructure, electrical grids, computer systems.
These systems are the result of human work accumulated over generations.
They represent a gigantic reserve of quantified human energy capable of amplifying production.
In some activities, the share of direct human work even becomes minor compared with the energy mobilized by machines.
But this transformation does not mean that wealth now comes from the machines themselves.
It simply means that societies now use past human energy to multiply the effectiveness of present human energy.
The wheel, invented around 5,500 years ago and used by human beings for centuries, still equips our bicycles; but if no human being pedals, it has no utility. The same is true of all our tools and machines.
When the economy is observed from this perspective, collective wealth takes on a much more concrete form.
It is no longer a monetary abstraction resulting from thousands of conflicts.
It becomes the real capacity of a society to mobilize its human and technical energy in order to produce the material conditions of life.
This perspective also makes it possible to understand a major phenomenon of our time.
Technological progress increases the power of machines and reduces the amount of direct human energy required to produce certain material goods; we shall measure this later.
At the same time, however, it greatly increases the importance of knowledge, education, research, and creativity.
In other words, wealth depends increasingly on collective intelligence if it is to be maintained and expanded within a society that is itself becoming increasingly fragile.
The Joule Model therefore proposes constructing an economic accounting system that makes this reality visible.
Rather than treating money as the fundamental unit of value, it proposes taking as its reference the human energy actually mobilized in production.
This approach makes it possible to reconstruct what may be called the energy foundation of the economy.
Production then becomes legible as a transformation of human energy — direct or mediated by machines — applied to matter in order to produce goods and services.
Within this framework, money does not disappear.
It simply becomes an instrument of measurement and exchange grounded in a physical reality: the human energy mobilized within society. Money serves only to monetize caloric energy, preserving a common framework of psychological habits and allowing exchange with the outside world.
Once wealth is recognized as a transformation of human energy, one question becomes unavoidable: how much human energy does a society really possess?
In other words: what is its collective energy reserve?
This question is almost never asked in traditional economic systems because wealth is expressed there in money.
The Joule Model begins from the opposite direction: it first accounts for the human energy available.
This accounting constitutes the Joule Reserve.
Not as an ideology, but as the logical consequence of an obvious fact already explained: wealth is transformed human energy.
In the current system, when this source becomes invisible, wealth appears to come from elsewhere: from money, capital, or financial institutions.
This reversal of perspective constitutes one of the foundations of the modern economic system.
This energy capacity is neutralized by the artificial scarcity of money, and this situation has sustained a lasting confusion.
The biological necessity to produce has often been interpreted as proof that certain people had to organize or own production.
Yet ontological constraint designates no owner. It merely indicates that a society must mobilize energy in order to live.
Forms of economic domination do not arise from this constraint itself; the constraint is only the environment in which human beings evolved. Human organizations developed from the ways in which people lived within that scarcity. Over time, this led to the capitalization of wealth held by a small number of historical heirs to the strongest. These are forms of capital within an organization that human beings either chose or endured, and in which they were obliged either to borrow from the holders of capital or to alienate themselves through work.
This situation produced a lasting confusion.
The biological necessity to produce in the face of ontological scarcity came, over time, to be interpreted as proof that capital had to organize production.
Yet ontological constraint does not designate an owner. It designates only one fact: a society must mobilize energy in order to live.
Economic history has often transformed this universal necessity into a particular relationship of domination, as Karl Marx brought to light.
The Joule Model therefore clearly distinguishes two realities: the constraint to produce, which is universal, and the forms through which production is organized, which are historical.
This does not mean that capital is a pure illusion or an historical anomaly without roots. It was built up over centuries in a context of real scarcity, uncertainty, risk, slow accumulation, and inherited wealth. It answered the needs of an era in which production depended closely on prior savings, the concentration of resources, and organizational power.
Historically, accumulation did not arise from nothing. It was certainly embedded in relations of power, but also in a necessity: financing infrastructure, equipping workshops, fitting out ships, building factories, developing networks.
Capital was an instrument of expansion in a world of relative energy scarcity. Failing to recognize this would be an error.
What the Joule Model changes is not the past existence of this logic, into which millions of human beings were born without having created it.
What has changed is the present energy context.
In a society where productive power rests mainly upon a structural human reserve, a machine reserve derived from accumulated human energy, and an already deployed technological organization, permanent recourse to private capital as a prerequisite for all production is no longer a physical necessity.
Society already possesses the real energy power.
It no longer needs the capital of the rich. The Joule Model will not dispossess them, however, because doing so would constitute an anthropological injustice, independently of the behaviours recorded by history.
The Joule Model does not rewrite history through the values of today, values with which we condemn human beings of the past without recognizing the historical error we may thereby commit.
From that point onward, the Joule Model does not need to “call upon” private capital in order to exist. The Joule Bank can make social energy available without interest because it does not create fictitious wealth: it organizes the circulation of a reserve that is already present and of which every human being is an owner.
But this does not mean that holders of capital should be denied, expropriated, or rendered useless.
That would be historically false and politically destructive.
Accumulated capital itself represents past human energy, materialized in monetary, real-estate, industrial, or financial form. It is the product of an earlier system for translating energy into wealth, a system in which all our ancestors participated within the always unequal and exploitative organizations of their respective eras.
The Joule Model does not destroy this reality, because no one can erase what no longer exists except in our memory or in the remains that archaeologists make “speak.”
It converts it. It converts capital into caloric energy and, from there, monetizes it.
By integrating existing capital into an energy accounting system converted into joules, its origin is not denied. It is placed within a framework coherent with the new physical basis of wealth.
This conversion is not confiscation; it is reclassification.
Capital holders do not lose their capacity for initiative.
They simply cease to be the compulsory suppliers of social energy.
Their wealth is no longer required as the exclusive lever for access to production. It becomes a conscious participation in a collective venture.
This is where the Employers’ Bank comes into play.
It is not a remnant of capitalism.
It is the space in which economic actors — entrepreneurs, employers, project initiators — can continue to organize, invest, coordinate, and innovate. It would equally be an error of judgement to deprive society of their skills, irrespective of their political opinions or behaviours they may have had; the Labour Code itself bears witness to the history of those relations. Anyone occupying their place in those times, or today, would have acted within the same conditions. No one can truly refute that. The idea is simple: a friend once told me that if he had been Napoleon, he would have done this or that. He eventually understood that this was impossible, because if he had done this or that, he could not have been Napoleon.
The difference is fundamental:
The “rich” no longer advance money that demands a return because of scarcity.
They mobilize available social energy within a framework without structural interest.
Capital ceases to be a power of obstruction; it becomes an organizational competence placed at the service of economic activity. The Joule Model distributes the income required for the functioning of the economy to all workers and active participants.
At this stage of the demonstration, a reaction is almost inevitable from a reader trained in classical economics.
Several objections immediately arise:
if wealth is measured in human energy, what becomes of prices?
if society possesses a collective energy reserve, why continue to work?
if money is no longer scarce, is there not a risk of inflation?
if one country adopts such a system, how can it remain competitive in the world economy?
These objections are legitimate.
They do not arise from an intellectual error, but from the theoretical framework within which modern economics has been conceived for several centuries.
That framework rests upon three implicit assumptions:
monetary scarcity organizes the economy;
capital is a prerequisite for production;
prices are the only way to reveal value.
The Joule Model does not deny these historical mechanisms.
It simply argues that they have become ill-suited to a civilization that already possesses considerable productive power, hidden and not used for what it truly is.
The objections must therefore be heard, but under one clear condition: they can be retained only if they do not lead us to reconstruct the very system that the analysis is seeking to move beyond.
In other words:
if, in answering the criticisms, we reintroduce monetary scarcity, the financing of subsistence through prices, or the idea that capital must precede all production, then we return exactly to the starting point.
The Joule Model does not ignore classical economics.
It places it within history.
It considers that the tools classical economics built were adapted to an era of real material scarcity, but that they become insufficient when productive power exceeds elementary needs. Nor can economics any longer be thought without taking into account the consequences that flow from it, as though those consequences occupied no place in human existence.
The question is therefore not whether these objections are intelligent.
The question is whether they still describe the world as it has become.
Within this framework, current holders of wealth no longer need to defend their assets as a vital rampart. Since material security is guaranteed by the Joule Model through the accounting of the Joule Reserve, wealth ceases to be an insurance policy against insecurity. It becomes a tool for engagement, innovation, and creation.
Capital is no longer an organ of domination; it becomes an organ of contribution.
Historically, accumulation was built upon centuries-old relations of force and appropriation: when territories were conquered, the human beings living on them were taken with them. Human beings could therefore change political dominants without ever knowing it.
In a system where recognized energy abundance exists, the power relationship loses its structural justification.
The Joule Model does not humiliate holders of capital; it invites them to participate consciously in an evolution.
Wealth does not disappear because it is no longer desired; it changes status because the scarcity that justified it is no longer real.
This is not a revolution against the rich; it is a change in the frame of reference.
Private capital is no longer indispensable to the functioning of the world.
But those who hold it can become major actors in the transition, no longer as owners of a scarce lever, but as organizers of a common energy.
This is how the Joule Model moves beyond capitalism without denying it.
It incorporates its history by converting it.
The Joule Model does not deny history.
It begins from an essential principle: no one is responsible for having been born into a given system. We are actors in a trajectory, not the authors of its origin.
The capital accumulated today is the product of a world structured by monetary scarcity. For those who hold it, it has been:
protection against uncertainty;
a guarantee of transmission;
a lever of influence, and in practice a form of discretionary power;
sometimes, a tool for genuine innovation.
It has also been an instrument of domination. But above all, it has been an insurance mechanism within an unstable system.
If this transition is approached as a moral expropriation, an archaic defensive reflex is immediately triggered.
The Joule Model, however, is not based on punishment. It has no one to punish and no one to judge. It is based on conversion.
When wealth is no longer necessary as vital insurance, it ceases to be a fortress.
The Joule Model overturns the saying: “If the wealth one possesses is no longer desired, one is poor.”
In the present system, that saying works because wealth is desired as protection against vulnerability. No longer desiring it means losing one’s security.
In the Joule Model, because material security is guaranteed by the common Reserve, wealth ceases to be a defensive necessity. It becomes a capacity for free action.
The holder of capital does not become poor because wealth is no longer scarce.
They become free from the need to defend it.
This is a major psychological reversal.
Today, wealth is:
a rampart;
a weapon;
insurance;
a hierarchy.
In the Joule Model, it becomes:
a competence;
an organizational capacity;
a capacity for initiative;
conscious participation.
Converting capital into an energy equivalent (capital ÷ €0.0355 in the approach developed later) does not destroy accumulated value. It places it within a stable frame of reference.
The holder of capital is no longer the person who controls access to production.
They become one actor among others in a system where social energy is available without structural interest.
The fundamental fear disappears: the fear of being excluded from the vital circuit.
It is this fear that makes any reform explosive today.
The Joule Model does not attack personal wealth; it removes the necessity of wealth as protection against poverty.
That is an immense difference.
It does not say: “The rich are superfluous.”
It says: “The scarcity that justifies domination is no longer real.”
And when scarcity disappears as the foundation, the power relationship loses its historical justification.
The transition is no longer a struggle, a revolution.
It becomes an evolution.
Capital holders can retain their role of initiative, participate in the Employers’ Bank, organize, innovate and undertake, but without structurally capturing collective energy and without turning others into human money-printing presses.
They do not lose their dignity; they lose only a historical monopoly that has become obsolete.
And this may be the most calming aspect of the model: it identifies no guilty parties.
It reveals a transformation.
Humanity has moved from a world of relative energy scarcity to a world of structural productive abundance, together with the capacity, through research, to replace exhaustible sources.
The accounting system must follow this transformation.
This is not a revolution against a class.
It is a change of standard.
And when the standard changes, the hierarchy changes naturally.
From this point on, this book is neither one more denunciation of capitalism nor one more social utopia. It does not seek to judge the actors of the system morally or to set artificial camps against one another. It begins from an observation now established: wealth comes from human activity, but existing institutions have made this reality illegible, to the point that those who produce wealth have been durably dispossessed of it without understanding how.
Opacity has become a structure. It is not necessarily intentional; it is functional.
The objective of the Joule Model essay is simple to state but demanding to implement: to make wealth readable, measurable and shareable, so that institutions cease to operate on implicit narratives and instead rest on mechanisms that everyone can understand.
To achieve this, the book proposes a fundamental shift: no longer organize society around wages and the market as conditions of access to life, but around the explicit recognition of human energy as the universal source of wealth.
No longer: “Who pays?”
But: “Where does wealth actually come from?”
From this principle, several institutional consequences follow, not as an ideological posture, but through logical consistency.
First, this book clearly distinguishes what belongs to production from what belongs to the protection of life. Producing goods and services is an economic activity. Eating, having a home, receiving healthcare, learning, growing old, and protecting oneself against natural risks are not markets: they are universal passages of human existence.
As long as these passages are embedded in the price of goods, everyone indirectly buys back their own survival.
This is why the Joule Model introduces economic partner income. This income is neither a wage, nor assistance, nor charity. It recognizes the fact that every person participates, directly or indirectly, in the production of collective wealth.
It does not reward a position. It recognizes an ontological participation.
Next, this book organizes the removal of social protection from the price of labour. Today, health, retirement, disability, compensation and collective risks are financed indirectly and opaquely through wages and prices. The Joule Model proposes that they be financed explicitly by a Joule Bank.
Protection ceases to be a hidden cost. It becomes an acknowledged function.
This clarification transforms price formation. A price no longer includes the survival of individuals, illness, or old age. It reflects only the real cost of production: the necessary human and material energy.
The price ceases to be a mixture of production and fear.
The book also addresses the remuneration of learning. Learning becomes a central activity, productive in the long term, and therefore legitimately remunerated.
Finally, this essay proposes a new institutional reading of economic roles. Wage employment may continue to exist as a contract, but it no longer structures access to life. The entrepreneur organizes measured production. The social partner who replaces the wage earner contributes explicitly to collective balance. The State guarantees the readability of rules and flows.
The State becomes neither a universal owner nor a moral arbiter. It becomes the guarantor of transparency.
This book does not promise a perfect society. It proposes a readable and responsible society.
In this section, we establish a clear comparison between the payment of wages through the expenditure of energy required to work and the historical origin of capital, on the one hand, and the financing of economic partner income through accounted-for and monetized human energy, on the other.
The objective is to make visible a simple but concealed mechanism: as we have written, employees receive wages paid by employers from capital that, historically, was built upon the labour of all those who expended their energy at work—as servants, serfs, slaves and then wage earners—that is, under the dependence of a master, whatever name that master took over the course of civilizations.
In other words, capital is not an autonomous source of wealth. It is the result of an accumulation of past human energy by those who had others perform the work. It is quantified labour, organized, transmitted and possessed by the “Masters of every age.” What we call capital is nothing other than transformed and stored human energy, made available over time in the form of money and machines, and held by those who employed helpers or owned economic infrastructure or institutions.
This point is decisive: no wealth exists that does not originate in an expenditure of human energy or in its mechanical extension, from domestication to artificial intelligence.
From this, a second and more discreet mechanism appears.
In the present system, the employee’s remuneration appears to come from the employer because its historical formation is not taught—the economy of plunder. In reality today, however, it comes from the overall economic circuit into which the employee’s own production is reintegrated.
Here we need to slow the reasoning down in order to follow each stage, both yesterday (except in the case of slaves) and today.
The employee expends energy in order to produce and receives 100 in wages in exchange;
this production includes the wage of 100 as a cost in class 6 of expenses in the accounting framework;
this cost of 100 is incorporated into the calculation of the cost price that enters the final price;
the production is sold on the market for 100 plus a margin X, which allows payment of the employer’s share of social security;
the employee, as a consumer, buys the production for 100 plus the employer’s social-security share and everything else added to form the final customer price;
when the employee consumes what they produce, they therefore buy back, in full, their wage, the employer’s social-security share and the margin—in other words, the monetary value of the energy they expended, the value of their own labour.
The simple example shows that a good sold for 100 plus a margin X contains, within that price, a share corresponding to the wage of the employee who produced it. When the employee buys that good, they pay a price that already contains their own remuneration and the employer’s health contribution. The detour is complex, but the result is simple: the employee helps produce what they consume, consumes what they helped produce, and at a minimum buys back the cost of their own life. The cost price corresponds to all the direct and indirect costs incurred in producing a good or service. Selling price = cost price + margin.
In the capitalist system, this mechanism is indirect, fragmented and invisible. In the Joule Model, it is direct, measured and acknowledged: human energy is accounted for upstream, and income is paid on that basis. In both models, producing the same good requires the employee to expend the same energy. In the Joule Model, income is granted as soon as a job is taken up, because it is the employee’s energy that will enable the production of what is needed, through the initiative of an employer who requires assistance to carry out an objective. In the capitalist model, the employee commits their energy to a job that the employer remunerates out of capital inherited from history. To avoid losing that amount from capital, the employer includes the wage expenditure as a charge in the selling price, plus the margin, which the same employee will then pay as a consumer. Capital is therefore restored: by using wages to consume and purchasing the good at its selling price, the employee returns their wage to rebuild capital, while the margin serves to increase capital and provide the employer’s income. In both cases, the same energy is expended and financed through the employee’s participation in the circuit.
The difference therefore lies not in the origin of wage income, but in the readability of the purchasing circuit.
It is here that a major reversal occurs.
If both income and capital come from human energy, in the past as today, then those who produce that energy can no longer be regarded as mere executants. This is why the governance of the Joule Model brings employers and former wage earners together.
This right is not an ideological demand. It is a logical consequence. Those who produce value are legitimate participants in its organization.
In the present system, this reality is neutralized. The employee is kept in a position of execution. They work but do not decide. They produce but do not organize. They are integrated into a system whose structural responsibility escapes them.
The Joule Model reverses this logic. It does not grant a new power; it reveals a responsibility that already exists but has been confiscated.
The employee therefore becomes a co-actor:
in defining incomes;
in defining margins;
in defining the real costs of life;
in the collective organization of the economy.
But this shift is not neutral.
It requires a profound change of posture. The issue is no longer merely to execute, or even to criticize, but to participate. It is no longer a matter of living within a system one undergoes, but within a system one helps to build.
And this is where the real difficulty appears.
Fear of losing familiar reference points.
Fear of taking on a new responsibility.
Fear of no longer being able to take refuge behind a system that one criticizes but that nevertheless provides structure.
For despite its constraints, the capitalist model offers a form of psychological comfort: it shifts responsibility towards others—employers, institutions, leaders. The Joule Model does the opposite: it redistributes responsibility among economic actors.
This passage from the role of executor to that of co-decision-maker constitutes an anthropological transformation. It depends not only on intellectual understanding, but on the capacity to assume that responsibility.
At this point, a line of division appears.
Not between superior and inferior individuals, but between those who accept entering into this responsibility as cultural adults, and those who prefer to remain within a framework where decisions are taken elsewhere and they remain simple executants.
Some will choose this transformation.
Others will prefer the stability of a system they know, even if it constrains them.
And this is where a more complex phenomenon appears.
Not necessarily through ignorance, but through refusal to see what making reality visible implies.
As long as mechanisms remain invisible, they are not contested. Once they become visible, they oblige people to reposition themselves. That repositioning may be refused.
This refusal may take the form of criticism, distortion or rejection of the model, not because of its internal coherence, but because of the implications it carries.
This phenomenon is not limited to individuals. It can exist at the level of States.
A State adopting the Joule Model would mechanically become more competitive by separating the costs of life from production costs. Such a transformation could be perceived as a major rupture by other States, which might seek to contain it, as history has already shown in other contexts of systemic transformation—whether Greece more recently, the French Revolution of 1789, the Paris Commune, or communist countries.
We are therefore dealing not only with an economic question, but with a question of collective capacity to integrate a transformation of reality.
For, fundamentally, the problem is simple: what can be demonstrated is not immediately acceptable.
We return, then, to our biological atavisms in order to understand the difficulty of choice.
The cortex can understand, analyse and establish causal links. But the older structures of human behaviour—linked to security, hierarchy and fear, and forming the archaic brain—do not change at the same pace.
And everything is played out in that gap: between what we are capable of understanding... and what we are prepared to assume.
Yet this difficulty in seeing, understanding and assuming reality becomes all the more serious as our societies themselves become technologically more powerful and, for that very reason, more fragile.
As we saw at the beginning of the introduction, technological societies become fragile because they rest on an accumulation of knowledge that they must maintain and renew continuously, independently of international supply circuits.
The more technological a society becomes, the more powerful it becomes, but also the more fragile. This fragility does not arise from any particular moral weakness; it arises because a technological society rests on accumulated, specialized and interdependent layers of knowledge that it must constantly maintain, transmit, correct and renew.
An agrarian society can survive for a long time with stable knowledge transmitted locally. An industrial society already requires more: engineers, skilled workers, doctors, accountants and technicians. But a hypertechnological society depends on an even denser cognitive fabric: computing, networks, energy, health, law, logistics, research, maintenance, security, ecology, communication and risk arbitration. As technology grows more complex, ignorance ceases to be merely an individual weakness; it becomes a collective danger.
A nuclear power station, an electricity grid, a global supply chain, a hospital system, digital infrastructure or a drinking-water network do not operate through machines alone. They depend on up-to-date knowledge, maintained know-how, understood procedures and shared skills. When this knowledge deteriorates, it is not only efficiency that declines: society itself becomes vulnerable.
In other words, technological modernity shifts the centre of collective stability. What protected society yesterday was first strength, then material production, then industrial organization. Increasingly, what protects it now is the quality of the level of understanding available within the population and its institutions.
A technological society is therefore not merely a society of machines. It is a society of memory, transmission, vigilance, research and permanent correction. It can endure only if it maintains the knowledge that keeps it standing.
At this point, learning can no longer be regarded as a secondary expense, a cultural luxury or a simple preparation for employment. It becomes a function of civilizational security.
For a society that does not renew its knowledge becomes dependent on mechanisms it no longer understands. It continues to use powerful tools without being capable of governing their effects. It becomes technologically advanced and cognitively vulnerable.
This is where the need for a knowledge economy appears.
Not an economy in which knowledge is commodified like any other product, but one in which the production, maintenance, diffusion and transmission of knowledge become central activities of the community.
Within such a framework, learning is no longer useful only to the individual; learning protects society as a whole.
Training, understanding, verifying, transmitting, connecting disciplines, and maintaining the scientific, legal, technical, historical and moral culture of a population become acts of collective preservation.
A technological society that does not invest in shared intelligence prepares its own ruptures: breakdowns, systemic errors, manipulation, dependencies and authoritarian regression. The more sophisticated it becomes, the more it needs a population capable not only of using its tools, but of understanding their principles, limits and dangers.
This is why the Joule Model does not make learning a generous appendix to the system. It makes it a central function.
Paying people to learn does not simply mean recognizing an individual right to cultivate oneself. It means recognizing that the continuity of a complex civilization depends increasingly on the capacity of its members to keep alive the cognitive heritage that makes it possible.
This centrality of learning will have another, even more concrete consequence: it will transform individuals’ relationship to occupations themselves.
In a world where access to life is no longer conditioned by the fear of shortage, certain forms of work will no longer be able to continue in their old form simply because they were imposed by necessity.
Many difficult, repetitive or exhausting activities will remain necessary.
But they will no longer be able to rely on the constraint of survival in order to find labour.
Society will then have to choose lucidly among three paths:
greatly revalue certain indispensable occupations;
transform the way they are organized;
or accelerate technical innovation intended to reduce their arduousness.
This shift will be particularly visible in construction, materials handling, agriculture, cleaning, logistics and certain heavy industries.
A bricklayer who, in the Old World, spent a lifetime laying thousands of bricks because there was no other means of subsistence will not necessarily accept that repetition once material security is guaranteed.
Society will then have to invent other productive forms: prefabrication, moulding, automation, new materials, more intelligent organization of worksites, and greater use of technologies that save unnecessary human effort.
In other words, the Joule Model does not merely create a knowledge economy.
It creates structural pressure towards an economy of inventiveness.
When human beings are no longer held by scarcity, technology must cease to be a means of domination and become again what it should always have been: a liberation from absurd effort.
This movement is not a secondary effect of the model.
It is one of its most logical consequences.
The less a society can rely on constraint, the more it must rely on intelligence, organization and innovation.
In ancient societies, survival depended directly on bread, fire, territory and physical strength. In technological societies, it also depends on the maintenance of knowledge.
The knowledge economy therefore becomes not an optional refinement, but an invisible infrastructure of collective stability.
And the more a society rests on complex systems, the more decisive that infrastructure becomes.
At this level, failing to organize learning as a major social function amounts to deliberately weakening the very conditions of continuity.
This introduction cannot remain without a conclusion. Changing living conditions means replacing the capitalist tale with the tale of the Joule Model; it does not mean changing the human being.
It is tempting to believe that human evil comes from a moral defect. But this belief always encounters the same limit: it asks human beings to become better in a world that obliges them to become worse in order to survive.
Virtue is demanded within a framework that rewards predation.
Human beings are neither good nor bad by essence; they are plastic. They take the form their world imposes upon them.
This is why transformation cannot be moral alone. It must be environmental.
The wager of the Joule Model is not that human beings will become wise. It is more modest: if the conditions under which instinct is satisfied are changed, dominant behaviours will change with them.
This book does not promise peace. It explores a possibility: a world in which survival would no longer be tied to domination, recognition would no longer require crushing others, and human energy would be directed towards understanding.
Perhaps this, ultimately, is true progress: not producing more, but making self-destruction less likely.
Over the long term, humanity will not need everyone’s labour, but everyone’s intelligence in order to endure.
For the first time, a civilization knows that it can collapse. It knows history. It sees the mechanisms. It possesses both power and consciousness.
This knowledge creates an unprecedented responsibility.
Changing organization does not mean changing numbers. It means touching what holds a life together: security, recognition and dignity.
The Joule Model does not promise wealth.
It proposes that people should no longer have to buy back their right to exist, and no longer have to be poor.
But if such a transformation is not to remain a wish, we must now move beyond anthropological observation alone and understand what, within human history itself, makes this institutional bifurcation necessary.
What is changing today in human history is not the existence of conflict.
Rivalries, domination, wars and crises have always accompanied the evolution of societies. They are not a moral anomaly; they are an anthropological fact. Human beings, like all social living beings, enter into competition. They seek to distinguish themselves, survive, protect their own and transmit.
What changes, therefore, is not conflict itself.
What changes is the scale and power of the means involved, at two levels.
Biologically, human beings can confront one another, but barring accident they are not naturally equipped to kill one another: they have neither pointed teeth nor sharp claws, and a gatherer has little likelihood of killing another with the body alone.
Culturally, however, humanity gains access to tools that become weapons in a permanent escalation over the centuries through industrialization and knowledge. Within this development, two levels can be distinguished.
The first is the level at which, for millennia, collective errors, excesses of power or armed conflicts remained circumscribed. They caused the collapse of empires, regional famines and mass destruction, but humanity as a whole survived.
Crises remained absorbable at the scale of the species.
The second is contemporary. It appears at the end of the Second World War with nuclear weapons; since then, the conditions of the past are no longer guaranteed.
Accumulated technological power—nuclear, biological, algorithmic and energetic—has reached a threshold at which certain decisions can produce irreversible effects on a global scale.
The interconnection of financial, industrial and food systems now makes shocks systemic.
A major war, uncontrolled military escalation, a global energy disruption or an authoritarian drift in an interconnected world would no longer be local crises.
They would become civilizational crises.
In other words:
what yesterday destroyed an empire can today compromise the very conditions of organized life on a planetary scale.
The currently dominant economic model was conceived in a world where the consequences of competition remained limited and where the weapons used to settle conflicts were likewise limited.
It cannot consciously reform itself, because its internal dynamic rests on acceleration, capture and permanent rivalry. The one who prevails is the strongest—not only economically, but also by backing economic power with military power capable of protecting its interests.
It rests on a simple dynamic: acceleration, capture, permanent competition, the pursuit of accumulation, and military protection.
This dynamic is not morally condemnable in itself, because it is a representation of innate behaviour. The problem is that it is not the cortex that directs it, but the primitive brain, commonly called the reptilian brain.
In previous centuries, despite all its tragedies, this dynamic produced growth, innovation, wealth and technological expansion.
But today, coupled with unprecedented technological power, it mechanically produces an escalation of military, economic and technological means, some of which have already produced irreversible effects: persistent chemical pollution, climate disruption and the weakening of geopolitical balances.
The question is therefore not moral. It is structural.
Either humanity continues this model to its logical conclusion, hoping that the self-regulating mechanisms of the species will suffice despite accumulated power—an unlikely hypothesis.
Or it undertakes a conscious bifurcation in order to protect itself.
The Joule Model does not claim to abolish conflict. Human beings will always have sources of disagreement.
It does not claim to transform human nature in order to make it more virtuous or more deserving; the reptilian brain is indispensable.
It does not promise naïve concord or harmony in a universe where predation continually regenerates itself.
It proposes a structural shift: remove human survival from the field of economic competition; separate the protection of life from production; make readable the real flows of wealth produced by work; define the necessary place each person occupies within them, from employer to employee; and direct technological power towards stabilizing and facilitating life rather than escalating destruction.
The Joule Model does not promise harmony; it seeks to make continuity of existence possible in the face of the risks generated by the capitalist model.
At this point, it becomes necessary to understand the historical origin of that model, which rests on the axiom associated with Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
One of the pillars of modern economics rests on an idea that has become almost unquestionable: by pursuing individual interest, each person would, without intending to, contribute to the general interest.
This intuition, formulated by Adam Smith, had considerable historical power. It liberated initiative, weakened old rigidities and made it possible to imagine a social organization based on spontaneous coordination rather than constraint.
But over time this idea proved incomplete, because individual interest does not systematically serve the general interest as he believed.
It necessarily participates in it, but blindly. The present contradicts the absolute form of the claim.
And now, at the scale of technological societies, individual interest can destroy the general interest.
Contemporary facts are no longer hypotheses; they are observable.
Mass pollution, accumulation of waste, climate disruption, artificialization of environments, unlimited extraction, financialization disconnected from reality: all are phenomena produced by decisions that are rational at the individual scale but destructive at the collective scale.
Each actor optimizes their own interest, while the whole—the interest of humanity—deteriorates.
What the axiom could not anticipate was not the logic of individuals, which remained within the framework of innate behaviour, but the scale of their cumulative effects before science gave us the means to read them.
In Adam Smith’s time, scientific knowledge did not make it possible to measure these effects. Human activities appeared localized, their consequences limited, and their externalities invisible or negligible.
Today, that ignorance is no longer possible. We know.
And that knowledge changes the scope of the axiom.
For a system of individual interests that does not perceive its global effects becomes a blind system.
And a blind system does not self-regulate; it drifts and becomes distorted.
Individual interest is not in itself a problem. It becomes a problem when it is separated from its consequences.
In other words: it is not freedom of action that is in question, but the absence of a reading of the reality within which that action takes place.
An individual can act in a perfectly rational way at their own scale while contributing to an imbalance they do not perceive.
And if no one perceives that imbalance, it becomes structural.
The purpose here is not to judge Adam Smith.
It is to understand his historical limitation.
He was thinking in a world in which effects were localized, production chains were short, nature appeared inexhaustible, and scientific knowledge remained limited.
In that context, the idea that interests could produce self-regulation could appear coherent.
But in an interconnected, technological and cumulative world, that hypothesis changes in nature.
What was adjustment becomes runaway acceleration; what was coordination becomes imbalance.
In other words, what remained bearable when effects were limited in Adam Smith's time becomes destructive when those effects accumulate through modernity, which developed from the first industrialization in a continuous process of accumulation.
The problem is therefore not the individual; we cannot reproach a human being for carrying an innate structure.
The problem is the absence of a common frame of reference capable of linking individual action to its real effects.
This is precisely where the Joule Model introduces its shift.
It does not seek to constrain individual interest; it seeks to make it lucid. By replacing monetary measurement with energy measurement, it reconnects production with its origin, consumption with its real cost, and individual action with its collective consequences.
But this shift would be insufficient without a second pillar: learning.
Making something visible is not enough; one must still understand what one sees.
This is why the Joule Model inseparably combines a change of reference framework with a generalization of knowledge. Within the evolution that is taking shape, this means paying people to learn so that no one can find themselves without an income.
Smith's axiom should not be rejected; it should be completed.
Individual interest contributes to the general interest, but on one condition: that it be enlightened and informed.
Without understanding, it optimizes for the short term; with understanding, it can act over the long term.
Individual interest is not dangerous; its blindness is.
What was an equilibrium at a small scale becomes an imbalance at a large scale.
A system that does not see its effects cannot regulate itself.
The sum of local rationalities can produce global irrationality.
Freedom without understanding does not produce equilibrium. It produces drift.
Smith thought within a limited world. We live in a cumulative world.
Individual interest becomes collective only when it understands the collective world.
In the following section, we will show that the limitation of Smith's axiom is not merely an error, but a function of the system in which he lived.
We have devoted a development to the Systemic Dominant because its role is decisive.
If individual interest does not spontaneously serve the general interest, a deeper question arises: why does this limitation persist even though we now know its effects?
Why does a system whose consequences are visible continue to operate as though it could not see them?
The answer no longer lies only at the level of individuals. It lies at the level of the structure.
For this blindness is not only a human limitation; it has become a function of the system itself.
This is where what we have called the Systemic Dominant intervenes.
The Systemic Dominant does not designate only dominant actors.
It designates an organization that selects, produces and maintains representations compatible with its own reproduction.
Within this framework, Adam Smith's axiom plays a central role.
It legitimizes a simple idea: what each person does for themselves would, by its very nature, benefit everyone.
This idea is not merely a theory; it is a functional narrative.
A narrative that makes it possible to render the existing organization acceptable, neutralize structural criticism, and maintain individual adherence to the system.
For if everyone believes that their own interest contributes to the common good, the system no longer needs to be questioned about its global effects.
Blindness becomes integrated.
It is no longer merely endured; it is reproduced.
In contemporary societies, knowledge exists, data are available, and analyses are produced.
But they do not all circulate in the same way.
Some representations are valued; others are marginalized.
This selection is not always conscious, but it is real.
And it produces a decisive effect: it keeps individuals within frameworks of thought compatible with the reproduction of the system.
A leader can therefore be extremely intelligent while remaining enclosed within a model of interpretation that does not allow them to perceive the global effects of their decisions.
Not through intellectual incapacity, but because their cognitive environment selects what they are able to see. Pierre Daco illustrated this with the difficulty of turning the dial of one's radio to listen to another station. This limitation has a structuring function that can be necessary in order to create and produce; it maintains a form of functional determinism. But it is no longer acceptable when what it produces can destroy us.
In this context, Smith's axiom ceases to be a simple economic hypothesis.
It becomes a stabilizing mechanism.
It transforms a contestable organization into something perceived as natural.
It prevents the fundamental question from being asked: the link between individual action and collective consequences.
As long as this link remains invisible, the system can function without profound challenge.
This is where the Joule Model introduces a more radical break than it first appears.
It does not merely propose another organization; it changes the framework of perception itself.
By linking wealth directly to human energy, it makes visible mechanisms that the dominant narrative had kept implicit, had kept hidden.
What was presented as natural becomes legible; what was accepted immediately becomes open to question.
And what was invisible becomes measurable.
The limitation of Adam Smith's axiom therefore does not belong only to history.
It reveals a deeper function: that of a system capable of organizing not only exchanges, but also the way in which they are perceived.
As long as that perception remains unchanged, the same mechanisms reproduce themselves.
Even with more knowledge, even with more intelligence.
The real issue is therefore not only economic; it is cognitive.
Changing the system requires changing what the system allows people to see.
A system is maintained not only by what it produces, but by what it makes invisible. In the language of information dissemination, we would say that it lies by omission.
Smith's axiom is no longer merely an idea; it is a mechanism for stabilizing reality.
Thus, what the system does not show, the individual cannot correct; intelligence is not enough when the framework of thought is closed.
In this way, the Systemic Dominant does not only control wealth; it organizes the way wealth is understood.
We have followed a path from economics to anthropology, then to cognition, and finally to structure.
One reality remains to be understood: why do even the dominant actors fail to see the system they serve?
A common mistake is to imagine that dominant actors understand perfectly the system they direct, as though they could see what others cannot see, as though they consciously mastered the mechanisms of domination.
This representation is reassuring because it provides an identifiable person to hold responsible.
But it is inaccurate.
Dominant actors are not outside the system; they are products from within it. They are pieces of the puzzle, not observers standing above it and able to see the fading image of the whole.
In contemporary societies, positions of power are not allocated at random. They result from a process of selection.
This process does not necessarily choose the most lucid individuals; it selects those whose way of thinking is compatible with the system.
In other words, one does not become dominant because one understands the system; one becomes dominant because one functions coherently within it.
This mechanism is often invisible.
It does not rest only on constraint; it rests on adherence, internalization and a form of cognitive conformity.
And when an individual no longer fits that coherence, they are removed, replaced or corrected.
The result is a paradoxical situation.
Highly competent individuals, sometimes with very high measured intelligence, can remain enclosed within a partial reading of reality.
Not because they lack intelligence, but because their intelligence operates within a given framework.
They optimize within the system, but do not question its foundations.
Their rationality is effective but localized: it solves internal problems without challenging the structure that produces them.
This phenomenon produces a powerful illusion: that the system is mastered by those who direct it.
In reality, the system reproduces itself through them.
They make decisions, but within an already defined framework.
They arbitrate, but between options that are already structured.
They act, but according to logics they did not construct.
This does not mean that they bear no responsibility, but their responsibility is not the one commonly imagined.
It is not the responsibility of a conscious will to achieve total domination; it is the responsibility of participating in a system they perceive only partially.
Like everyone else, but at another scale.
Here lies the most powerful lock.
If even those who direct the system cannot see the whole, then the system cannot simply be corrected from within.
For there is no naturally external point of view.
Everyone thinks from inside the system, dominant and dominated alike. We explained this through the metaphor of the puzzle. No one can stand above it to read the fading image as it forms. We therefore have to live with this impossibility, which is why narrative matters so much.
For this situation to hold together, a narrative is required.
A narrative that gives meaning to each person's position.
For dominant actors: merit, competence and responsibility.
For those who are dominated: effort, progress and hope.
These narratives are not necessarily false, but they are incomplete.
And this incompleteness is functional: it allows the system to maintain itself without being perceived as a system, while everyone believes they have chosen freely.
Real change therefore cannot come only from replacing elites, occasional redistribution, or partial reform.
Those transformations remain internal to the existing framework.
The turning point can occur only when the framework itself becomes legible, when what organized perception becomes visible.
This is precisely where the Joule Model takes on its full significance.
It does not assume more virtuous individuals. It does not assume more lucid leaders.
It changes the frame of reference within which everyone thinks and acts.
By making wealth measurable through its real origin - human energy - it reduces the gap between perception and reality.
It does not immediately eliminate inherited behaviours, but it limits their capacity to produce invisible effects.
The problem, therefore, is not that some know while others do not.
The problem is that the system organizes partial knowledge for everyone, to different degrees, but according to the same logic.
As long as that logic is not made visible, it continues to reproduce itself.
Dominant actors do not fully control the system; they are its vectors. This is why the explanatory certainty of conspiracy theories should be treated with doubt.
We do not select those who see the system; we select those who function with it.
Intelligence does not escape its framework. Power does not provide an overview; it provides a capacity for action within a given framework.
The system is not maintained because it is understood.
It is maintained because it is experienced as self-evident.
One objection systematically reappears whenever social transformation is proposed:
"It assumes that individuals will change."
That they will become more rational, more supportive, more conscious.
In other words: better.
This objection is legitimate, because history shows that systems founded on a moral transformation of the individual almost always fail. Religious and philosophical organizations bear witness to this. They identified human difficulties and, in some religions, attributed antisocial behaviour to animality, then formulated commandments - in vain.
Not for lack of ideals, but because they rest on an unstable condition: human will, which we know requires long periods of reflection and changes in environment before the demands of the archaic brain can loosen their hold - Buddhist practices provide one example.
Will fluctuates.
It depends on context, immediate interests, emotions, fear, education and dominant systemic narratives.
A system that assumes constant, enlightened and collective will in fact assumes a condition that cannot be sustained.
This is why models based on virtue eventually collide with reality: individual behaviours return, interests reappear, and old structures re-form in an endless repetition.
The Joule Model does not begin with the question: "How can individuals be made better?"
It begins with another question: "Within what framework do individuals act?"
For effects are not produced by intentions alone.
They are produced by the structures in which those intentions are expressed and by the information to which they have access.
In other words, human behaviour is always embedded in an environment that shapes and directs it.
An individual does not act from an abstract or universal essence.
They act from the world in which they live, and that world is personal to them because they see it from the place where they stand, and no one else can stand there in their place.
The example of Inuit societies makes this easy to understand.
An Inuit does not eat pork, does not sacrifice a goat, and traditionally lives largely on fish.
Not because they are following the prescriptions of Islam, Judaism or Christianity, but because their environment offers different possibilities.
What, in other societies, is framed as a religious or cultural rule can here be understood as a direct consequence of living conditions.
In other words, behaviours attributed to beliefs can often be explained partly by the environment in which those beliefs were constructed.
This does not mean that narratives are useless, because they often justify, organize or stabilize practices already shaped by the real conditions of existence.
Human beings do not think in a vacuum; they think from the world in which they live, at every step.
What we believe to be choices is therefore often drawn from an environment in which the possibilities are already contained, and bringing one of them into being requires a search connected to innate needs.
The dynamic is as follows: the environment shapes behaviours, which we then narrate in order to build a system.
Human behaviour does not arise in a vacuum; it emerges from an environment.
That environment is material: the resources it contains, the constraints it imposes, the climate it undergoes. But it is also informational: it contains available knowledge, language and representations, as well as all the interpersonal relationships established with others.
From this environment, behaviours emerge.
They are not arbitrary. They are adaptive. They respond to specific conditions of life.
Over time, these behaviours stabilize and become habits.
Then these habits are narrated. They take the form of religious, cultural, economic or political narratives.
These narratives do not create the behaviours; they organize them, justify them and make them transmissible.
Finally, these narratives structure systems: institutions, rules - morality, law - and norms.
And these systems, in turn, produce a new environment that influences subsequent behaviours. The loop is therefore complete, and we do not see it. What we take to be free individual choices is often the product of a chain already in place.
Narratives do not merely explain the world; they stabilize what it produces.
The system does not begin with laws; it begins with the environment. Changing behaviour without changing the environment is not enough.
If human behaviour is shaped by its environment, then a decisive question arises:
How can a society be transformed durably?
History provides a clear answer.
Laws can be changed, wealth can be redistributed and institutions can be modified, but as long as individuals continue to think from the same representations, the same mechanisms reappear.
In other words: the forms change, but the structures are reproduced.
The only lever capable of acting in depth is not constraint.
It is understanding.
For to understand is to change the way an individual perceives their environment, their actions and their consequences.
And this change transforms behaviour, not through obligation but through coherence.
In traditional societies, learning was a limited necessity: learning to hunt, cultivate and transmit skills.
Today, the situation is radically different.
We live in societies that are technological, interconnected and cumulative.
Knowledge no longer merely accompanies society; it conditions its stability. A society that ceases to learn becomes fragile.
For it depends on knowledge it no longer masters, techniques it no longer understands and systems it no longer knows how to correct.
This is where the shift occurs. In a complex society, learning is no longer a secondary activity; it becomes a condition of survival.
Not only individual survival, but collective survival.
Humanity now faces a new requirement: continually to adapt in order to maintain, understand and correct what it has itself produced.
The more technical a society becomes, the more it depends on the knowledge that structures it.
And the more it depends on that knowledge, the more indispensable mastery of it becomes.
Artificial intelligence introduces an ambivalence. It is in this context that AI creates a major problem.
It provides access to knowledge without necessarily passing through the process of learning it.
It makes it possible to obtain answers without having travelled the path that leads to them.
At first sight, this appears to be progress, but the shift is not without consequences.
Thought is not limited to access to information. It rests on the ability to connect, associate and structure information in order to construct a narrative, and this capacity requires memory.
A constructed memory, a lived memory. Knowledge without learning has a limit.
Associative thought requires information to have been internalized.
Not in order to store it passively, but in order to mobilize it, connect it and transform it.
Knowledge that has merely been consulted does not have the same effect as knowledge that has been learned. It informs, but it does not structure.
AI is intelligence without experience.
We can question an artificial intelligence and obtain answers.
But this intelligence has an essential limitation: it has no experience of the world. It does not live, perceive or confront its answers with lived reality. It does not walk through the world it describes.
In other words, it can produce knowledge, but it does not produce embodied understanding.
In this context, an old temptation appears, one embedded in living systems: to conserve energy.
If access to knowledge is immediate, why learn?
If the answer is available, why memorize?
But yielding to this logic would be a mistake, because what is gained in ease can be lost in capacity.
There is therefore a real risk of cognitive regression.
A society that delegates learning risks losing the capacity to understand, and a society that no longer understands what it uses becomes dependent on what it does not master.
Conclusion: artificial intelligence does not eliminate the need to learn; it makes that need more demanding. Access to knowledge is not understanding it, and an answer obtained is not a thought that has been constructed.
Economizing effort can produce a loss of capacity; we have already been able to observe this with the calculator.
The calculator did not remove the need to learn mathematics. AI will not remove the need to learn the forms of knowledge required by our present and future development.
The Joule Model draws the consequences of this transformation.
If learning is a vital function, it can no longer be marginal, reserved for only part of the population, or dependent on conventional economic logics.
It must be recognized for what it is: a productive activity.
For learning is not merely accumulating knowledge; it is maintaining and developing society's capacity to function, undertake, innovate and create.
Lifelong learning therefore constitutes a fundamental shift.
Within this framework, value changes in nature. It no longer rests solely on the production of goods.
It also rests on the capacity to understand, adapt and transmit.
Paying people to learn is therefore not a marginal innovation; it is a structural adaptation to the environment of the contemporary world.
A society that does not pay for learning throughout life organizes its own fragility.
Learning is no longer a choice; it is a condition of stability. We can already see this under the capitalist model: a society that produces without understanding exposes itself to the effects of its own production. Knowledge no longer merely accompanies society; it supports it, and we can no longer remain confined to the period of learning inherited from the eighteenth century.
In the current system, an individual can act rationally while contributing to a global imbalance, such as climate warming. This is a geo-historical consequence of human activity, but we had never measured it on today's scale.
Not through ill will, but because the framework does not connect action to consequence. We must therefore draw the lessons from this.
The Joule Model acts precisely at this point: it changes the frame of reference.
It connects action to its real cost, production to its origin, and wealth to human energy.
Thus, the same individual, with the same instincts, does not produce the same effects within a different framework. This remains a structural, not a moral, constraint.
The Joule Model does not ask people to be altruistic, morally superior, or to renounce their own interests.
It introduces a different constraint: the legibility of our actions and our organizations.
When effects become visible, behaviour adjusts not through virtue, but through understanding and coherence with reality.
The implicit analogy is simple: in a society where the consequences of an act are invisible, behaviour can drift without limit.
In a society where those consequences are measurable, they become integrated into decision-making.
This is not a transformation of human nature; it is a transformation of its cognitive environment.
We can now establish the link with the Systemic Dominant: this is precisely what the current system does not allow.
It organizes a dissociation between action and consequence, between production and wealth, and between the individual and the collective. This dissociation allows the system to reproduce itself.
The Joule Model does the opposite: it reconnects. And this reconnection mechanically modifies behaviour because it changes the geo-historical environment.
The real lever of change is therefore not will, apart from the initial decision to accept the Joule Model; it is the framework in which human beings stand and act.
A system endures when it is coherent with the behaviours it produces; it disappears when it becomes incompatible with reality. The same will one day be true of the Joule Model if it is implemented.
The Joule Model therefore does not rest on a fragile hypothesis.
It does not assume a new humanity. It rests on a constant reality: individuals adapt to the framework in which they live because their innate dispositions are built to do so.
Change the framework and the effects change, without requiring a prior transformation of individuals.
We do not change humanity.
We change the framework in which humanity acts, because will fluctuates whereas structures produce recurrent effects.
A durable system does not rest on virtue; it rests on coherence with reality.
This is precisely what allowed capitalism to endure through the centuries.
It did not impose itself only through constraint or ideology. It relied on a deeper reality: a brain structure oriented towards individual interest, the search for security, accumulation and recognition - what we call archaic behaviours and what religions have often called animality.
In this sense, capitalism is coherent with a fundamental part of human functioning. That coherence helps explain its stability.
But this stability has a limit, because what is coherent at one scale can become incoherent at another.
What functions in a given environment can become destructive in a transformed environment.
Changing this framework therefore cannot rest on a simple political will or moral injunction. It requires a much deeper transformation.
A transformation of reference points, representations and ways of understanding and acting.
In other words: a transformation of psychic reality. And that transformation can occur only through learning.
Not as the accumulation of abstract knowledge, but as a process capable of shifting the centres of psychological interest themselves.
What the individual perceives as desirable, what they judge satisfying, and the direction in which they orient their energy.
The point is therefore not to deny the individual structure of living beings.
It is to reconfigure it by allowing other forms of satisfaction and recognition to emerge, compatible with an environment that has become complex and interdependent.
A system changes durably only when it becomes coherent with a new reading of reality.
Capitalism endured because it was coherent with one part of human reality. It will not be replaced by condemning it, but by making it obsolete, by shifting desires - particularly the desire directed towards money and its substitutes.
To transform society is therefore to transform what gives meaning to the individual; without learning, psychic reality will not change.
Thus the Joule Model can function with human beings as they are.
The Joule Model does not promise harmony; it seeks to make the continuity of existence possible in the face of risks generated by the capitalist model.
The Joule Model is not based on the idea of a perfect society.
It assumes neither the disappearance of conflict, nor the erasure of divergent interests, nor a moral transformation of humanity.
It begins from a simpler, more demanding observation: human societies produce effects that exceed the intentions of the people who compose them.
The capitalist model illustrates this. It was not designed to destroy ecological balances or to produce systemic risks at the planetary scale.
And yet it can lead to them, not by intention, but through the accumulation of actions that are coherent at the individual scale and incoherent at the global scale.
This is precisely the kind of dynamic that the Joule Model seeks to make visible.
It does not claim to prevent tensions; it aims to prevent those tensions from producing irreversible effects.
In other words, it does not seek to eliminate human contradictions; it seeks to prevent them from becoming destructive of the very conditions of existence.
The problem is not that human beings have interests. The problem is that the effects of those interests escape them.
The Joule Model does not seek only to stabilize an economy by reducing the conflicts that have shaped it for centuries.
It seeks to make possible the continuity of a species that, through its technological power, is now capable of causing its own disappearance.
The history of life shows that other species have dominated their environment before disappearing.
Considering this possibility for humanity in view of present military and technological realities is not an illusion.
It would be an ordinary component of evolution.
What is unprecedented today is not the possibility of extinction.
It is that this possibility can be caused by the species itself, through the power it has developed.
At the individual scale of everyday life, this reality remains almost invisible. We are psychologically protected from the risk because it does not directly reach our senses.
Everyday life is made of ordinary gestures, bills, work, relationships, fatigue and hopes.
Nothing in immediate experience makes it possible to perceive the systemic dynamics running through the planet.
The analysis of everyday life is necessary in order to live.
But it is insufficient to understand the global long term.
Only an overall reading - geopolitical, energy-related, technological and ecological - makes it possible to grasp the direction taken by human systems.
Such a global reading cannot exist without institutions capable of going beyond the local scale: international organizations, cooperation mechanisms, scientific structures and transnational observation bodies.
These institutions are often criticized.
Sometimes rightly.
But they remain the only instruments capable of providing a coherent planetary view and measuring the interdependencies that bind us.
Their decisions can be contested and their legitimacy debated.
But without them, only fragmented, national and emotional perceptions would remain, incapable of understanding dynamics that no longer recognize borders.
Enclosure within borders, whatever their size, is not an anomaly.
It arises from natural behaviours found across living species.
It corresponds to a fundamental need: securing a nourishing environment, shelter and a community against outsiders.
Within this framework, invasions, colonizations and wars, but also commercial exchanges, have always contributed to mixing populations, long before modern means of communication made it possible to connect societies durably.
These encounters have produced enrichment, but also tragedy.
We may judge them morally today, but they arise from biological behaviour amplified by human cultural capacities.
It is within this context that nationalisms were constructed. For a long time they were perceived as conditions of security: territorial security, economic security and political security.
But what was an adapted response to a fragmented world is not necessarily adapted to an interdependent world.
Today, many of these logics still rest on an ancient fear.
A fear inherited from innate mechanisms, a fear that continues to structure representations even though real conditions have changed, because globalization already exists in practice.
Economies are interconnected, production chains cross borders, and large groups organize themselves globally, while States remain in competition.
This gap reveals a profound tension: economic structures are global, while political representations remain fragmented.
The Joule Model proposes to take account of this reality, not by abolishing existing organizations, but by opening the way towards forms of global institutions - not merely supranational ones - capable of matching the real scale of interdependence.
The history of France illustrates this process.
For centuries, it was composed of feudal territories structured by logics of local domination and protection. Conflicts, alliances and recompositions gradually formed regions.
Those regions, in turn, protected themselves from one another and then, through a similar process of wars, alliances and integrations, eventually formed a larger entity: the nation.
What we now take for granted is the result of a long process of moving beyond smaller borders. Moving beyond State borders is simply a further stage.
The next stage is of the same nature: recognizing a reality that is already present, that of global interdependence.
It is not a rupture; it is a continuity.
Moving from the individual to recognition of the human species as a whole belongs to the same dynamic.
The aim is not to deny individuality, but to move beyond an individualism that has become unsuited to the complexity of collective relations.
We already live with this contradiction without always perceiving it.
The right to property, which the Joule Model does not call into question, illustrates this tension.
It organizes the protection of spaces: agricultural land, private property, industrial infrastructure and public spaces.
But it also limits human circulation in practice.
Taking the individual right to private property to an absolute would amount to assigning every person a portion of territory.
In such a framework, all human movement would become impossible, because everyone would be enclosed within their own space and would depend on the authorization of others in order to move.
Sometimes absurdity is what reveals the limits of a principle.
Pushed to its extreme, what seemed legitimate reveals its contradictions.
The absolute form of a right can become the impossibility of reality and thereby reveal its limits.
What is obvious at a small scale becomes less visible at a large scale.
At the scale of nations, the same mechanism persists.
We continue to organize human movement through authorizations: borders, visas and controls, as though the world were not already interconnected without authorization.
It is no longer only real conditions that limit openness to the world.
It is the FEARS contained in inherited representations, even when the capitalist model provides them with justification.
Borders were an answer; they are no longer always adapted to the question.
The world is already global, and our representations are not yet global.
What we call protection can therefore become destructive enclosure. History has already crossed several thresholds of unification; globalization is a continuation of that process.
We live in an interconnected world with archaic fragmented reflexes that culture has made destructive through the possession of weapons.
Globalization, which many perceive as a technocratic abstraction, is often in reality an attempt to organize a complexity that has become global - a complexity that must move beyond the capitalist model in order to become inhabitable.
In an environment in which strategic rivalry, energy scarcity, economic competition and technological escalation reinforce one another, the probability of an accident, a miscalculation or intentional use increases structurally.
This risk is not simply the act of one individual.
It is the product of an interweaving of millions of human actions that gradually orient the political and economic trajectories of societies.
European history already demonstrated this with the rise of Nazism: it was not only the history of one man, but that of a society that created the political conditions for his emergence.
Systemic risk is not visible in everyday life. It appears only at the scale of historical probabilities and collective trajectories.
This is precisely why geopolitical, energy-related and technological analysis is indispensable: it reveals dynamics that ordinary life does not allow us to perceive.
At this scale, the signals become visible: arms races, tensions over resources, climate disruption, extreme financialization and strategic technological dependencies.
These are not isolated phenomena. They are trajectories.
[Graphic to be recreated in English for the final edition. The French source presents cumulative-risk scenarios for 2025-2100: a constant annual risk of 0.5%, a constant annual risk of 1%, and an escalation scenario rising from 0.5% to 2% per year. The methodological note states that these are probabilistic illustrations rather than exact predictions and that cumulative probability rises as exposure time increases.]
The Joule Model belongs within this global reading of the world.
It does not begin from individual unease. It begins from a systemic observation: the current economic dynamic, combined with accumulated technological power, makes possible a point of rupture that past civilizations could not reach.
The proposed bifurcation is therefore not ideological.
It is evolutionary.
The aim is not to predict a catastrophe; it is to recognize that the continuity of the species is no longer automatic.
The proposed bifurcation rests on a few simple principles: remove human survival from the market, separate the protection of life from production, make the real flows of wealth legible, and consciously direct technological power towards continuity rather than escalation.
From this observation, one question becomes unavoidable: if this bifurcation is to be more than a wish, what minimum structures are necessary to make it operational?
This is where the institutional architecture of the Joule Model begins.
Before entering into the detail of this architecture, its minimum logic and basic functions must be summarized.
For the principles set out in this essay to remain neither abstract nor ideological, the Joule Model rests from the outset on a minimum institutional architecture whose function is not to govern the economy, but to make legible what is currently confused.
The Joule Model does not replace political power with another form of power.
But it removes the undivided domination of financial power - that is, the absolute domination of capital when capital is confused with money and concentrated in a few hands.
It redistributes the power of capital to those who actually possess its original source, because they hold the only original capital that exists: human energy.
This energy is located neither in employers nor in employees taken separately.
It exists in all human beings, without distinction of social status, because it is a shared biological function.
If money disappears, human energy remains.
It can still produce, organize, build, care, teach and transform the world.
If human energy disappears, society disappears. We are not dealing with the same scale of value.
No currency, financial title or accumulated capital can replace the absence of living human energy.
If a real value exists, it is here: in mobilizable human energy, which we use every day.
Money is only a suggestive instrument of translation, normalized through a long history of violence.
It is not the source of value.
The Joule Model therefore proposes explicitly to recognize this hierarchy:
1. Human energy is the primary value.
2. Money is its functional translation.
3. Financial capital is only a secondary derivative, useful for undertaking projects.
Human energy must therefore be converted into a monetary unit, not in order to subordinate it to money, but in order to preserve monetary habits necessary for psychological stability and exchange.
Energy capital then becomes the common capital of all human beings, who participate in its decision-making management together with the political authority of their choosing.
The independent institutions arising from this management do not replace political power.
They remain distinct from it and are representative of organized economic social groups.
Political power remains sovereign in its constitutional functions and, as such, retains a right of oversight over these independent institutions, but it does not decide the use of energy capital.
The management of energy capital is made independent of private financial interests so that collective decision-making is no longer structured by artificial monetary scarcity.
political power does not disappear;
financial power no longer dominates;
human energy again becomes the explicit basis of wealth;
institutions ensure its accounting and management;
democratic sovereignty remains intact.
This is not the abolition of power.
It is a hierarchy of its foundations.
The Joule Model separates what has for centuries been mixed together in prices, wages and balance sheets: the protection of life, production, and the circulation of goods.
This separation makes a real accounting of human energy possible.
Every society, whatever its period, political regime or technical level, is subject to a simple law: in order to live, it must mobilize energy.
It must feed, house, care for, protect, transport, transmit, build, repair, produce and renew the material conditions of existence.
This constraint is neither moral nor ideological. It is material. It predates economic doctrines. It depends neither on capitalism nor socialism nor any particular theory.
It follows from the fact that a human group can survive only by transforming its environment through an expenditure of energy.
This energy law is therefore primary.
Money is not its source.
Financial capital is not its origin.
Institutions are not its cause.
All these forms are only historical ways of organizing, translating, controlling or distributing a more fundamental reality: the obligation for a society to mobilize direct human energy, later extended by the mechanical energy derived from it, which human beings learned to discover and construct through their mastery of fire.
This clarification is decisive because a major confusion has run through modern economic history.
The fact that a society needs to organize this expenditure of energy has often been interpreted as proof that some people must naturally own the conditions of that organization.
But the necessity to produce designates no owner. It consecrates no domination.
It points to neither a natural master nor an original creditor.
It means only that a community must find the most coherent forms for making its own energy legible, available, transmissible and sustainable.
The Joule Model begins there.
It does not claim to abolish material constraint.
It does not promise a society without effort, limits or arbitration.
On the contrary, it recalls that the only real basis of every economy is energy, and that the first task of a lucid society is to recognize that basis instead of concealing it behind monetary scarcity, accounting conventions or inherited power relations.
Once this energy law is recognized, the institutional architecture of the model becomes intelligible.
The Joule Reserve does not create wealth: it accounts for it.
The Joule Bank does not invent it: it mobilizes it.
The Human Energy Council (HEC) determines human needs and budgets them. The Human Evaluation Chamber (HEVC) authorizes the corresponding release of funding and transmits it to the Public Treasury for financing.
Political power does not produce human energy: it arbitrates collective priorities within a real base that exists before it.
In other words, the entire architecture of the Joule Model follows from a single principle: make visible, measurable and politically securable the energy law that already sustains all social life.
The Joule Energy Reserve is a national accounting instrument, and nothing more.
In this section, the French source also uses the name 'Joule Reserve Bank' for the body performing this accounting function. This institutional name is retained provisionally in the working translation and flagged for later harmonization.
Its stated function here is unique and non-negotiable: to account for real national human energy and compensating mechanical energy.
It:
measures human energy available, mobilized and lost through life and death;
records machine energy as a historical quantification of past human energy, on an estimated basis;
adjusts national energy reference standards according to demography, technology and living conditions.
It finances nothing.
It distributes nothing.
It decides nothing.
the human energy of the population residing on the national territory, from the first newborn to the last person dying;
European nationals and immigrant populations residing legally;
French nationals living regularly abroad are excluded;
the equivalent energy of jobs replaced by machines is included - that is, past human energy embodied in technology and now quantified in the Joule Reserve as national energy capital.
From the first tools to contemporary automated systems, no machine has ever produced by itself without human intervention.
Every technical device is the result of prior human work: accumulated knowledge, research, organization, experimentation and transmission.
The machine does not create autonomous value; it extends human energy already expended.
In the current system, gains resulting from this technical productivity have been captured mainly by financial capital through legal ownership of the means of production.
The Joule Model does not contest property; it changes the recognition of the source of value.
When a job is replaced by a machine, the energy does not disappear.
It changes form.
It becomes quantified productive energy.
This energy is integrated into the national energy capital of the Joule Reserve.
The productivity released by automation is no longer a factor of exclusion.
It becomes a factor in increasing common energy capital.
Innovation ceases to be an existential threat.
No one loses the means of subsistence as a result of technological replacement, because the value produced remains accounted for in the Joule Reserve and contributes to the collective financing of existence.
The machine does not destroy human value; it destroys only the job.
It extends human productive capacity. It is its measurable extension.
Technological progress therefore no longer reduces the human share of wealth.
It increases the common energy foundation from which economic partner income and the protection of life are guaranteed. Economic partner income will replace wages and the incomes of other economic categories. There will no longer be returns on investment, because they will no longer be necessary.
In the Joule Model, the machine no longer becomes a factor that places human beings in competition with one another.
It becomes a factor in the creation of energy capital.
The additional productivity generated by innovation increases national energy capital.
This shift has a major consequence, because the machine is no longer regarded as an autonomous source of value. This is not because work disappears, but because human value no longer depends exclusively on the job held.
Ontological scarcity does not disappear: production will always remain necessary.
Taken together, these elements constitute a finite quantity of energy, representing the nation’s real capacity to finance social and economic existence over a given period.
The Joule Reserve finances nothing directly, decides nothing and allocates nothing.
It transmits its data to the Joule Bank.
It is a branch of the Public Treasury under government responsibility. The government establishes a monitoring commission composed of trade-union representatives of employers and economic partners, who are informed twice a year about changes in the nation’s financing.
In this way, the nation’s established practices are preserved: the Public Treasury currently collects taxes; in their place, it will collect the accounting of the human energy reserve of the population present on the national territory and quantify the energy embodied in machines.
The Bank is not a commercial bank in the usual sense. We use the term for convenience, and it may be replaced.
It does not lend at interest, finance speculation or create private debt. Its operation will be explained in detail.
it receives the accounts supplied by the Joule Reserve as reserve funds;
on that basis, it finances the budgets required by the services that ensure the continuity of social and economic life, as determined by the Human Evaluation Chamber (HEVC), and transmits the corresponding amounts to the Public Treasury, which provides the funding.
It validates financing within the limits of the Joule Reserve’s available capacity: financing determined by the Human Evaluation Chamber (HEVC), defined in the following chapter; financing decided by Parliament, including the national budget and the budgets of local and regional authorities; and any other budgets to be funded, such as national public research.
It transmits to the Public Treasury the financing of the national budget of the State and of local and regional authorities, without intervening in their content.
It grants interest-free investment loans and consumer-support loans.
In the Joule Model, the State and local and regional authorities retain their full power of budgetary deliberation.
They debate the public policies they consider necessary; establish their plans for infrastructure, education, security, transition, spatial planning, culture and other fields; determine the corresponding levels of expenditure; and organise mechanisms of territorial equalisation. They continue their normal activities.
Once these budgets have been adopted, they are transmitted directly to the Joule Bank.
The Joule Bank has no power to make political allocations; it does not alter the amounts adopted, rank priorities or make financing conditional.
It assesses only overall compatibility by comparing the budgets with the national energy capital available in the Joule Reserve. The actual payment is then made by the Public Treasury.
If difficulties arise in financing the requests submitted to it, the Joule Bank does not decide between them. It refers the matter to the political authority, which will establish a regulatory chamber together with the commissions responsible for managing the Human Evaluation Chamber (HEVC). If disagreements persist, the matter will be referred first to the administrative court, then to the elected political authority and, as a final recourse, to the Constitutional Council.
Financing limits are no longer determined by the constraints of financial markets, monetary scarcity or public debt.
They are determined politically, on the basis of the number of inhabitants or households, their quantified energy capacity and the available national energy base.
In other words, the financing base becomes energy-related and demographic rather than financial.
The political authority sets ceilings compatible with the use of the Joule Reserve.
If cumulative requests exceed this capacity, the Joule Bank refers the matter to the political authority.
In the Joule Model, inheritance tax loses its purpose as an instrument for financing the State budget.
In the current system, taxation of inherited wealth contributes to the general financing of public services and to the indirect regulation of inequalities resulting from financial accumulation.
In the Joule Model, the basis of collective financing no longer rests on taxes levied on monetary flows or on inherited assets.
It rests on quantified national energy capacity.
The financing of institutions, healthcare, economic partner income and collective protections no longer depends on the fiscal capture of inheritances.
The transfer of assets then once again becomes a matter of civil law and family continuity, rather than a structural mechanism for financing the State.
In practical terms, this means that some heirs will no longer be forced to sell inherited property in order to pay duties intended to fund the public budget.
The Joule Model does not set itself up as a judge of wealth inequality.
It changes the environment in which these inequalities take effect.
When financial capital ceases to be the foundation of economic power, monetary inheritance loses part of its structuring capacity.
The model transfers real capital to human energy, to those who possess it by nature—that is, all human beings.
The consequences of this transformation for inherited wealth will then depend on the evolution of civil law and on the political choices made within this new environment.
The Joule Model does not correct everything. It changes the foundation and makes use of the changes this will bring about.
And when the foundation changes, certain apparent certainties change of their own accord.
The burden placed on the population by debt and monetary scarcity disappears.
It is replaced by the explicit responsibility of political actors and, more broadly, by that of the population in the use of the Joule Reserve.
In animist societies, human behaviour was based on a direct relationship with nature. People made offerings to that from which they derived their subsistence, in the hope of ensuring its continuity and, often, of receiving more than they had given.
This behaviour has not disappeared.
It has been transformed.
We find it today in the relationship to taxation and compulsory levies: populations contribute, but they expect to receive more in return than they have paid.
This expectation produces permanent dissatisfaction and fuels demands for lower levies, as though they were a loss rather than participation in a system on which people depend.
A reversal of perception takes place here.
In the past, dependence was visible: it was expressed through the relationship with nature, whether agricultural or industrial.
Today, it has been displaced and projected onto money, which is perceived as wealth in itself, independently of the realities it organises and thereby renders invisible.
We are therefore confronted with a profound transformation of the narrative conveyed by the contemporary capitalist Systemic Dominant.
The direct relationship to production and to the material conditions of existence fades, giving way to an abstract representation of wealth.
In this context, one concern remains.
It is the possibility that individuals may project onto the Joule Reserve the same expectations they have constructed around money.
They may imagine that they can receive more than they contribute simply because their individual energy is accounted for.
Yet the Joule Model is not based on a logic of capture or illusory redistribution.
It is based on establishing coherence: making visible what is produced and organising its use in a legible and collective way. This opens up another form of responsibility for the population.
It is not the contribution that changes, but the way it is understood.
What people once gave to nature, they now believe they give to money; dissatisfaction arises from an expectation disconnected from reality.
Money has replaced nature as the medium of perceived dependence: we have changed the narrative, not the mechanism. To understand contribution is to escape the illusion of a greater return, to which capitalism has accustomed us through return on investment—a return that necessarily accumulates surplus value captured from others, who in turn lose it.
This confusion persists because the Joule Model does not erase the conditioning inherited from the capitalist model.
It does not instantly transform representations, expectations and reflexes constructed over several centuries.
Individuals continue to perceive contribution and return through inherited patterns:
the expectation of a greater gain;
the logic of individual maximisation;
a monetary relationship to wealth.
In other words, changing the system is not enough, because behaviour initially remains aligned with the former capitalist framework.
This is why the transition cannot be solely institutional.
It is also cognitive. It requires learning, a gradual rereading of the mechanisms, and a shift in expectations.
The system can change faster than the representations that sustain it. We do not leave a system merely by changing its rules, but by transforming what it has produced within us.
The Joule Model does not eliminate the conditioning of the previous system; it gradually makes that conditioning visible, and everyone will have to take a position in relation to it.
Human societies produce wealth, but they also produce expectations.
And these expectations are not proportional to what is given; they tend to exceed it.
The principle of gift-giving in animist societies rests on a simple but fundamental idea: nothing is separate; everything circulates. The world is not composed of inert objects, but of living relationships between human beings, spirits, ancestors, animals, plants and natural elements.
Within this view, giving is neither a secondary moral act nor charity in the modern sense. It is necessary to preserve balance. Human beings constantly receive life, food, rain, fertility and protection. They are therefore required to give back. This return may take the form of offerings, ritual gestures, words, songs or sacrifices. It is not a matter of payment, but of maintaining circulation.
What is given is never lost. The gift establishes a relationship. It creates, sustains and reaffirms the bond between the visible and the invisible. Refusing to give, or interrupting this circulation, amounts to disturbing the balance of the world. In many animist societies, this is perceived as dangerous, not morally but ontologically: disorder may then appear in the form of illness, poor harvests, conflicts or disruption.
This principle of giving is deeply structuring. It organises social relationships as much as relationships with the invisible world. Giving, receiving and giving back form a continuous loop. There is no definitive accumulation, but permanent circulation.
What appears in later religions, particularly among believers, partly extends this logic. Prayer, for example, can be understood as a form of giving. It is not only a request. It is also an acknowledgement, a symbolic offering, an act of return. Giving thanks, praising, invoking and entering into contemplation are all ways of maintaining the bond with a higher power.
In some traditions, this is even more explicit: offerings, tithes, alms and ritual sacrifices directly extend this logic of giving. Even when the form becomes more abstract, the principle remains: human beings do not think of themselves as autonomous, but as part of a relationship they must sustain.
The major difference lies in the transformation of the framework. In animism, the world is inhabited by a multiplicity of presences with which human beings must come to terms. In monotheistic religions, this relationship tends to be concentrated upon a single figure. Yet the underlying mechanism remains identifiable: there is a debt of existence, and the gift—whether material or symbolic—is a way of acknowledging it.
Prayer, in this sense, can be understood as an immaterial gift. It does not feed a god in the material sense, but it sustains the bond, places the individual within a relationship and recalls that life is not self-produced. In another form, it extends this ancient anthropological principle: what is received calls for something to be given back.
Thus, behind very different religious forms, we find the same structure: a world founded on circulation rather than accumulation. Representations change; what remains is the necessity of giving in order to continue belonging to the world.
This mechanism is not the result of a moral error.
It is rooted in living processes.
Every organism is oriented towards the pursuit of gain: more resources, greater security and greater comfort. This dynamic is not the product of conscious reflection; it is inscribed within the very structures of life. It corresponds to a logic of conserving energy and increasing the chances of survival.
This is what Adam Smith formulated in economic terms through the axiom of self-interest as the driving force of behaviour. Transposed into human societies, this principle then takes the form of a range of conduct, from acceptable individual self-interest to more pronounced forms of selfishness or egotism.
However, this principle does not have the same significance in every kind of world in which it is expressed.
In a natural world, where human beings are directly subjected to the constraints of their environment—scarcity, danger and uncertainty—this orientation towards gain is an absolute necessity. It determines immediate survival. Accumulating resources, exercising caution and maximising advantages are then appropriate responses to a constraining and unstable environment.
But in a cultural world—that is, a world that human beings themselves transform in order to produce their own conditions of existence—this logic changes in nature. The environment is no longer merely endured; it is organised, stabilised and brought under technological control. Fundamental needs can be anticipated, planned for and met through surplus production.
In this context, the principle of pursuing gain loses its absolute character. What was once a condition of survival becomes a behavioural habit. And when this habit continues without being reconsidered, it may come into conflict with the world it helped to construct.
In other words, a mechanism perfectly adapted to a natural world can become ill-adapted, or even dangerous, in a cultural world.
This is where the shift occurs: when human production makes it possible to meet needs on a large scale, the indefinite pursuit of gain no longer answers a biological necessity but a behavioural inertia. It may then lead to forms of accumulation, domination or destruction that are no longer connected to survival, but to the persistence of an ancient reflex within a new environment.
History thus shows that this principle, initially protective, may under certain conditions contribute to self-destructive dynamics. Not because it is bad in itself, but because it is no longer adapted to the world in which it operates.
This orientation is therefore not a moral choice, but a biological condition whose relevance depends on the type of environment—natural or cultural—in which it unfolds.
What was originally a survival behaviour becomes, in organised societies, a logic of accumulation.
Individuals no longer seek merely to meet their needs; they seek to improve their position and secure it further.
They seek to obtain more than they have committed, in order to attain an enviable position of success that satisfies the reptilian drive for dominance.
Economic systems have amplified this mechanism.
Capitalism, in particular, has made it a structuring principle: individual self-interest becomes the driving force. Seeking to gain more than one gives is no longer a deviation; it is a norm consistent with the innate behaviours described above.
But this amplification does not produce the same effects in every kind of world in which it operates.
In a natural world without developed cultural production, the stomach sets the limits of desirability. The organism can consume only a limited quantity of food. In the same way, territory has meaning only insofar as it makes it possible to meet real needs: feeding, protecting and reproducing. Biological constraint acts as a regulator. It sets limits on behaviour. Even predation and domination remain confined within these physical limits: one can neither eat indefinitely nor occupy a space unrelated to one’s real capacities.
Within this framework, the pursuit of gain remains connected to survival. It is constrained, finite and adjusted to the organism.
In a cultural world, however, the situation changes radically. Human beings no longer merely take from their environment; they produce. They transform, accumulate, store and organise. Goods are no longer consumed directly when they are obtained. They become intermediary objects, means of exchange and abstract reserves.
The biological limit then disappears from the process of accumulation. The stomach no longer decides. Production makes it possible to exceed immediate needs and even to multiply them artificially. A produced object can be stored, exchanged and assigned value independently of its direct use.
In this context, the dynamic of gain changes in nature. It is no longer regulated by satiety, but by psychological and social mechanisms: the fear of going without, the need for security, the desire to accumulate in order to protect oneself against an uncertain future, or the desire to appear successful, distinguish oneself and exist through possession.
Accumulation then ceases to be a response to a biological need and becomes a response to a representation. In theory, it can become unlimited.
This absence of limits is further reinforced by the monetary structure of the system. Money introduces a form of artificial scarcity. It does not directly measure real production or available resources; it organises access to them. Consequently, even in a world of abundant production, access can remain constrained.
This monetary scarcity sustains the fear of going without. It fuels the need to accumulate. It justifies permanent competition. It transforms a biological survival reflex into a systemic logic of endless accumulation.
Thus, what living processes naturally contained through the limits of the organism and the environment has been extended, amplified and partly deregulated by social and economic systems. The original principle has not disappeared, but it has changed in scale and nature.
It is no longer merely a condition of survival in a world of scarcity. It becomes a structuring norm in a world of production, where the limit is no longer biological but institutional, symbolic and monetary.
Working note: the French source repeats the preceding development in full at this point. The duplicate has not been reproduced in the English working translation and is flagged for harmonisation of the French manuscript.
At the collective level, however, this mechanism encounters a simple limit: not everyone can receive more than they give, because total wealth is produced by society as a whole.
What is perceived as an individual gain can, in reality, only be a transfer. When an individual receives more than they produce, the difference necessarily comes from elsewhere: from another individual, from a group, from a time lag or from a transfer of burdens. The gain exists at the individual level, but it cannot be generalised without contradiction.
In a natural world, this limit is immediately perceptible. Resources are finite, flows are visible, and the relationship between effort, production and consumption remains direct. An organism cannot continue to take more than its environment can provide without disturbing the balance of the whole.
In a cultural world, this limit becomes less obvious. Production is mediated, organised and fragmented. Wealth circulates in an abstract form, detached from its immediate physical basis. This displacement creates an illusion: that of a gain that could be extended to everyone.
But this illusion encounters a fundamental constraint: real wealth remains bounded by what is actually produced.
This is where the monetary system amplifies the discrepancy. By developing monetary circulation that exceeds the wealth actually distributed, it becomes possible to multiply rights of access to wealth without producing that wealth in the same proportions.
In other words, money can circulate faster, more widely and in greater quantities than the real wealth available. It can anticipate, promise and represent future or presumed wealth. In this way, it temporarily sustains the idea that everyone can receive more.
But this expansion of circulation does not mechanically create real wealth. It creates a gap between entitlements and resources.
This discrepancy may remain invisible for as long as the system succeeds in absorbing it: through growth, debt, price adjustments, redistribution or the transfer of burdens. But it eventually becomes apparent when promises of access persistently exceed real productive capacity.
This abstract mechanism has very concrete expressions in individual behaviour.
Gambling provides a direct illustration. Every player can hope to win more than they stake. This hope is real at the individual level: someone does indeed win. But at the collective level, all the players cannot win more than the total amount staked, less the system’s deductions. The gains of some are necessarily the losses of others. Yet the system functions precisely because each person imagines themselves individually in the winner’s position, as though that situation could be generalised.
The hope of becoming a millionaire operates according to the same structure. In a given society, some individuals may attain very great wealth. But it is mathematically impossible for everyone to become a millionaire simultaneously, because such wealth rests on a structure of distribution. It presupposes disparities. It presupposes that the majority do not possess that level of wealth.
Yet the cultural system sustains this individual projection: everyone can imagine attaining that position. This representation encourages adherence to the system, even when the real probability is extremely low.
We find the same mechanism in other situations: financial speculation, promises of high returns, wealth accumulation presented as accessible to everyone, or the belief that everyone can permanently consume more than they produce. In all these cases, a genuine individual possibility is transformed into an imaginary collective horizon.
These examples share the same feature: they rest on a confusion between what is possible for a few and what would be possible for everyone.
The discrepancy with reality therefore does not arise from an isolated error of calculation, but from a deeply rooted mechanism: the individual projection of a gain that, by its very nature, cannot be generalised.
What is possible for one individual—winning at gambling, becoming extremely wealthy or capturing more value than they produce—cannot become a collective norm without contradiction. And what monetary circulation can make plausible in the short term cannot be sustained indefinitely without encountering the limits of reality.
The deepest imbalances are located within this gap between individual perception and collective reality.
This confusion is reinforced by certain economic indicators.
GDP, particularly when expressed per capita, gives the impression of shared average wealth.
But this average conceals real disparities and renders inequalities invisible.
Wealth is neither produced nor held uniformly. It results from the work of the active population, productive organisation and machines, but it is distributed very unequally in a system in which one person accumulates what another loses through exchange.
A high GDP per capita therefore does not mean that everyone genuinely benefits from that wealth.
It may coexist with a high concentration of income, major disparities in living standards and situations in which some gain what others lose.
In other words, what statistics present as an average may conceal a reality of imbalance.
This is where a permanent tension arises.
Individuals act according to a logic consistent with their biological functioning.
But this logic becomes incoherent when it is generalised.
The result is structural dissatisfaction.
Everyone feels that they do not receive as much as they expect.
This tension gives rise to frustration and, in many cases, to forms of violence that have run through human history from its beginnings.
This is why understanding systems becomes decisive.
Understanding how wealth is produced, how it is distributed and how certain forms of exploitation are maintained makes it possible to transform this tension.
Conflict is fuelled not only by deprivation, but also by the failure to understand its origins—what we describe as relying on the population’s ignorance.
Eliminating mechanisms of exploitation, combined with a clear reading of reality, can help to calm minds.
Not by eliminating all tension, but by reducing what arises from perceived and misunderstood injustice.
Within this framework, the Joule Model introduces a break.
It proposes to make the mechanisms of production and distribution visible and to limit the forms of capture operating within them.
In this respect, it contradicts a commonly accepted saying: that whatever endures must necessarily be legitimate.
Yet duration does not constitute proof of justice—not that justice exists in itself. Duration reassures us while the events of evolutionary transformation unfold. Such sayings therefore owe their existence to the limits of our empirical perspective.
A system is not just because it lasts; it can be transformed because it is understood.
Duration does not confer legitimacy, and what occurs or is accepted is not necessarily just. Injustice often persists because it remains invisible; to understand is already to transform. What is old is not necessarily still required, because its original necessity may no longer exist in present reality.
Money reinforces this illusion.
It makes it possible to compare, measure and project, but it also gives the impression that wealth can grow independently of real production.
It sustains the idea that a greater gain is always possible, leading to financial collapses and stock-market crashes.
The Joule Model introduces a break.
It does not rest on the promise of a greater gain for everyone.
It rests on establishing coherence between what is produced and what is distributed, together with a shift away from monetary wealth.
Working note: the French source reads “richesse maçonnique” (‘Masonic wealth’), which appears to be a typographical error. It has been rendered provisionally as “monetary wealth” and flagged for harmonisation of the French manuscript.
Individuals may project onto this model expectations inherited from the previous system: receiving more than they give.
Yet this expectation cannot be satisfied collectively. Compared with the current employment-based system, people will collectively receive greater purchasing power, but it will remain bounded by what human energy can actually provide—that is, by what we are prepared to contribute.
Dissatisfaction is not only economic; it is also produced by representations that conceal the reality of distribution.
A comparative average conceals inequalities. GDP per capita provides an image, but it does not describe the reality of distribution. What statistics gather together, reality disperses: some gain what others do not receive. Understanding wealth also means understanding its distribution.
What has endured has not always been accepted; it has often merely been tolerated. In many societies, duration is not proof of adherence, but frequently the sign of a constrained adaptation.
After everything we have just examined, under the Joule Model elected representatives can no longer invoke pressure from the markets, external debt or an abstract budgetary constraint.
They must assume responsibility for their choices within a real limit: the national energy capacity represented by the annual use of the Joule Reserve.
Scarcity is no longer monetary. It becomes energy-based and collective.
This profoundly shifts responsibility. Money no longer decides in place of human beings; they will have to assume responsibility for their own economic choices within the various bodies in which they participate.
Monetary scarcity is replaced by a real limit: the national energy capacity of the Joule Reserve, except in cases of force majeure.
Since 1976, public debt has become entrenched not only under the influence of financial markets, but also as a result of a permanent tension between the population’s growing collective demands and citizens’ equally persistent resistance to the levies required to finance them.
This debt reflects the inability of those in power to meet public needs in the face of a supply-driven market that generates new needs; monetary scarcity is therefore what regulates the entire system.
People have wanted more services, more protection and more infrastructure, while simultaneously refusing to bear their cost explicitly through taxation.
This structural inconsistency, which neither wage increases nor taxation of every kind could resolve, has fuelled recourse to debt and kept it in place.
The Joule Model makes this mechanism visible.
It shows that the wealth available for mobilisation comes neither from markets nor from abstract money creation, but from quantified collective human energy.
There is no longer a ceiling imposed by finance.
There is no longer an external argument through which responsibility can be displaced.
There will be no limits to meeting needs other than those which social and political actors themselves consciously establish on the basis of the available energy capacity.
If the needs expressed exceed that capacity, the decision can no longer be deferred through debt or attributed to an external constraint.
It will have to be assumed politically: scarcity ceases to be monetary and becomes an accepted collective choice.
This shift is decisive: money no longer constrains the decision; human beings decide and assume the consequences of their own choices. They will no longer be able to hide behind the actions of political leaders, and this will help to prevent a return to fascism, because debt arises when desire exceeds the courage to pay its price.
One of the major consequences of the Joule Model is that it profoundly transforms the place of occupations in society without eliminating their necessity.
This does not mean claiming that tomorrow everyone could do anything, or that skills would become interchangeable.
It means moving beyond a system in which an occupation is first and foremost a means of monetary survival, before it is a useful function within collective organisation.
In the current system, many occupations are structured by an initial constraint: obtaining an income in order to live.
This dependence tends to distort the direction of individual choices, the hierarchy of activities and social recognition itself.
Essential occupations receive little recognition.
Others, less necessary to the concrete continuity of collective life, are highly valued because they stand at the centre of financial flows.
Society thus comes to assess value through monetary remuneration, even though that remuneration largely depends on historical power relations, market effects, artificial scarcities or entrenched positions.
The Joule Model changes this way of seeing.
Because the protection of life is no longer financed by the job itself or by the company that makes use of it, an occupation ceases to be the exclusive basis of existence—and, by extension, so does the company.
It becomes once again what it should always have been: a social, productive, technical, relational, educational, creative or organisational function exercised within a collective whole in which survival no longer depends on the job one holds.
This transformation has several consequences.
First, it makes it possible to distinguish more clearly between:
the protection of life;
qualification;
social utility;
arduousness;
responsibility;
technical scarcity;
and the scope for initiative within the activity.
In other words, society can at last discuss occupations for what they really are, rather than through the distortions created by the need to make them bear the overall financing of existence and the provision of purchasing power.
This transformation also makes it possible to approach technological change more lucidly.
When an occupation is transformed by a machine, software, automation or artificial intelligence, the immediate question is no longer: who will lose their income?
It becomes: how can the human energy thus released be usefully reorganised?
The shift is considerable.
Instead of experiencing innovation as a direct threat to subsistence, society can treat it as a change in the forms of work, skills, working patterns and training needs.
Within this framework, some occupations will partially disappear, others will be reshaped, and still others will emerge.
But this dynamic will no longer lead, as a matter of course, to social destruction.
On the contrary, it will open up a more rational space for transmission, retraining, lifelong learning and the redefinition of functions useful to the community.
Individuals will no longer be reduced to defending their jobs as they would defend a vital place in a world of scarcity.
They will be able to defend a skill, experience, know-how or social function, and take part in its transformation instead of passively enduring its erosion.
This leads to another essential consequence: learning changes status.
In the conventional system, learning is often presented as preparation for the labour market or as forced adaptation to its changes.
In the Joule Model, learning becomes a productive activity in the broad sense, because it prepares, sustains, renews and enhances society’s qualitative energy capacity to meet its needs and desires.
The transformation of occupations therefore leads logically to making education, transmission and skills development normal dimensions of social existence, rather than biographical accidents confined to periods of crisis.
Finally, this transformation eliminates neither hierarchies of qualification nor technical requirements nor the particular responsibility attached to certain functions.
There will always be a need for surgeons, farmers, engineers, builders, electricians, teachers, researchers, logistics specialists, carers, craftspeople, coordinators, creators, administrators and decision-makers.
But their place will be understood anew within a system that no longer confuses their productive function with the financing of all collective protection.
The occupation does not disappear.
Its status changes.
It ceases to be the exclusive condition of the right to live and becomes once again a differentiated contribution to the organisation of the common world. It ceases to be the means by which employees buy their lives.
This chapter has brought one simple fact to light: in the current system, life is bought through prices, and this makes everything opaque.
By separating the protection of life from production, the Joule Model does more than establish a fairer accounting system. It requires a more difficult inner change: a change in outlook, and therefore in behaviour.
Until now, many citizens have experienced work as a constraint imposed upon them. They feel exploited, trapped, infantilised and confined within inequalities they do not understand and cannot overcome through their individual strength alone.
In this situation, they often wait to ‘get by’ or to be ‘saved’: by a wage increase, lower taxes, a better employer, a more generous state or a more moral system. And because these promises never hold for long, exhaustion sets in.
What must change profoundly is that citizens will no longer be able to think of themselves solely as exploited people who merely let themselves be carried along within a system they endure.
They will have to think of themselves as full participants who hold a share of collective reality.
Not as heroes, permanent activists or all-knowing experts, but as decision-makers among others, at a human scale, in the places where they choose to take part—because no one can be everywhere.
And this change is not merely political.
It is anthropological.
For in a world where survival is removed from the market, the first adversary is not the employer. It is not even ‘capitalism’ in the abstract sense.
The first adversary is each person’s archaic brain: the reptilian brain that urges us to withdraw, give up, close ourselves off, distrust, prefer immediate security to sustained effort, and flee responsibility as soon as it begins to feel like a burden.
In a few words: having money so as never to work again.
In a world where employment is no longer a constraint produced by scarcity, the reptilian brain loses one pretext for saying: ‘I have no choice.’
And it finds another: ‘Then I can let go; then I no longer need to work.’
The Joule Model does not create a society of idle people.
It makes possible a society of responsible human beings confronting their obligations as cultural adults, with a clear view of how their society is organised.
But becoming responsible does not mean submitting to a capitalist model.
On the contrary, becoming responsible means sustaining a model in which everyone plays their part—an accepted part within a history of scarcity that compels us to confront it consciously through the production of reality, the organisation of the community, the reduction of scarcity, the transmission of knowledge and the maintenance of the common world.
Today, however, citizens do not possess sufficient knowledge to understand this without education.
They cannot simply ‘guess’ the real accounting system, price mechanisms, the nature of wealth or the effects of opacity.
They can only sense that something is not working properly.
This is why learning is not a moral supplement within the Joule Model: it is a central function.
Without education and progressive understanding, emancipation turns into inertia, and consciousness into disengagement.
The shift is therefore twofold.
On the one hand, survival is removed from the market. Coercion and the anxiety embedded in prices are eliminated. Life is made stable.
On the other hand, a new maturity is required: that of citizens capable of understanding what they finance, choosing where they take part, and resisting their own temptation to withdraw as soon as external constraint diminishes.
This is not a moral injunction.
It is a mechanical condition of the system’s operation.
If the protection of life is guaranteed, useful production can no longer be sustained by that constraint.
It can be sustained only by collective intelligence: understanding, coordination, will, meaning and recognition.
And it is here that the chapter’s pedagogical circle closes: what we have dismantled—the opacity of prices, the employer illusion, the repetition of flows and ‘buying back one’s life’—serves not only to criticise the current system.
It serves to prepare the next stage, which that system has itself generated: making the new logic of economic partner income and contribution understandable and acceptable.
Like any bank, it receives deposits from people’s savings and manages bank accounts in the same way as a traditional bank. It does not pay interest on savings; it charges technical management fees and preserves the value of deposits.
It provides interest-free, non-speculative capital loans for all investment projects, as well as interest-free loans for consumption and individual construction, in accordance with the rules established by its management commission, parliamentary legislation and the amount held in the Joule Reserve.
Within the Joule Model, it is entirely consistent that borrowers should pay no interest in the traditional sense on capital of which they are, in reality, a source.
The capital lent does not arise from autonomous private creation.
It comes from the national energy capital quantified in the Joule Reserve—that is, from collective human energy, either directly produced or credited as compensation for quantified jobs.
As members of that community, borrowers already participate in the formation of this capital through their present or past productive activity.
They therefore cannot be regarded as owing capital that is foreign to them.
Two elements nevertheless remain legitimate: the management costs associated with assessing, monitoring and administering the loan; and preserving the value of the capital so as to prevent any erosion caused by monetary or energy fluctuations.
The obligation to repay does not disappear, and the capital returns to the Reserve.
What disappears is the speculative remuneration of capital simply because it has been lent.
The loan becomes a mechanism for the temporary mobilisation of common energy capital.
It enables initiative, investment and construction without establishing a structural rent on capital whose source is collective.
Thus, capital circulates, initiative is encouraged and responsibility is maintained, while automatic rent disappears.
The aim is not to abolish credit.
It is to remove from credit the logic of capturing capital whose real basis is common human energy.
If the Reserve is exceeded in a case of force majeure, the government is called upon to address the difficulty and has a means of intervention through the monetary valuation of the basic energy unit.
The Joule Model puts an end to speculation founded on wealth extracted from salaried work.
In the current system, once this wealth has accumulated beyond immediate needs, it is deposited in the banking system. It then becomes a source of credit and is lent back to the same employees who produced it, in return for repayment of the principal and payment of interest.
This is the second framework of exploitation, following the conversion of salaried work into monetary wealth when those same employees become customers.
The Joule Model puts an end to this capture.
The interest-free loan mechanism is not, however, sufficient to describe the full circulation of purchasing power within the Joule Model.
Another question immediately arises: what happens to distributed income when it is not consumed, or when it fuels imprudent, speculative or excessive behaviour?
In other words, how can surplus energy currency be prevented from becoming detached from the real capacity for production, whether existing, planned or arising from entrepreneurial initiative?
In the Old World, this regulation was achieved largely through monetary scarcity, interest on credit, debt and fear of deprivation.
In the Joule Model, it must be consciously assumed.
In the absence of artificially imposed monetary scarcity, social and political actors must maintain an overall view of real needs, productive capacities and the volume of energy currency compatible with collective balance.
Within this framework, individuals will possess significantly greater purchasing power than they do today.
Once essential needs and some aspirations have been satisfied, production will no longer have to be artificially stimulated by creating offers intended solely to capture this surplus purchasing power.
It will be able to readjust to real constraints: the availability of resources, material limits and recycling capacity.
Surplus purchasing power that is not consumed will not disappear. It will be deposited in the Joule Bank or equivalent deposit institutions and will contribute to the monetary circulation required for the system to function.
Energy currency will thus cease to drive artificial production, as today’s money does—a divergence represented later in the figure ‘Divergence Between Global Productive Wealth and Financial Wealth (1980–2024)’—and will once again become an instrument for balancing expressed needs, real capacities and collective choices.
This rests on three implicit conditions: purchasing power must exceed needs, thereby creating abundance; once needs have been met, unnecessary production must decline in conjunction with learning; and no one must believe that this is a magical possibility existing outside the responsibility of the population.
We shall develop the first two conditions, but the Joule Model cannot guarantee the responsibility of the population.
The idea of abundance is often associated with balance.
If resources are available and purchasing power increases, tensions should disappear.
But this intuition is incomplete.
Abundance does not regulate behaviour inherited from the old capitalist system; it changes the constraints.
It does not automatically change behaviour. Time must be allowed to transform the environment.
An individual placed in an environment where resources are accessible does not spontaneously become moderate after living with the frustration of scarcity.
On the contrary, that person may consume more, accumulate unnecessarily and continue seeking to maximise their advantage.
This mechanism is well known: it is the persistence of scarcity.
Behaviour formed under scarcity does not disappear when the constraint is eased.
It continues. Individuals go on acting as though deprivation might return: they anticipate, protect themselves and accumulate under the direction of innate impulses, as though there might be no tomorrow.
The risk of a new imbalance then arises.
In a system where purchasing power increases sharply, this behaviour can produce an imbalance caused no longer by deprivation, but by excess.
Excessive consumption, excessive production, unnecessary pressure on resources and a mismatch between real needs and economic activities can recreate the conditions of deprivation.
This gives a measure of the responsibility that will fall upon populations—a responsibility for which they have neither been trained nor prepared while allowing themselves to be governed by scarcity.
Yet monetary or energy abundance does not eliminate the limits of the real world:
natural resources;
production capacity;
transformation cycles;
and waste treatment.
If behaviour does not adjust, abundance may accelerate imbalances rather than reduce them. No system is without risk, because our ontological ignorance of the mechanisms of the objective world from which our universe arose, and within which we live on Earth, remains constant.
The Joule Model is not a belief. It promises no hedonistic paradise on Earth, but presents such a future as a hope to be pursued through evolution, because humanity is carried forward by its need to believe.
This is where a common error appears.
It consists in believing that increasing our means is enough to solve our problems. Yet means without understanding can amplify undesirable effects. To reduce them, we cannot dispense with learning, or with giving meaning to the existence of a species spread across the Earth.
Learning then becomes decisive.
It makes it possible to transform our relationship with abundance, not in order to restrict it artificially, but in order to understand it.
To understand the real limits, the consequences of choices, the necessary balances and the meaning of belief.
Within this framework, regulation no longer rests on scarcity. It rests on consciousness and on the associative capacity of thought.
It is no longer deprivation that sets the limit, but understanding, for future transformations—evolution itself—will arise from it.
The Joule Model makes a situation of relative abundance possible, but it cannot by itself guarantee balance.
It creates the conditions, but it does not automatically produce the appropriate behaviour.
Abundance without learning can produce more disorder than scarcity.
Abundance does not correct behaviour; it amplifies it, and what scarcity once limited may accelerate when abundance is not understood.
Balance no longer comes from deprivation. It comes from human consciousness, not from the rule of the strongest.
Abundance makes learning indispensable.
In traditional systems, constraint is external. It takes familiar forms: lack of resources, the need to work in order to survive, monetary scarcity, debt and fear of downward mobility.
These constraints organise behaviour; they compel people to act.
The Joule Model changes this framework by removing external constraint. By guaranteeing the protection of life, it removes an essential part of these constraints.
Survival is no longer conditional on employment, monetary income or immediate individual success. These motivations will not disappear; they will sustain life without economic burnout, although we cannot guarantee that the responsibilities assumed by the population will not create other forms of burnout.
The disappearance of this constraint may be experienced as liberation.
But it also creates a void, because what compelled people to act partially disappears. Without an apparent constraint, a question arises: why act?
In reality, the constraint shifts. It does not disappear: from an external constraint, it becomes an internal one and takes the form of responsibility. A new image of the puzzle is taking shape, although we cannot yet see what pictures of reality will emerge.
A new responsibility appears, and it is twofold.
On the one hand, it is individual: understanding the mechanisms, directing one’s actions and participating in collective organisation.
On the other hand, it is collective: setting priorities, choosing between needs and maintaining the balance between production and real capacities.
Populations will no longer have an alibi. The practice of electing representatives and then most often blaming them, without assuming responsibility for having elected them, will come to an end.
In the current system, constraint is likewise often attributed to external factors: the market, the State, employers, ‘economic necessity’, or the conspiracy theories that run throughout history.
These factors serve as explanations and sometimes as alibis. It will also be difficult to dispense with scapegoats: ‘the Jews who control the world’ or ‘the Muslims who want to invade us’, at least in the West.
In the Joule Model, these alibis disappear. Scarcity is no longer imposed by money.
It becomes a political choice made in full awareness of the capacity to act.
The turning point in this shift is decisive.
It is no longer money that sets the limit, but human decisions.
And those decisions must be assumed.
This is where tension reappears: without strong external constraint, human beings may relax, disengage and seek the easiest path.
The archaic brain then finds room to expand once again, unaware that it is pursuing its own self-destruction through its very capacity for adaptation—a capacity that, in order to preserve domination over others, leads it to acquire irreversible military means that it will one day use when positions of dominance are reversed.
This is precisely where learning becomes indispensable, because responsibility cannot exist without understanding.
Learning becomes the condition of this new constraint.
To understand what we produce, what we consume and what we decide, together with the consequences for the living world and for the species that we are.
The Joule Model introduces a more demanding constraint.
Responsibility is a more demanding constraint than scarcity.
Scarcity imposes; responsibility requires us to choose among everything the environment presents to us.
In reality, the Joule Model does not replace constraint with an absence of constraint.
It replaces an imposed constraint with an assumed constraint.
When external constraint disappears, responsibility becomes a condition of the system’s operation.
Scarcity compels; responsibility commits. Where money once imposed, human beings must now decide.
Without external constraint, society rests on internal responsibility. This brings us back to the issue of a population’s internal self-regulation, familiar from debates on security, in which the police believe they must do more as that self-regulation declines.
It would therefore be regrettable for the Joule Model to follow this path, as communism did because it did not have time to emancipate illiterate populations. This relationship has always existed during changes of regime or civilisation in which force took the place of understanding. Ignorance has always been the ally of the dominant.
The problem populations will face is bound up with armaments: will they have the possibility and the time to adopt the Joule Model? If populations wish to continue being exploited by the capitalist system, as we have revealed, they must demand the destruction of armaments; otherwise, they must ask themselves, in statistical terms, when those weapons will be used.
This chapter has demonstrated an essential shift.
What organised society through external constraint—scarcity, money and fear—gradually disappears.
But this withdrawal does not eliminate the need to organise reality; it makes that need visible.
The Joule Model promises neither limitless abundance nor spontaneous harmony.
It puts an end to the illusions that made it possible to postpone choices: debt, monetary scarcity, institutional alibis and appeals to risk. From now on, what constitutes the limit is no longer hidden. The limits are the choices made by human beings themselves: their decisions, trade-offs, understanding and acceptance.
Constraint does not disappear. Its nature changes: it becomes responsibility.
And this responsibility cannot exist without learning, because a society that understands what it produces can choose, whereas a society that does not understand reproduces through imitation.
The Joule Model does not merely change the rules for accounting for wealth; it changes what human beings can no longer ignore, because it has become readable.
To live through these changes, the institutional means of exercising this responsibility already exist within the architecture of the Model.
Chambers of Trades and Crafts, professional branches and representative organisations as a whole possess the tools required to assess needs, support initiatives and guide productive capacities.
To support these efforts, they can draw on the Joule Bank as well as employers’ deposit banks.
Within this framework, the only real constraint is no longer money: it becomes the material, technical and human feasibility of projects.
Thus, money ceases to be the prior obstacle to action.
It once again becomes a simple instrument of organisation, serving what can actually be produced.
This leads us, in the developments that follow, to examine human risk-taking, the circulation of deposits, monetary reabsorption and the balance between distributed purchasing power and real productive capacities.
The interest-free loan mechanism is not, however, sufficient to describe the full circulation of purchasing power within the Joule Model. Another question immediately arises: what happens to distributed income when it is not consumed, or when it fuels imprudent, speculative or excessive behaviour?
In other words, how can surplus energy currency be prevented from becoming detached from the real capacity for production, whether existing, planned or arising from entrepreneurial initiative? In the Old World, this regulation was achieved through scarcity.
In the Joule Model, it must be consciously assumed. In the absence of imposed monetary scarcity, social and political actors must maintain an overall view of real needs, productive capacities and the volume of energy currency compatible with collective balance.
And a need for coordination will almost certainly emerge, to be managed by the various ministries.
Human beings are not only beings of need. They are also beings of desire, anticipation, wagers and risk-taking. This reality runs through the whole of social history. It can be found in gambling, speculation, investment, entrepreneurship and the pursuit of a gain greater than prudence would recommend.
Financial markets provide a spectacular expression of it. The search for higher profit leads actors to accept levels of risk they would consider unreasonable in other areas of life. Speculative bubbles, stock-market frenzies and individual or collective ruin are not merely technical accidents; they reveal an anthropological constant: the hope of a greater gain can prevail over reason.
This mechanism will not disappear under the Joule Model. Guaranteed existence will not transform human beings into perfectly moderate beings. Some will continue to consume immediately everything they receive. Others will seek to accumulate. Still others will take risks in the hope of gaining a greater advantage. The Model is not intended to eliminate this human dimension. It must simply prevent it from once again becoming a threat to collective existence.
In the current system, an error of judgement can lead to debt that threatens basic subsistence, social decline, the loss of one’s home and sometimes lasting exclusion. In the Joule Model, this structural brutality disappears, because subsistence is no longer suspended upon individual success. Economic error remains possible; social destruction ceases to be its normal horizon.
Purchasing power distributed from the Joule Reserve is not intended to remain idle or to accumulate without purpose. It circulates through the real economy by means of consumption, saving, investment and bank deposits.
When part of the economic partner income is not consumed, it returns to the banking system in the form of deposits. These deposits perform a decisive function. They constitute an available money supply that can be remobilised to finance productive investment, construction, technological transformations, research activities or equipment needs.
Thus, the Joule Bank does not merely finance existence from the Joule Reserve. It also receives deposits arising from the circulation of purchasing power and reinjects them, in the form of interest-free loans, into society’s productive capacities.
This mechanism has an essential consequence: surplus energy currency does not remain pointlessly in circulation. It returns to the financing of production, the maintenance of material capital, innovation and the real needs of the community. Energy currency thus ceases to be a floating pool that fuels speculation; it recovers its function of circulation and transformation.
A society organised on the basis of human energy cannot ignore a simple rule: there is no purpose in distributing more energy currency than society can actually produce, transform, maintain or absorb.
If the money supply arising from the Joule Reserve were persistently to exceed real productive capacities—which may occur as machine energy continues to be accounted for while technologies develop—it would lose its function of adjustment and create excess monetary pressure with no corresponding material content. The problem would no longer be debt or financial scarcity, but an excess of energy currency in relation to the real world. Humanity has never experienced such a situation and will have to manage it.
It is precisely to prevent this imbalance that the circulation of Joule currency must be monitored.
The Joule Reserve accounts for the nation’s energy capacity.
The Joule Bank measures available funds, deposits, loans, capital repayments and financing needs.
The Human Energy Council (HEC) determines social and economic needs.
Political authority makes the necessary trade-offs when several demands simultaneously exceed the real capacity for financing.
Balance therefore no longer rests on fear of deprivation, interest or debt, but on a permanent correspondence between:
the energy capacity recorded;
the currency placed in circulation;
the deposits available;
real productive capacities;
and politically recognised needs.
In other words, the Joule Bank does not merely ensure distribution. It also ensures that the circulation of purchasing power remains consistent with the real world.
Within this framework, deposits play a stabilising role.
They absorb temporary surpluses of unconsumed purchasing power, reconstitute capital that can be mobilised and make it possible to support production once again without artificially creating energy currency detached from society’s material capacities.
But this dynamic brings about a new consequence.
If surplus purchasing power is deposited over the long term, it constitutes capital for each individual that can grow over time.
Even without remuneration through interest, this accumulation can gradually give some people the possibility of living without an active contribution, without working.
Here we face a situation unprecedented in human history, one that cannot be understood solely through the codes inherited from the capitalist model. Today, people accumulate out of fear of deprivation. In the Joule Model, that fear disappears. What arises, inherited from capitalism, is the concern that, in a world where our needs must still be produced, some people may exempt themselves from working. This becomes possible only where machinery replaces human beings at work and where work is replaced by learning in order to maintain the machinery that takes its place.
In this context, learning becomes decisive.
Understanding the nature of energy currency, the function of deposits and their role in collective balance becomes a condition of stability.
A major error would be to seek to absorb these surpluses through an artificial increase in consumption.
This would lead to:
unnecessary pressure on resources;
production without any real purpose;
increased ecological imbalance;
and the exhaustion of certain mineral resources before replacements are found, which depends on the uncertainties of research.
Conversely, these deposits can be mobilised in other ways.
They constitute a collective financing capacity and can be directed towards:
collective needs;
the maintenance of the territory;
infrastructure;
and the transformations made necessary by climate change.
From this perspective, the surplus does not become a problem; it becomes a resource for development needs limited only by the means available to implement them.
The identified real risk that some people may not participate in indispensable work is not necessarily a problem. Some people live without working today, but they are not numerous and do not place a significant burden on the economy.
In a productive and stable society, not working is no longer a systemic problem; it becomes a question of imbalance between contribution and collective organisation. We move from a consumer economy to an economy based on the conscious allocation of needs essential to existence across the planet—and the world does not lack such needs, even in wealthy countries.
Managers, or the political authority, will decide which rules to adopt so that deposited capital does not confer power of domination. Everyone’s dream of becoming a millionaire may come true, except that they will no longer be living under a capitalist regime. This does not mean that the Joule Model will have no need for capital; it means that holding capital will no longer fulfil the dream of becoming a freeloader who lives off the work of others. Accumulation is no longer power over others; it becomes a capacity serving the collective. Abundance misunderstood destroys; abundance understood builds.
The system therefore abolishes neither freedom in the use of income, nor the possibility of error, nor the diversity of human behaviour. It simply removes from such behaviour the power to disorganise collective existence.
Global warming is one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century. The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has documented the scale of the transformations under way with precision: the accelerating melting of ice, rising sea levels, increasingly frequent extreme weather events, the disruption of agricultural cycles and mass population displacement.
The scientific knowledge exists. The technologies required for the energy transition also exist. What appears to be lacking, however, are the financial means to transform productive infrastructure rapidly.
This impression of shortage rests largely on an accounting illusion.
In the current economic system, the investments required for the ecological transition are estimated at several trillion each year. States therefore seek to finance these sums through three traditional means: taxation, debt or financial markets.
Yet each of these mechanisms has a structural limitation.
Environmental taxes are generally passed on through prices, which means that their cost is ultimately borne by consumers. Financial penalties imposed on companies are often incorporated into their economic strategy and converted into new production costs. As for so-called international ‘climate finance’, it very often takes the form of loans that increase countries’ debt instead of solving the problem on a lasting basis.
The economic system thus finds itself in a paradoxical situation: societies possess the technical and material capacities needed to transform their energy systems, yet behave as though they lacked the money to do so.
This contradiction arises because money is currently treated as a scarce resource, even though it is only an accounting instrument.
The Joule Model offers another interpretation.
The real wealth of a society lies not in the quantity of money available, but in the energy capacity of its population and in the energy accumulated within its technological systems.
In other words, it lies in the combination of living human energy and past human energy quantified in machines, infrastructure and knowledge.
When this productive capacity is properly measured and organised, the question of financing changes in nature. It is no longer a matter of finding money, but of mobilising productive power that already exists.
Within this framework, the ecological transition no longer appears as a cost that is impossible to finance, but as a redirection of collective energy towards infrastructure compatible with the planet’s physical limits.
The difficulty is therefore not technical. It is institutional.
As long as money remains organised around scarcity and debt, societies will continue to behave as though protecting the climate were a financial luxury.
Recognising the real energy basis of the economy, by contrast, makes it possible to restore money to its rightful place: a tool for coordination, not the condition for collective action to exist.
The climate problem is not primarily a technological problem.
It is an accounting problem.
As long as money is treated as a scarce resource, societies will act as though they were too poor to preserve the conditions of their own existence.
The international relationships governing this banking activity must be defined.
The Joule Reserve represents national energy capital, quantified on the basis of the resident population and the productive energy available within the territory.
Interest-free loans constitute a temporary mobilisation of this common capital.
They are therefore reserved as a priority for:
actors operating within the territory;
projects producing within the territory;
and activities contributing to the national energy base.
This principle prevents any leakage of energy capital and any speculative pull factor that would transform the Joule Bank into a bank for the entire world.
A foreign company may obtain interest-free Joule credit if:
the investment is located within the national territory;
the activity generates employment or productive value within the country;
and the corresponding energy contribution is incorporated into the Joule Reserve.
In this case, there is no transfer abroad, but an integration into national productive capital.
Projects located outside the national territory do not qualify for interest-free lending from the Joule Bank.
They may be covered by:
inter-State agreements;
bilateral energy-compensation mechanisms;
or a loan accompanied by a non-speculative energy-compensation contribution intended to strengthen the Joule Reserve.
This contribution is not a financial rent; it compensates for the use of national energy capital under conditions set by the political authority.
If several countries adopt the Joule Model, the nature of the difficulty changes.
Each country then possesses:
its own Joule Reserve;
its own Joule Bank;
and its quantified energy capacity.
Agreements can be concluded on the basis of reciprocal energy compensations:
one country temporarily mobilises another country’s energy capital;
the compensation is measured as an energy equivalent, not as an interest rate.
Within such a multilateral framework, the speculative pull factor disappears because:
capital is no longer scarce in monetary terms;
it is limited in energy terms within each sovereign space;
and exchanges rest on measured equivalences.
International openness is possible.
But it must never result in one country’s energy capital being diluted for the benefit of actors from another country who do not contribute to it, unless compensation is provided.
In this new environment, capital holders, and employers in particular, are not required to deposit their assets with the Joule Bank. Like all human beings, they may react psychologically by becoming defensive and feeling that they have been dispossessed. The Joule Model dispossesses no one.
The question is legitimate.
If society already possesses a common energy reserve, if the Joule Bank can advance social energy interest-free, and if production is no longer structurally dependent on monetary scarcity, why maintain a specific space for those who still hold capital?
The answer lies in one word: evolution—the evolution of human history.
Capital did not arise by chance. It was formed in a world in which energy was scarce, tools had to be financed before they could exist, and infrastructure required prior accumulation. In that context, ownership was a condition of production. Accumulation was a means of action.
That world is not moral; it is constrained. Morality emerged from the depths of the centuries, and fear gave it its social structure.
Capital has been both an instrument of expansion and a lever of domination. It has financed railways and conquests, hospitals and empires, factories and wars. It has organised the world according to a logic of scarcity and power.
No one—no human being, past or present—is responsible for having been born into this system. We are its heirs and its actors, not its authors.
The Joule Model does not deny this trajectory. It moves beyond it.
It does not claim that private capital is inherently illegitimate because it accumulated through the exploitation of human beings by other human beings. It says that private capital is no longer necessary as a condition of access to production.
The distinction is essential.
In a system where social energy is recognised as abundant, and where the human reserve and the machine reserve form an objective foundation, the financing of activity no longer depends on a scarce lender or on investment by the wealthy. Society can mobilise its own power without paying a structural tribute to scarcity.
But removing this necessity does not mean erasing the people whose contributions are included in the accounting of the Joule Reserve.
Capital holders exist. Their wealth represents past human energy translated into money. It did not fall from the sky. It arose from an earlier way of accounting for energy, obscured by the predominance of money established through historical power relations.
[Graphic to be recreated in English for the final edition. The French source compares the growth of world GDP (real production) with that of global financial assets from 1980 to 2024, in trillions of US dollars. It illustrates the possible disconnection between financial wealth and real productive capacity.]
France: Divergence Between Real Production and Financial Wealth
(orders of magnitude, billions of current euros)
| Year | GDP (real production) | Total financial assets (households + companies + institutions) | Financial assets/GDP ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1980 | ~460 | ~1,200 | ~2.6 |
| 1990 | ~900 | ~3,200 | ~3.6 |
| 2000 | ~1,450 | ~8,000 | ~5.5 |
| 2010 | ~2,000 | ~15,000 | ~7.5 |
| 2020 | ~2,300 | ~21,000 | ~9.1 |
| 2024 | ~2,800 | ~26,000 | ~9.3 |
(Synthetic sources: INSEE national accounts, Banque de France financial accounts, and consolidated estimates of domestic financial assets.)
This table shows a structural trend: real production, measured by GDP, increases progressively, whereas financial wealth grows much faster.
In France:
in 1980, financial assets represented approximately 2.6 times annual production;
by 2024, they represented approximately 9 times annual production.
Finance therefore no longer merely reflects real production: it is expanding much faster than the productive economy.
This divergence illustrates a central phenomenon of the contemporary economy: the growth of financial assets can become largely independent of growth in real production. Financial assets accumulate through valuation, market effects and the multiplication of financial instruments, whereas production still depends on the mobilisation of human energy, material resources and machines.
From this perspective, financial wealth appears less as the source of production than as the monetary representation of a productive system whose real foundation remains energy-based and human.
The Joule Model does not deny the existence of this financial capital. It simply restores it to its historical status: it represents the monetary accounting of past human energy, produced within an accounting system dominated by monetary scarcity.
When the human and machine energy reserves are made visible, production can be financed directly through society’s energy capacity, without depending on an artificial scarcity of financial capital.
Conversion into an energy equivalent is not a punishment. It is a translation. It restores capital to the common physical frame of reference. It removes its status as a scarce weapon, but does not remove its capacity for action.
For what capital holders truly possess is not merely a sum of money. They possess organisational experience, decision-making ability, an appetite for risk, a habit of coordination and a capacity for initiative.
In the current system, these qualities are linked to control of monetary resources.
Within the Joule Model, they can exist without structural domination.
The Employers’ Bank responds to this human and historical necessity.
It is not a remnant of capitalism; it is a space of continuity in human evolution.
It enables those who undertake, organise and coordinate to continue doing so, but within a framework in which social energy can no longer be captured through financial interest.
The Joule Model is self-sufficient in guaranteeing life, but it does not seek to make human trajectories uniform.
Wealth ceases to be insurance against poverty, because vital security is guaranteed by the common Reserve. It ceases to be a defensive weapon. It becomes a freely available capacity.
And it is here that the old saying loses its force: ‘If the wealth one possesses is not desired, one is poor.’
In a world of scarcity, this saying is true.
In a world of recognised energy abundance, it becomes false.
We are no longer poor because we do not individually own what we already possess collectively.
The Employers’ Bank therefore does not exist to preserve an old hierarchy. It exists to prevent an unnecessary fracture sustained by the capitalist model.
The Joule Model does not seek a social war; it seeks a transformation in the frame of reference for wealth. No one will fight to obtain energy they already possess.
It does not humiliate capital holders, nor does it engage in or perpetuate any archaic struggle from past centuries against employers.
It invites them to participate consciously in an evolution in which productive power is no longer a monopoly, but a shared inheritance.
This is not abolition; it is transformation.
Capital ceases to be a compulsory gateway; it becomes a voluntary contribution.
And it is precisely because the Joule Model is self-sufficient in energy terms that it can integrate former holders of wealth without depending on them. It does not ask them to save the system.
It offers them the opportunity to join an undertaking that no longer rests on scarcity, but on the recognition of real abundance made possible through labour.
This is not historical revenge; it is a change of standard, a change of language. It does not invoke punishment at every turn.
And when the standard changes, the hierarchy changes without denying anyone’s dignity.
The Joule Bank finances collective existence and therefore performs a central function comparable to that of the Banque de France.
It is not intended to centralise all private assets through its traditional banking function.
Employers may therefore establish one or more employers’ deposit banks.
These banks remain subject to the principles of the Joule Model, under which money no longer generates money outside productive investment.
These banks:
receive deposits of private capital;
may lend this capital interest-free;
and pay no return on savings deposits.
Why?
Because capital ceases to be an autonomous source of enrichment—one whose effective use we may legitimately question.
It once again becomes what it fundamentally is: an accumulated capacity to organise, invest and produce.
This does not mean that citizens with substantial assets are required to work.
The Joule Model does not retroactively declare situations inherited from the history of civilisations to be unjust.
A capital holder may live from their existing assets.
What disappears is not the assets.
It is the right to demand interest on the work of others merely by virtue of possessing capital.
In other words, one may possess capital.
One may no longer charge those who produce merely for its possession. Whether it is used for investment or made available through a loan, it no longer yields interest, except for a regulated margin in the case of productive investment.
We live in a world of scarcity.
Production remains an obligation if we are to meet our needs.
The need to work does not disappear, but its purpose is not to create capital for rentiers.
What disappears is monetary scarcity as an instrument compelling people to work in order to obtain money.
This is one of the first fundamental shifts that should be introduced into children’s education. Today, from a very early age, the implicit lesson is this: people work to earn money. This representation profoundly shapes behaviour, career choices, perceptions of effort and even the value individuals assign to themselves.
Yet this idea is an inversion.
We do not work in order to possess money.
We work to produce the goods and services we need in order to live.
Money is merely a medium of exchange, an instrument of circulation intended to organise the distribution of that production. It is neither the purpose of work nor its justification.
In a natural world, this is self-evident: people hunt, cultivate and make things in order to feed, house and protect themselves. The act of producing is directly connected to need. No abstract intermediary intervenes to reverse the logic.
In a cultural world, by contrast, money interposes itself between need and production. It becomes the condition of access. Gradually, within people’s representations, it takes the place of the purpose itself. Children no longer learn that we produce in order to live, but that we must work in order to obtain money, as though money itself produced goods.
This inversion is not insignificant. It transforms the meaning of work. It can lead people to produce without any connection to real needs, or to direct their efforts towards what pays the most, irrespective of its social usefulness.
This is why the disappearance of monetary scarcity as the central constraint requires a major educational correction. From the earliest stages of learning, the logical order must be restored:
human needs come first;
production responds to them;
money organises the exchange of that production.
Learning this means restoring work to its real foundation. Work is no longer an abstract obligation tied to access to money, but a concrete participation in collective production.
From this perspective, education no longer aims to prepare individuals to ‘earn a living’ in the monetary sense, but to understand how a society produces what it needs and how each person can contribute.
Money then becomes once again what it should never have ceased to be: an instrument serving production and life, rather than a prior condition determining access to them.
Capitalism is often discussed as though it were a collection of actors: bankers, industrialists, investors and political leaders. It is criticised, defended, accused or absolved.
But its foundation is almost always forgotten: the accounting framework.
Yet it is not the intentions of individuals that give a system its enduring structure.
It is the way the system accounts—and this method perpetuates itself through learning, through accounting.
The accounting framework determines:
what constitutes an expense;
what constitutes an asset;
what constitutes a liability;
what constitutes income;
what must be depreciated;
and what must be remunerated.
It is the invisible architecture of decision-making.
In the contemporary capitalist model, the remuneration of capital through interest is built in as a structural requirement: if I lend, I receive a return.
[Working note: the French source reads ‘si je suis prête ?’. It has been translated here according to the apparent intended meaning, ‘if I lend’, and should be harmonised in the French manuscript.]
The protection of life—whether healthcare, retirement provision or risk coverage—is recorded in present systems as an expense. This choice is not neutral.
It means that:
rent is a right;
protection is a cost;
growth is a necessity;
debt is an engine;
and profitability is the overriding criterion.
This framework is not a moral aberration. It is an accounting construct consistent with a particular way of organising the world: one that seeks to generate rent—that is, to enable some people to live without producing directly.
But reducing this logic to a mere accounting invention would be insufficient. Its roots reach more deeply into living systems.
It extends a fundamental mechanism: appropriation as a condition of survival. In an environment of scarcity, every organism must capture sufficient resources to remain alive. This appropriation is not negotiated; it is imperative. It tends to exclude anything that might compromise survival.
Within this framework, the other is not spontaneously a partner. The other is first a risk: a competitor for access to resources. Cooperation itself emerges only when it becomes a more effective means of ensuring survival than direct confrontation.
Here a first anthropological paradox takes shape: mutual aid exists, but it is conditional. It is not a renunciation of appropriation; it is one of its strategies. If I cannot live alone, I cooperate. But this cooperation remains marked by a tension: each person seeks to take more than they give whenever conditions allow.
When transposed into economic systems, this mechanism does not disappear. It changes form.
The exploitation of human beings by other human beings is not an accidental moral distortion. Nor is it simply the reward for entrepreneurial merit. It is the translation, within an organised social framework, of an older principle: capturing a greater share of available resources in order to secure one’s own existence.
In ancient human societies, this dynamic was constrained by strict material limits. Groups hunted together for prey that could not be preserved. Meat had to be shared, not out of pure altruism, but because the possibilities for preservation were limited. This constraint encouraged forms of redistribution and rituals of sharing.
With the emergence of preservation techniques—smoking and drying meat, and storage—and later with agriculture, these constraints gradually receded. Accumulation became possible. And with accumulation came the possibility of permanently capturing more than one consumed immediately.
The behaviours observed in certain social species—hierarchies, the organisation of hunting and the differentiated distribution of resources—find a continuity here. Human beings did not invent these logics from nothing; they made them more complex, stabilised them and institutionalised them.
The modern accounting framework can therefore be understood as a formalisation of these mechanisms. It organises distribution, establishes a hierarchy of rights of access and distinguishes between what counts as a cost and what counts as income. By recording the protection of life as an expense, it makes that protection subordinate to production and profitability.
From this perspective, share ownership appears as an abstract and modernised form of this ancient logic. It is no longer a matter of physically participating in a collective hunt, but of owning a share of a productive system. That share confers a right to part of the result, irrespective of direct participation in the productive effort.
In other words, the right to capture part of the wealth produced is detached from the act of production itself. This detachment lies at the heart of rent.
If this principle did not exist, or if it did not resonate with deeply rooted mechanisms, it would not command such widespread adherence. The fact that games of chance have existed for centuries in every culture is one indication. They rest on the same structure: obtaining more without producing, capturing value through a mechanism other than direct production.
Thus, the present accounting framework is not merely a technical construction. It is the expression of a deeper paradigm, which may be described as the extension of the survival mechanisms of living systems into a world that has become cultural.
But it is precisely because this paradigm arose from a world of scarcity that it now comes into tension with a world of production. What was suited to survival in a constrained environment may become unsuitable in a system where production is organised, large-scale and potentially abundant.
The Joule Model therefore proposes a shift: not to deny these mechanisms, but to place them within a framework in which the protection of life is no longer a conditional expense, but a guaranteed foundation. Where the present system organises competition for access to survival, the task is to remove survival from competition itself.
Only on this condition can the structures inherited from living systems cease to produce, at the collective level, forms of exploitation that have become incompatible with the real productive capacities of our societies.
Political and economic leaders operate within this architecture.
They can:
adjust rates;
redistribute in part;
increase taxation;
and regulate certain excesses.
But they never contemplate a profound change to the foundation without risking major instability, because they do not know how to bring such a change about.
For if the return on capital ceases to be guaranteed:
capital flees;
credit contracts;
solvency falters;
and confidence in the currency weakens.
The accounting framework then acts as a Systemic Dominant.
It does not command through force; it commands through structural constraint. It imposes its limits on individual wills.
A government may make promises, but if it departs too far from the architecture that guarantees rent, it triggers a financial crisis. This is not a moral punishment; it is a mechanical effect. Debates about individual economic responsibility take place only within what the accounting framework permits. If a proposal does not fit within it, the proposal is rejected. Responsibility then becomes an illusion.
Changing a political system is possible. Changing a government is possible. Changing laws is possible.
But changing the accounting structure that guarantees the reproduction of capital through rent requires changing:
the nature of value;
the logic of debt;
the formation of prices;
and the hierarchy of budgetary priorities.
In other words: the ANTHROPOLOGICAL foundation must be altered.
[Working note: the French source reads ‘la reproduction du capital sans rente’. In light of the surrounding argument, this has been rendered as ‘the reproduction of capital through rent’ and should be checked during harmonisation of the French manuscript.]
Yet any attempt to alter part of the accounting framework while the global environment remains unchanged exposes a country to:
capital flight;
speculation;
devaluation;
and economic isolation.
The constraint is therefore not only national; it is international.
It is in this sense that the capitalist accounting framework structures the world.
In a world where:
rent must be paid;
debt must be honoured;
and continual growth must be maintained;
pressure necessarily falls on:
natural resources;
production costs;
social protections;
and ecological balances.
Environmental damage is not accidental.
It consists of the externalities, emissions and waste of a system whose priority is profitability, while treating them increases production prices beyond what wages can bear (the Futura experience in the United States).
As long as the protection of life remains an expense and the remuneration of capital remains a requirement, extraction will take precedence over preservation, taking from nature or from human labour faster than what is taken can be renewed.
This is not a malicious intention; it is an accounting hierarchy.
To guard against this, monetary scarcity is organised so that not all needs can be met, because the raw materials currently available are insufficient to provide the entire world with a Western level of comfort. The result is tension generated by austerity programmes.
The Systemic Dominant is therefore not a person. It is not a conspiracy. It is not a single individual will.
It is an architecture that developed empirically over centuries and assumed its present structure with the rise of industrialisation.
And this architecture makes any profound reform without crisis extremely difficult.
History shows that civilisations often alter their foundations only after a rupture.
The contemporary question is simple: can we change the accounting framework before the crisis, or will we wait for the crisis to impose the transformation?
The Joule Model begins with this question. It does not seek to moralise. It does not seek to accuse. It seeks to shift the accounting foundation.
It makes the protection of life a foundation, human energy the reference for value, and limits the reproduction of rent through the entrepreneurial margin.
In other words: it replaces the monetary Systemic Dominant with a finite and explicit energy framework.
For a long time, we believed that capital produced by itself, as though money, placed somewhere, quietly began to work, sheltered from the hands that transform the world. We ultimately came to speak of ‘returns’ as we would speak of a natural law, forgetting that behind every return there is always human activity, a body, time devoted and fatigue borne. The Joule Model does not destroy capital. It puts it back in its place.
It simply reminds us that capital is never anything more than an accumulated memory of human energy. What we call ‘wealth’ is not an autonomous entity: it is the result of past work, quantified, preserved and transmitted. The problem, therefore, is not that wealth exists. The problem begins when that wealth demands, merely by virtue of its existence, an independent remuneration—a right to charge for the use of what the stronger party has accumulated from the lives of the weaker, to whom it lends that wealth or allows its use in exchange for payment. This is not a contradiction, but an organisation of financial surplus value for those who possess a surplus they do not consume. Put more plainly, it is a system for exploiting those who have nothing, or so little.
Thus, in the present system, someone who holds capital can lend it and demand interest. That interest is paid by someone else, who must produce more in order to repay more than they received. This mechanism seems normal because it is old. But if the reasoning is carried through to its conclusion, it leads to an absurdity: if everyone could live solely from the return on their capital, no one would need to produce any longer. Yet without production, goods wear out, infrastructure deteriorates, food runs short and houses fall into disrepair. Money cannot be eaten. Money does not repair a bridge. Money does not cultivate a field. Consequently, if the system cannot compel someone else to work, it collapses.
In a world of scarcity, work is not a moral punishment; it is a physical necessity. What the Joule Model removes is not work, but monetary scarcity as an instrument of coercion. It becomes impossible to charge others merely for the fact of possessing capital. Capital can circulate, be invested and support enterprise; it can no longer reproduce itself through interest or surplus value. We must speak plainly about this ‘deep flaw’ in modern capitalism, which is not merely that it organises rent.
The deeper flaw is that it encourages the belief that anyone can become a rentier—hence the timeless appeal of games of chance.
It sustains the idea that any individual, if sufficiently skilful, bold and persistent, and a little lucky, will be able to accumulate enough to live from capital rather than work. This promise acts as a powerful psychological engine. It nourishes hope, competition and acceptance of the rules.
But this promise cannot be fulfilled universally; it is merely an attractor, a monetary pheromone trap. For if everyone became a rentier, no one would produce any longer.
And if everyone’s sole ambition in producing and working is to become a rentier, the scarcity organised through financial shortages prevents them from achieving it simultaneously.
It needs scarcity to be maintained somewhere: scarcity of access to capital, scarcity of opportunities and monetary scarcity, so that the majority continue to work in the hope of an ascent which, structurally, can apply only to a minority if human existence is not to collapse.
This is not a moral condemnation. It is the observation of a mechanism.
The Joule Model does not promise that everyone will become a capitalist; it affirms that everyone already bears the only real capital: their human energy.
It does not foster the hope of an individual escape through accumulation, which would be impossible without the collapse of production and of life into absurdity.
It proposes a collective way out through a transformation of the framework.
Monetary scarcity no longer sorts people’s destinies or designates the winners of a past history that continues into modern development.
In its place comes a common responsibility in the face of real scarcity: the responsibility every adult must assume in managing their individual energy capital, which requires self-knowledge and rest in order to act well.
The model moves this responsibility to the national level by accounting for each person’s energy in order to determine the real available capital that the population must manage, because it is finite. What is also shifted here is the real physical scarcity imposed by human limitations. There is nothing imaginary or suggestive about it, and no need to perpetuate wars in order to increase it: the quantification of machine energy accounts for it as machines continue to replace human beings at work.
Monetary scarcity gradually replaced the old, visible forms of civilisational subjugation. Where once there were servitude, slavery and serfdom, wage labour became established through a political and legal shift. Constraint changed its face. It became more abstract, more acceptable and more contractual. But it remains a constraint that effectively imposes choices, compelling us to carry out what we would not do if acting consciously and responsibly.
In the past as today, these forms of subjugation had an implicit justification: compelling part of the population to produce in response to an ancient fear—the fear that human beings, left to themselves, would choose not to work and would turn to plunder and theft.
Its roots lie in a biological reality. Every animal seeks to expend as little energy as possible in order to survive. This is a vital principle of economy. Energy is precious; it must be preserved. Everyone knows this and has been able to observe it in wildlife documentaries.
In the animal world, if prey can be obtained without effort, it will be. If one animal can steal it from another and feed on it without an unduly costly fight because the other is too weak—the human equivalent of the dominated—it will try its luck. We call this theft when we judge it according to our moral categories. If the other animal is strong—the human equivalent of the dominant—it will go and hunt its own prey, expending more energy.
This principle runs through the entire chain of life. It does not become immoral simply because it becomes human. It merely becomes more complex. Endowed with memory and foresight, human beings do not seek only to conserve energy in the immediate moment; they seek to project it forwards, defer its use and accumulate it in the form of tools, techniques and reserves.
Throughout the living world, this is the rule we observe and, when it concerns us, morally characterise as theft—even to the point of anthropomorphism. But at its origin lies the application of a more fundamental rule: conserving energy in order to survive.
Human beings are not exempt from this logic. They naturally seek to optimise their effort. At times, they accept a considerable effort, but because they anticipate an even greater future reward. It is the same energy logic projected through time.
This principle is not a product of our intelligence; it predates it. The instinct to conserve energy is not a human failing, but a condition of survival. An organism that wastes its energy disappears; one that optimises it endures over time. The concrete expression of this has been the reduction of working time and of the effort required to perform work.
This is how capital arises in its oldest sense: a surplus of energy preserved for later action. But as soon as this capacity for anticipation combines with domination, a transformation occurs. Those who hold the reserve can compel those who have none. Those who possess the surplus can organise dependence.
This is not yet a moral perversion; it is a logical consequence of a world of scarcity. When food is lacking, tools are scarce and land is limited, constraint becomes an instrument of organisation. City-states practised it. Empires institutionalised it. Feudal societies codified it. The industrial world made it contractual. The slave, the serf and then the wage worker were the successive figures of a single structure: ensuring that the human energy required for production was mobilised. Modern monetary scarcity fulfils this function in a more abstract way: it no longer whips or chains; it conditions.
You do not work, you have no money; you have no money, you cannot live properly. The constraint is no longer visible; it is systemic. This is the present Systemic Dominant, and we believe in it as our ancestors believed in their structuring myths. This is why any change to this story is described as utopian.
The Joule Model does not deny that production is necessary.
It recognises that the instinct to conserve energy will continue to exist. It does not naively believe that human beings will spontaneously become virtuous, but it refuses to allow this instinct to be manipulated through artificial scarcity.
It distinguishes between two things:
the real scarcity of material resources;
monetary scarcity organised as a lever of power.
The first is a physical fact; the second is a political construct.
In the present world, the two are conflated: people are led to believe that money is lacking, whereas what is sometimes lacking is organised capacity.
This is the transition; this is the shift made possible by the Joule Model.
We leave behind an organisation founded on implicit constraint and enter one founded on responsibility born of a lucid understanding of limits. Here we reach the precise point at which biology, anthropology and politics meet.
Economics was not born in banks. It was not born with money. It was not born with the market. It was born in the human body as it adapted to the ontological scarcity of the Neolithic period.
Henri Bergson spoke of the élan vital: the obscure impulse that runs through living systems and seeks to endure, adapt and extend itself into ever more complex forms. This impulse is not moral. It is not evil. It is movement.
Much later, Karl Polanyi would show that economics had never originally been an autonomous system. It was ‘embedded’ in social relations. People produced in order to live together, not in order to accumulate abstractly. The self-regulating market is a recent and fragile invention.
René Girard, for his part, showed how societies organise their internal tensions through mechanisms of rivalry and the channelling of violence. When scarcity intensifies, rivalry intensifies. And when rivalry becomes uncontrollable, society seeks an outlet.
Money, in its modern form, becomes the ideal instrument: it makes constraint invisible.
No longer does a master give the order; instead, a figure is lacking. No longer is there a whip, but a payslip and an overdraft; no longer a chain, but a loan and a repayment deadline.
We call this ‘modern economics’.
Yet the underlying mechanism remains the same: compelling people to produce because otherwise they do not eat.
Monetary scarcity acts as a constant pressure. It channels the instinct to conserve energy towards coerced work.
It turns a biological necessity into a permanent obligation. This is why, for centuries, we described those who sought to escape it as lazy.
With the Joule Model, work changes meaning. It is no longer a response to the fear of running out of money.
It once again becomes a response to the need to renew the world by sustaining the life within it.
We no longer work to avoid exclusion; we work because what is necessary must be produced. And if someone chooses not to work for a time, society does not collapse as a result, because constraint is no longer organised around a scarce figure, but around a real and shared capacity.
This shift in meaning is immense. It imposes a responsibility for collective management that human beings will have to assume without entrusting it to Fathers or Duces of the economy.
Marx described private property as theft. Yet some wildlife films amuse us with the cunning and patience certain animals display in stealing another’s food—and it works. Could a system based on theft therefore exist among human beings, with each person stealing what they need from another? Very quickly, we would stop working, exhaust our resources and render our goods useless. The system would collapse, because we live with the scarcity that compels us to work in order to meet the needs that the planet enables us to satisfy in this way. If we understand this, why can we not understand that if everyone lived on financial income without working, no one would go to work to produce and everything would collapse?
The flaw in modern capitalism is that it encourages the belief that everyone can become a capitalist, even though the very structure of the system creates the scarcity that prevents the majority from doing so.
The dream is sustained in order to maintain the tension. A few success stories are displayed to justify inequality, while monetary scarcity compels the majority to work.
The Joule Model does not moralise. We do not say: ‘rentiers are bad’.
It simply says: money cannot be eaten, dividends cannot be breathed, and we cannot live from algorithms if no one produces.
Quite simply because, in the development of industrialisation, irrespective of the human motivations involved—whether vanity, greed, necessity or hedonism (morally characterised as laziness)—the place of capital holders and their contributions are indisputable. Whether they accomplished this by consciously taking part in an ongoing historical development or, as Adam Smith wrote, by pursuing their own interests, we include them as essential actors within their own social class, able to deposit and manage there the capital that we do not expropriate from them.
We ask them to establish a form of entrepreneurial solidarity based on mutual assistance, like the solidarity that exists within the population and from which they too will benefit.
The Joule Model includes them in the management of national energy capital because they contribute to it as all citizens do and bear the same responsibility as economic partners—former employees—to participate in its management.
Their capital, converted into energy, will contribute to national activity. Consequently, there is no reason to subject them to any form of subjugation other than the authority of political power.
No capital holder will be required to deposit their capital in the bank; they will be free to move it to banks abroad.
The only prohibition will be against relocating their production abroad.
The economy will not be affected because it possesses energy capital. The only issues that will arise will concern implementation in accordance with human rights, under which every citizen may change nationality. We do not, however, envisage employers changing nationality en masse.
If they then continue their activity while investing capital abroad, the authorities will legislate to introduce a system for managing conversions, so that the energy margin is not transferred abroad except between countries that have adopted the Joule Model.
It was therefore necessary to clarify how the Joule Model takes account of scarcity and work.
The Employers’ Bank forms part of this logic.
The Joule Model does not eliminate organisation, deny the hierarchy of skills or turn the enterprise into an idyllic community.
It simply removes from the productive enterprise the right to make life conditional upon wages.
The employer no longer controls employees’ survival; the employer no longer pays wages, taxes or other levies, but proposes a project.
Work does not disappear; it once again becomes a conscious contribution within a framework in which existence is already secured.
This will give rise to consequences that employers will have to manage, both as citizens and as employers.
The Employers’ Bank cannot exist in isolation.
It necessarily alters the place of private banks and international capital and, more profoundly, our relationship to work.
For if capital is deprived of the right to reproduce itself through interest, a question immediately arises.
Does the capital required for development disappear?
No. It changes in nature: it has become the Joule Energy Reserve.
From Adam Smith to Marx, by way of Keynes and Schumpeter, one idea runs through economic history: investment is indispensable to the transformation of the world. Capital enables anticipation, innovation, risk-taking and the expansion of human capacities.
The Joule Model does not destroy this function; it separates it from rent.
The capital required for development remains available:
in the Employers’ Bank, through non-interest-bearing private deposits;
in the Joule Bank, through mobilisation of national energy capital subject to repayment;
in companies’ regulated margins, which allow them gradually to build up equity.
What disappears is not capital, but the demand for interest merely because it has been lent.
In other words, capital circulates, but it no longer accumulates and it no longer ‘works’, as we commonly say.
In the present system, starting a business often requires prior capital; those who possess nothing depend on those who do. This dependence structures the economic hierarchy.
In the Joule Model, individual capital is no longer the prerequisite for entering productive activity or for the ability to undertake an enterprise.
Funding can be obtained:
by mobilising the national energy reserve;
through interest-free loans;
through solidarity between enterprises.
Initiative no longer depends on accumulated wealth.
It depends on a project recognised as energetically viable.
This does not eliminate effort; it eliminates the initial wealth barrier.
Private or mutual banks may continue to exist.
But they can no longer promise an automatic return on deposits.
They become:
places for safekeeping and management;
instruments for productive financing;
centres for advice, evaluation and support.
They cease to be return-generating machines.
Money no longer produces money; only activity produces.
This principle is not moral; it is anthropological.
Without work, no good is renewed.
Hannah Arendt recalled that labour is the biological condition of human life. Marx recalled that it is the activity through which human beings transform nature. Even aristocratic societies lived from the labour of others.
The idea of an income universally disconnected from all material production is physically untenable.
Automated investments, financial algorithms and promises of returns from modest stakes of around €250 push the system to the point of absurdity.
If everyone could live from financial returns without producing, who would produce?
Goods wear out, infrastructure deteriorates and needs recur.
In a world of scarcity, consumption without production leads to exhaustion.
This is not a moral judgement; it is a physical limit. Here we encounter both the financial impasse and the thief’s impasse. If theft becomes universal, goods disappear; if interest becomes universal, production collapses.
Modern financial capitalism comes close to this contradiction: in seeking to turn money into an end in itself, it forgets that money is merely a sign, and a sign cannot replace physical matter.
This possibility confronts us with a phenomenon that deserves explanation. We have said that any system which receives nothing from outside itself perishes beneath its own waste, considering waste in its primary sense: pollution, carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases. But when we examine the financial structures of the capitalist model, we find the chains of consequences produced by the pursuit of capital. For centuries, war was regarded as a cyclical necessity for renewal. The economist Jean-Marie Albertini openly presents it as a necessary benefit. Structurally, this can tragically be conceded—except when the means of waging war become nuclear; that risk can no longer be concealed. We have already pointed this out. Today, however, the scarcity that organised access to work may be brought to an end by algorithmic means, enabling a €250 stake to generate rent without work. Clearly, this modern technology, driven by the pursuit of money and sustained by the capitalist model, contains the seeds of its own collapse—a second limit after the nuclear one, whose effects are difficult to measure. But we can say that investment advisers offering these €250 solutions are acting irresponsibly, unless their purpose is to create inequalities of access while promising wealth to everyone. It is more than evident that the capitalist model must reform itself.
The Joule Model does not condemn established rentiers.
It does not expropriate them; it ends the mechanical reproduction of privilege. Those who possess wealth may continue to live from what they already have.
But they can no longer charge others merely for the fact of possessing it; capital becomes a tool once again.
It ceases to be sovereign through the exploitation of the weakest.
The Employers’ Bank aligns itself with and operates according to this principle of clear-sightedness.
On this basis, it organises productive continuity and work within an environment in which life is already secure.
It no longer permits:
the use of control over survival as a means of pressure;
the subordination of existence to a contract;
the remuneration of capital to be based on interest;
the transformation of the productive organisation essential to life into an unconscious dependence.
The employer no longer controls access to life; the employer organises a productive project.
Work once again becomes a contribution rather than a condition of existence, and entrepreneurial solidarity is expressed through assistance to enterprises whose capabilities are failing, with the conditions for obtaining that assistance established in a framework that respects competition.
Investment capital remains available while contributing to national development.
Regulated margins make it possible to build up equity.
The economy does not collapse; it ceases to operate under the threat of monetary scarcity.
Work remains necessary, but it ceases to be commanded by fear and instead comes under the force of conscious responsibility.
The Joule Bank also has a management committee composed of employers’ and economic partners’ trade unions, a representative of the public authorities, and any other organised social representation that the authorities consider useful. It is independent in its decisions, validates applications for credit and administers loan applications. Its decisions may be appealed.
The government or Parliament appoints the managers put forward by the socio-economic groups.
The national budget of the State and the budgets of local authorities operate as follows. Each body deliberates upon the budget it requires and the plans it considers useful. It sends its budget request directly to the Joule Bank, which makes the payment through the Public Treasury.
The Joule Bank has no decision-making power over allocations concerning the budgets of political institutions.
It carries out only a compliance check against the available reserve; in the event of difficulty, it passes the information to the political authorities.
Before even considering the place of capital in the Joule Model, it is necessary to recall a simple fact: the French economy does not lack capital.
Available estimates put the total wealth of French households at between €15,000 billion and €16,000 billion.
This wealth is distributed approximately as follows:
60% in property;
20% to 25% in financial assets;
10% to 15% in business assets.
The strictly financial share—the portion that can, at least in part, be mobilised—therefore represents approximately €3,500 billion to €4,000 billion.
Within this total:
bank deposits represent approximately €2,000 billion to €2,500 billion;
life insurance represents approximately €1,800 billion;
shares and bonds represent approximately €1,000 billion.
These orders of magnitude show that the question of capital is not one of shortage, but one of organisation.
This capital is not distributed evenly.
In France, the data converge upon a well-known reality: the wealthiest 10% hold approximately 50% to 55% of total wealth, while the wealthiest 1% alone hold approximately 20% to 25%.
This concentration is not an accident.
It is the result of a continuous process of accumulation.
Yet this process rests upon a reality that is often left in the shadows: this capital is the historical extraction of human labour.
It derives from:
wage labour;
collective production;
the social organisation of value.
What the present system portrays as individual accumulation is, in reality, the outcome of a collective process of production, part of which has been captured, consolidated and transformed into wealth.
This does not mean that all of this capital is immediately available.
A large proportion is tied up:
in property;
in long-term structures;
in illiquid uses.
A significant proportion can nevertheless be mobilised.
Applying a realistic assumption of approximately 30% of financial assets gives about €1,200 billion that could be mobilised.
This figure represents neither expropriation nor the disappearance of capital.
It represents a potential capacity for conversion within a system in which money is no longer the condition of production, but an instrument for organising it.
By comparison, the stock of foreign direct investment in France is estimated at approximately €900 billion.
This means that the internal financing capacity that could be mobilised already exceeds external contributions.
This observation is decisive.
It shows that dependence on foreign capital is not a fundamental economic necessity, but the product of a particular organisation of the economy.
In the Joule Model, this reality takes on a new meaning.
Mobilisable financial capital is no longer the foundation of the system, but is added to a more fundamental form of wealth: the reserve of human and machine energy.
In other words:
productive capacity already exists;
financial capital also exists;
but the way in which they are linked changes.
This capital can be converted within the structures of the model, particularly the Employers’ Bank, not in order to generate rent, but to facilitate the organisation of production.
From this perspective, its use does not constitute a break.
It may be understood as a return to its true origin.
The transformation of the stock exchange cannot be understood without the transformation of the banking system.
In the present economy, the bank occupies a central position: it creates money through credit, selects projects according to their financial profitability and determines access to economic activity.
In other words, it organises scarcity.
In the Joule Model, this function is profoundly altered.
Since money is no longer the source of wealth, the bank can no longer derive its power from its ability to create or restrict credit. It ceases to be an institution that distributes monetary scarcity and becomes an institution that organises real capacities.
Today, production requires borrowing.
Access to economic activity depends on the ability to persuade a bank to finance a project, which requires:
prior creditworthiness;
security;
an expected financial return.
In the Joule Model, this logic is reversed.
Activity is no longer determined by the availability of money, but by the availability of human energy, machine energy or resources from the Employers’ Bank.
The question is no longer:
“Is the project profitable?”
It becomes:
“Is the project feasible and useful within the collective organisation?”
The bank no longer approves a project according to its financial return, but according to its capacity to mobilise real resources effectively and to ensure repayment of the loan, together with the costs necessary to preserve its value.
Within this framework, money creation changes in nature.
It becomes an accounting expression of real capacities:
available human energy;
the productive capacity of machines;
the collective organisation of employers.
Money no longer precedes activity.
It accompanies it.
The central role is no longer held by a multiplicity of competing banking actors, but by an organised architecture:
the Joule Bank;
employers;
economic partners, assisted in an advisory capacity by consultants from the State and the Economic and Social Council.
The Employers’ Bank remains under their management and lends under the conditions of the Joule Model, without interest.
The bank does not disappear, but it loses its dominant role as intermediary between savings and investment.
It becomes:
a technical body for bringing parties together;
a tool for managing flows;
an instrument of coordination.
It no longer directs the economy according to the profitability of capital, but according to the consistency of projects with the capacities available to meet humanity’s needs.
In the present system, savings are rewarded through:
interest;
financial investments;
speculation.
They constitute an independent source of income.
In the Joule Model, this function largely disappears.
Savers no longer need to fear deprivation or protect themselves through mechanisms such as life insurance, because this role is fulfilled by economic partner income for every social class.
Households can live without anxiety about the future, apart from concerns linked to the availability of raw materials.
Savings no longer make it possible to generate income by themselves or to become wealthy from a neighbour’s interest payments.
They become:
an individual security reserve;
or a means of participating in personal projects.
This profoundly transforms economic psychology: people no longer save in order to make their money grow, but to secure themselves or commit to a project.
People nevertheless retain their capacity to pursue seemingly extravagant innovations, which provide an indispensable sphere of freedom for enterprise. Today, no one would have lent money to Denis Papin, still less to Pierre-Paul Riquet for the construction of the Canal du Midi.
The question of the stock exchange is one of the most sensitive issues in understanding the true scope of the Joule Model.
It brings together several fundamental dimensions of the present system:
the formation of capital;
the circulation of money;
the anticipation of profits;
and the possibility of becoming wealthy without participating directly in production.
In the Joule Model, this logic is profoundly called into question.
The enterprise is no longer intended to distribute financial gains indefinitely, because it no longer bears the structural costs associated with survival.
Its function is refocused on real production.
Its margin becomes identifiable, regulated and negotiated.
Consequently, what can be shared is no longer an expandable financial flow, but a limited result arising from productive organisation.
This does not mean that returns on investment disappear, but that their nature changes.
They may represent real purchasing power, since production no longer incorporates the cost of sustaining human life.
Each economic actor will make their own choices.
The stock exchange thus loses its principal attraction: the promise of enrichment based solely on the ownership of capital.
It gradually becomes:
a tool for directing productive activity;
a space for selecting projects;
a mechanism for bringing capacities and needs together.
Investors can no longer rely on interest from bank deposits, which disappears, but only on a share of the available margin, negotiated and regulated. Conversely, enterprises benefit from borrowing without interest and repay only management costs and the amount required to preserve the value of the capital.
Today, a significant proportion of foreign investment seeks to capture part of the wealth produced in other territories.
In the Joule Model, this capacity is greatly reduced.
Not through prohibition, but through a transformation of the framework:
wealth is no longer defined in monetary terms;
the margin is regulated;
production is separated from the financing of life.
Foreign capital may continue to circulate, but it no longer possesses the same power of extraction.
Likewise, holders of domestic capital retain the possibility of investing abroad.
An economy cannot claim to be open while prohibiting the circulation of capital.
But the logic changes: it is no longer based on enrichment for its own sake, but on participation in productive organisations.
This development does not raise economic questions alone.
It touches upon deeper dimensions.
Holders of capital, whether domestic or foreign, face a new situation: they possess wealth whose structural role is diminishing.
This raises a question: what becomes of a society in which monetary accumulation no longer guarantees a dominant position?
Some may be tempted to preserve the old logic, accepting the risks of destruction that it entails.
But in a world where technological power makes irreversible destruction possible, this attitude takes on a new dimension.
Refusing to understand what we are doing with our power is an invitation to suicide.
The Joule Reserve makes it possible to assess a society’s real productive capacity on the basis of its human and machine energy.
For France, the orders of magnitude used are as follows:
annual human reserve: 181,594.8 billion kilocalories;
machine reserve (F = 10): 709,560 billion kilocalories.
Total reserve: 891,154.8 billion kilocalories per year
Using the reference value: 1 kilocalorie = €0.0355
Total Joule Reserve = €31,635.995 billion per year
By comparison, foreign capital of €990 billion plus 30% of French financial assets estimated to be available—€1,200 billion—amounts to €2,190 billion, approximately fourteen times less than the Joule Reserve.
Caution: this is an annual flow.
Reading the Capital System in Comparison with the Capital of the Joule Reserve
Capitalist Model
Money → Capital → Production → Life = €15,000 billion (capital stock = total household wealth in France) = accumulated past
Production depends on capital.
Joule Model
Life → Energy → Production → Money = €31,600 billion per year, annual productive capacity; capital depends on production
Capital depends on production.
“Where the capitalist model organises the economy around monetary scarcity, the Joule Model organises it around the real abundance of human capacities.”
The capitalist model organises the economy around a stock of accumulated capital, whereas the Joule Model is based on an annual flow of real production that is already more than twice the size of that stock.
The transformation of the banking system, the stock exchange and capital is not a technical reform.
It follows from a change in the definition of wealth.
When wealth is recognised as organised human energy, money loses its function as an instrument of power.
Capital then appears for what it is: not the source of wealth, but an accumulation derived from it.
The bank ceases to be an institution of control.
The stock exchange ceases to be a place of accumulation.
The whole becomes a system for organising reality.
And it is from this understanding that the economy can be reorganised.
The Joule Model does not weaken the enterprise.
It entrusts it with an additional responsibility of solidarity.
The Employers’ Bank organises solidarity between enterprises.
Poor management is not an ordinary competitive risk; it is a question of capability.
Neither economic partners nor employers should have to endure the lasting consequences of inadequate competence or support.
The Bank may intervene through:
technical assistance;
training;
progressive restructuring;
the introduction of temporary measures.
The purpose is not systematically to replace the person who made a mistake, but to restore the capacity to act of an enterprise that affects its local, national or international environment.
If, despite this support, the activity cannot achieve a balance compatible with the common energy economy, the decision to cease operations rests with the employers themselves, under rules they have collectively established.
The political authorities intervene only to review legality.
Just as social solidarity exists in the face of the risks of life, employers establish solidarity in the face of entrepreneurial risks, independently of the competition between them.
The Joule Model does not abolish capital; it acknowledges that each person may have accumulated wealth under rules accepted in the past within the prevailing balance of power.
The Joule Model does not rewrite history and accepts it as it is; it forces no one to work and confiscates nothing.
It merely removes capital’s right to reproduce itself through rent and to control people’s lives.
It removes from productive organisations and enterprises the power to make life conditional.
It replaces monetary scarcity with the finite framework of energy responsibility provided by the Joule Reserve.
It does not moralise; it transforms the environment. When the environment changes, human relationships change with it, because human beings find their choices within their environment.
An Inuit will never walk around in a swimsuit; a Mauritanian will never buy a fur coat.
The Employers’ Bank is not designed to set employers against a class of economic partners who were formerly wage earners.
It emerges at a critical moment in which all the necessary elements exist and must be brought together.
Entrepreneurs grew up within a capitalist system—to use a simplification—that made profitability a condition of existence, not because they invented it, but because they inherited it from a long history, as we have explained.
Once this system had been structured by industrialisation, they invested, organised, hired and optimised; they sometimes made sacrifices, sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed, like all human actors operating within a given environment—an environment itself structured by the distribution of scarcity since the Neolithic period, with conflicts deciding in favour of the victor.
Here we are stating only what is recorded in every history book in the world, including, for Western societies, the biblical Old Testament.
They did not create single-handedly the architecture that guarantees rent.
They served it because it structured the world; they served it because a Systemic Dominant compelled them to do so, just as myths ordered life in antiquity.
We are not blaming anyone. We are placing them within the long history that links them to the Systemic Dominant. In this respect, they are products of the system more than architects of rent. They inherited a system without having chosen it. Throughout the history of organised scarcity, entrepreneurs learned how to operate within it.
Geopolitical tensions are accumulating.
Authoritarian regimes with fascistic characteristics are advancing according to known criteria.
States and commentators remain silent about them for fear of recognising themselves in those criteria. This is a major political failure.
Democracies are becoming more fragile.
Competition for resources is intensifying.
And destructive capabilities are reaching levels that history has never known.
We are not describing a fantasy.
We are describing a convergence of observable events.
Within this convergence, preserving intact a system founded on the automatic reproduction of rent becomes unstable. As history has shown us, it is this instability that drives the search for charismatic leaders, with all the dangers they entail.
Within this framework, the Employers’ Bank is not a political punishment imposed by the Joule Model.
It includes the people who have played a leading role in society’s economic development.
We do not judge them for having taken their place within an economic history from which they could not escape while applying the accounting framework.
Even with the best intentions in the world, had they distributed exorbitant wages, the accounting framework would have enabled them to recover three times their nominal value.
The Joule Model recognises what has been built.
It confiscates nothing.
It does not rewrite history.
It humiliates no one.
But it changes the purpose.
Capital ceases to be sovereign.
It becomes contributory.
The enterprise ceases to be a hierarchical fortress.
It becomes a node through which the world is transformed.
Responsibilities remain.
Roles remain.
Skills remain.
But the vital asymmetry disappears.
No one retains the power to tell another person: “Your life depends on me.”
The Employers’ Bank does not abolish the organisation of capital; it removes from that organisation the right to capture human bodies.
It confines capital to the implementation of work, where it should never have ceased to belong: an act between free human beings in a world of shared scarcity.
If entrepreneurs have been trained within a given system, it is logical that they should reproduce its mechanisms.
They did not merely learn how to act within it.
Within it, they constructed:
their points of reference;
their reflexes;
their criteria for success;
their way of making decisions.
Within this framework, the pursuit of profitability is not a deviation.
It is a condition of survival within the system in which they have operated.
Failing to pursue profitability meant disappearing.
This behaviour is therefore not morally blameworthy.
It is coherent.
Entrepreneurs have invested:
time;
energy;
resources;
sometimes an entire lifetime.
They have taken risks.
They have passed through periods of uncertainty.
They have built within a framework in which:
competition is real;
failure has serious consequences;
success depends on a fragile balance.
Changing the system does not merely mean changing the rules.
It means calling accumulated experience into question.
Resistance does not necessarily arise from ideological refusal.
It arises from a gap between what has been learned and what is being proposed.
This gap produces:
mistrust;
incomprehension;
and sometimes rejection.
Not because the change is harmful, but because it is not immediately intelligible within their existing points of reference. We are accustomed to undergoing change, not choosing it.
In the present system, capital is an instrument of security.
It makes it possible to:
invest;
withstand crises;
maintain an activity.
The Joule Model does not abolish this function.
But it profoundly changes its logic: capital ceases to be a means of capturing the wealth produced by wage earners and becomes a means of circulation and implementation.
This shift may be perceived as a loss.
Yet it is a change of framework.
This resistance is not individual.
It is systemic.
It concerns all the actors who have learned to operate within this framework:
entrepreneurs;
wage earners;
institutions;
decision-makers.
The system is not sustained by rules alone.
It is sustained because it has been absorbed into behaviour.
This is why change cannot be imposed.
It must be understood.
Learning makes it possible to:
make the new framework intelligible;
connect the old framework to the new;
transform the perception of what is at stake.
Without this transition, change will be perceived as a threat.
With it, change can become an evolution.
They do not resist because they reject change.
They resist because they learned to survive within another system, because what enabled them to survive becomes difficult to relinquish, and also because resistance is often loyalty to the past rather than a rejection of the future.
Changing a system also means transforming what it has produced within us, and no one leaves a world they have learned to master without hesitation.
Entrepreneurs may resist change, but not because they are its natural adversaries.
It is because they do not yet perceive its benefits, even though those benefits are plain to see.
In the present system, the entrepreneur is under constant pressure:
immediate profitability;
competition;
multiple costs;
economic uncertainty;
dependence on market fluctuations.
This pressure shapes the entrepreneur’s decisions.
It forces a constant choice between:
activity and survival;
investment and risk;
employment and competitiveness.
The Joule Model changes this framework.
By removing the direct financing of the protection of life from economic activity, it eases this constraint. By also removing the community’s institutional operations from economic activity, it strengthens that activity.
The enterprise no longer has to bear:
healthcare;
retirement;
social risks;
a significant share of indirect costs.
It can refocus on its proper function:
producing;
organising;
innovating;
coordinating.
In the present system, a large proportion of costs are indirect.
They are embedded:
in prices;
in costs;
in mechanisms that are difficult to understand.
The Joule Model makes these elements visible.
It clarifies the distinction between:
what belongs to production;
what belongs to the protection of life.
This transparency reduces uncertainty and eases conflict over wages.
In the present system, the relationship between employers and wage earners is strained by one constraint: wage income. Work is a means of survival. It is therefore burdened with tensions—negotiation, conflict and dependence.
In the Joule Model, this constraint disappears. The relationship evolves: it becomes one of contribution and partnership, no longer one of vital dependence for survival.
Today, innovation can be perceived as a threat:
job losses;
reductions in human costs;
social tensions.
In the Joule Model, this logic changes: innovation no longer destroys people’s livelihoods; it transforms organisation.
This opens up room:
to experiment;
to improve;
to adapt.
The entrepreneur no longer faces risk alone.
The system guarantees:
the stability of individuals’ lives, whatever their activity—whether employers, economic partners or members of any profession;
the continuity of collective organisation.
Economic risk remains, but it no longer results in social destruction.
What the present system presents as an advantage—the possibility of accumulation—in reality comes with:
permanent pressure;
structural uncertainty;
dependence on financial mechanisms.
The Joule Model replaces this logic with another:
less pressure;
greater transparency;
greater stability;
access to interest-free financing.
They do not lose the power of their expertise or their economic position.
They change frameworks, and within this new framework they no longer have power over the lives of those who come to help them achieve their aims.
What they believe they lose in rent, they gain in stability, reduced pressure and greater clarity. The enterprise ceases to bear responsibility for the population’s survival and returns to its function: producing.
Innovation is financially freed from rent; it becomes a process of adaptation.
Their loss of power over people’s lives liberates their productive function.
Even when a system offers objective advantages, it does not eliminate a deeper reality: the fear of loss. This logic is inherent in living beings.
Every living being is structured by a simple principle: avoid loss. Losing an advantage, a position or a point of reference is felt more strongly than the potential gain offered by a new equilibrium.
This mechanism is not irrational.
It is protective, but it becomes an obstacle when change is necessary. This behaviour has led every civilization to evolve through murderous upheavals.
For entrepreneurs, this fear may take a particular form.
They may have accumulated:
capital;
tools;
networks;
experience;
a position within the system.
Even if the new framework is more stable, it changes the value of these elements.
What was once a distinguishing advantage may become:
less decisive;
less highly valued;
used differently.
This shift may be experienced as a loss.
Not necessarily a material loss, but a symbolic one:
loss of status;
loss of recognition;
loss of control;
loss of autonomy;
loss of economic power over the population.
Change affects not only income, but identity as well.
A new framework creates uncertainty because it can be assessed only intellectually before the existing elements in the environment are brought together, juxtaposed and organised.
A familiar system, even an imperfect one, remains intelligible because we know:
how to act;
how to anticipate;
how to protect ourselves.
A new system introduces uncertainty. Even if it is more coherent, it requires learning.
And this learning phase is uncomfortable.
The Role of the Systemic Dominant
We have explained the fundamental place of the Systemic Dominant, which takes the place of the animal dominant whose paradigm it embodies.
This fear of loss is therefore not merely individual.
It is reinforced by the system itself.
Existing structures:
reward certain behaviours;
secure certain positions;
reproduce certain hierarchies.
Changing the system means changing these points of reference, which gives rise to a paradox.
An actor may therefore have an objective interest in change while perceiving it as a threat, because the reptilian brain cannot register these intellectual parameters.
This is not a contradiction.
It is a tension between the reality of the system and a perception constructed by past experience, in which the reptilian brain found expression. In Taoist terms, it is the ‘old man’ who must be persuaded.
The Role of Learning
This is where learning becomes decisive.
It makes it possible to:
make the new framework intelligible;
connect what has already been acquired with the change;
transform the perception of loss.
Without understanding, fear prevails.
With understanding, change becomes manageable.
They are not afraid of losing what they do not have; they are afraid of losing what they know.
What has already been acquired weighs more heavily than what is possible. The familiar is reassuring, even when it is constraining.
Fear of change is often a fear of losing status. This is why understanding transforms fear into choice.
The enterprise ceases to be the gateway to survival.
It once again becomes an organisation that people join freely.
The entrepreneur no longer holds another person’s life in their hands.
They hold a productive project.
Above all, the Joule Model is not imposed.
It will not be established by force.
It will not be defended through violence.
It justifies no confrontation.
It leaves people free not to embrace it.
For adding internal conflict to a world already saturated with tensions would be another act of madness.
The Employers’ Bank therefore marks a threshold.
Not a revolution.
It represents a responsibility: to commit to giving meaning to evolution.
The Employers’ Bank organises production and financing.
The Joule Reserve keeps the accounts.
The Joule Bank organises funding.
But no society lives on production, financing and accounting alone.
It lives through the recognition it accords to human energy.
This is where the Human Evaluation Chamber comes into play.
An Adult World as an Institutional Objective
In the Joule Model, the idea of an ‘adult world’ is not a moral hypothesis: it is an institutional objective.
Human desire knows no bounds; nor do needs, once they become confused with comfort, comparison, anxiety and imagination. This is why present-day society takes refuge in monetary scarcity: it does not resolve conflicts; it conceals them. Silently and by default, it decides in place of human beings.
The Joule Model does the opposite: it makes the limit visible and therefore open to discussion. It does not say, ‘You will not have it.’ It says: ‘This is what the nation can genuinely finance over a given period. If everything cannot be financed at the same time, society must choose, in full view.’
In a fully mature world, no one would vote for a budget that exceeded the Reserve, just as no one would sign a contract that was impossible to fulfil: the absurdity would be immediately apparent.
But we are not starting from a mature world. We are starting from a world in which emotion, the fear of scarcity and rivalry continue to produce incoherent collective decisions.
This is why the Joule Model retains safeguards—not to infantilise people, but to prevent our archaic reflexes from regaining power in a new form.
Just as we retain a price in order to preserve a signal of genuine scarcity and avoid the illusion that everything is free, we retain a sustainability framework: a budget cannot ‘exceed the Reserve’ without an explicit, reasoned and temporary political act that can be challenged on constitutional grounds.
In other words, the limit is no longer a financial taboo; it is a matter of public responsibility.
But as soon as a society chooses to make this limit visible and measurable, a question immediately arises: who is responsible for evaluating it and organising it in practice?
In traditional economic systems, this function is fragmented among a multitude of actors—markets governed by power relations, public administrations, social-security bodies and political arbitration—without any institution genuinely ensuring overall coherence.
The Joule Model therefore introduces a body specifically entrusted with this responsibility, under the authority of the social actors. The Joule Reserve derives from their energy; it belongs to them, and they manage it by delegation.
General Presentation of the Human Evaluation Chamber
Once the energy standard has been defined and the Joule Model’s accounting system established, one essential question remains: who, in practical terms, organises the distribution of collective energy throughout society?
In the present economy, this function is dispersed among several institutions: labour markets, collective agreements, ministries, social security, social bodies and government budgetary arbitration.
The Joule Model brings these functions together within a dedicated institution: the Human Evaluation Chamber (HEVC).
This first mention is intended only to establish its general principle within the model’s architecture.
Its organisation and detailed responsibilities will be presented later in the book.
The HEVC is the body responsible for recognising and valuing real human energy. It is an essential institution of the Joule Model. For the services that protect life and cover occupational needs, it will determine the financial totals required by the Joule Model to cover everything removed from present-day prices, with the exception of the budgets of central government and local and regional authorities, which remain within the remit of political power.
We shall approach this reality through a payslip reproduced in the appendix, together with a tax statement and a statement from the local authorities. Through them, we shall discover the reality of a production price and understand why, whenever we pay for a product or service, we are buying back our own existence.
Reading a Payslip as a Real Energy Account
Observing What We Actually Finance
To understand fully why these principles are necessary, we must now examine what individuals actually finance in the present economy.
In the contemporary economic system, financial flows are fragmented among wages, social contributions, taxes, levies and prices. This fragmentation makes economic reality difficult for citizens to understand.
The Joule Model is specifically intended to make this reality visible by clearly distinguishing:
what belongs to production;
what belongs to the collective protection of life;
what belongs to margins and investment.
Once this separation becomes clear, one phenomenon immediately appears: a significant share of what we pay today does not correspond directly to the production of goods and services.
Understanding this reality requires us to examine a familiar, concrete case.
We shall therefore begin by examining a document that everyone receives regularly, but that few people truly know how to read: the payslip.
The purpose of this passage is not to condemn anything, but to reveal and explain what the payslip contains.
A payslip is neither a moral nor a political document: it is an accounting document. Like every accounting document, it tells the truth—provided we know how to read it.
On the reference payslip, the monthly taxable gross pay is approximately €2,165.
This is the total value produced and recognised by the present capitalist system for that month of work. Its composition is validated by the public authorities, whose representatives are elected by the citizens. Through delegation, citizens are therefore the decision-makers behind these legal arrangements.
Everything that follows—protection, taxes and social contributions—is deducted from this value, either directly at source or indirectly through prices.
There is no other lawful source from which to pay a wage earner hired by an employer, because the ultimate source is the value produced.
An Essential Institution: Social Security
A Few Historical Landmarks: Where Social Security Came From
The major milestones in the history of a form of protection that occupies a central place in people’s lives.
Historical Overview: Where Social Security Came From
The history of Social Security through a few key dates.
The Social Security system we know today is the product of a long history.
Although its origins lie in the late nineteenth century, with the first social-insurance law on workplace accidents, it was only in 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War, that it truly came into being.
Seventeenth century — 1673
Colbert creates the first ‘pension scheme’ for sailors.
Nineteenth century — 1881–1889
Germany creates the first comprehensive social-insurance system, at the initiative of Chancellor Bismarck.
1898
The Law of 8 April provides industrial wage earners with protection against workplace accidents. It changes the civil-liability regime: wage earners receive general protection, and their losses are compensated either directly by the employer or by funds that enable employers to pool the costs.
1910
The Law of 5 April creates the first cross-industry pension system for low-paid wage earners in the industrial and agricultural sectors: the workers’ and peasants’ pension scheme.
1928–1930
A series of laws creates the first comprehensive and compulsory social-insurance system for wage earners in industry and commerce, covering sickness, maternity, disability, old age and death.
1932
The Law of 11 March creates the first compulsory family-allowance system, financed by employer payments.
1935
The United States adopts the Social Security Act under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, marking the first legal recognition of the term ‘Social Security’.
The 1940s — March 1944
The programme of the National Council of the Resistance proposes a ‘comprehensive social-security plan intended to provide all citizens with means of subsistence whenever they are unable to obtain them through work’.
1945
The Ordinances of 4 and 19 October establish the French Social Security system on the ‘Bismarckian’ model—management by the social partners and funding through contributions borne by employers and wage earners. They also overhaul the social-insurance system of the 1930s and recognise the complementary role of mutual-benefit societies. The Ordinance of 4 October creates a general scheme intended to bring together all economically active people—wage earners in the private and public sectors, farmers, self-employed workers and workers in specific sectors—while also allowing certain pre-existing Social Security schemes, known as ‘special schemes’, to remain in place.
1946
The Preamble to the Constitution of the Fourth Republic recognises everyone’s right to ‘the protection of health, material security, rest and leisure’.
Under the Law of 11 March 1932, employers became liable for compulsory payments covering family responsibilities. These payments became the employer contributions shown on payslips. Employers advance these contributions and recover them through the prices charged to customers for their products or services.
So-called ‘employee’ contributions
They appear as deductions from gross pay, producing the net amount.
They notably finance:
healthcare;
retirement;
unemployment insurance;
the CSG and CRDS social levies;
compulsory supplementary health insurance under collective agreements.
All these payments are made by wage earners to safeguard their existence, their lives and the lives of their households.
On this payslip, they represent approximately 22% to 25% of gross pay.
At this stage, wage earners still believe that there is something ‘left over’ that the employer pays.
This idea appears in the statements of politicians, employers and certain political parties, which emphasise that employers also contribute to safeguarding wage earners’ existence.
Trade unions, by contrast, explain that these sums constitute deferred wages secured through long and sometimes violent negotiations.
What remains invisible is the source from which employers finance these contributions.
So-called ‘employer’ contributions: the heart of the illusion
On the payslip, they appear to lie outside wages. This is where what might be called the system’s central illusion resides.
Economically, however, they can come from only one place: the value produced by the wage earner’s own work, together with the minute contribution of every employer involved in the organised whole of human productive activity. In 2024, this comprised approximately 27,009,300 wage earners and 1.4 million employing enterprises.
So-called employer contributions appear to be outside wages, paid by the employer and not charged to the wage earner. In reality, wage earners finance their own wages, their own contributions and those attributed to the employer—without even knowing it—when, as customers, they purchase the goods and services produced. This is what we call buying back one’s life. The employer creates no parallel source of wealth with which to pay them.
The employer incorporates them in advance into:
the wage offered;
the ceiling placed on remuneration;
the selling price of products.
On the payslip examined, the employer share represents 26% to 29% of taxable gross pay.
First Summary: Social Protection—Approximately 51%
Table — How we reconstructed approximately 51% of social protection within wage value
This table does not reproduce an official rate shown on a single line of the payslip. It reconstructs the share of social protection contained within the total value of work by combining what is legally paid by the wage earner with what is legally paid by the employer.
| Reconstructed component | Approximate share of taxable gross pay | Usual interpretation | Economic interpretation adopted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contributions and levies deducted from wages | 22–25% | Paid by the wage earner | They directly reduce the wage earner’s disposable income |
| So-called employer contributions | 26–29% | Paid by the employer | They form part of the cost of the work produced by the wage earner and are incorporated into prices |
| Total social protection contained within the value of work | 48–54% | Two distinct payers | A single economic circuit |
| Central figure used in this study | Approximately 51% | — | The socialised share of wage value |
The exact rates vary according to pay level, employment status, sector, contribution reductions and the risks covered. The 51% figure is therefore an order of magnitude derived from a representative payslip, not a universal statutory rate.
It does not mean that a wage earner personally pays 51% of their wages into the healthcare branch alone. It means that close to half of total wage value finances social protection as a whole: healthcare, pensions, family benefits, workplace accidents, unemployment, support for independent living and other associated arrangements.
This interpretation must be distinguished from official accounting. In 2023, contributions represented 54% of the revenue received by Social Security administrations: 38% was legally attributed to employers and 17% to wage earners. Earmarked taxes and levies represented 37% of revenue, including 20% from the CSG social levy. Official documents also acknowledge, however, that the CSG is largely levied on earned income and that taxes such as VAT account for a growing share of funding.
The difference between the two interpretations is therefore as follows:
Official accounting classifies revenue according to who pays it in law. Our analysis seeks to identify who bears it economically at the end of the circuit of wages, prices, consumption and compulsory levies.
Social protection: approximately 51%
Adding employee and employer contributions produces a figure of approximately 51% of taxable gross pay used to finance social protection—what we regularly hear described as wage-related costs.
What remains invisible, however, is that wage earners unknowingly purchase the employer’s contributions—26% to 29% of taxable gross pay—when they pay for a product or service as customers, because those contributions enter into the calculation of the cost price.
This entire 51% is purchased by wage earners as customers, together with their own wages, the employer’s income and the increase in the capital financed. Without this, capital cannot grow sustainably in the absence of solvent consumption arising from work—that is, wages. The employer does not produce money out of nothing.
Wage earners finance all this, whether or not they are aware of it.
The mechanism is easy to understand. There is no work that does not arise from the expenditure of human energy. The wages received in return enable consumption and help determine the enterprise’s turnover, alongside the employers’ very small share. This turnover finances all the enterprise’s operating costs and the compulsory levies imposed on it—taxes and other charges—and determines the profit that constitutes the income of the employer or shareholder-employers.
First established fact: social protection is already paid for by the worker—directly through deductions from the payslip, and indirectly through the purchase of the goods or services that the worker has produced or supplied.
Net pay: a value already reduced
The net amount paid (€1,700) is not ‘full’ income.
It is what remains after the compulsory financing of social protection, healthcare, retirement, unemployment insurance and solidarity.
But that is not the end of it. Wage earners and employers must also pay the levies that finance the national and local political choices they reaffirm at each democratic election—that is, national taxes and the taxes levied by local and regional authorities.
Curiously, people nevertheless continually object to having to finance these choices.
This behaviour is neither immoral nor unjust. Each citizen assesses their situation within an environment in which survival compels them to compete in pursuit of money, and in which whatever remains always seems insufficient to purchase the available supply of consumer goods and services.
Income Tax
A deduction from the same source: annual wage income
Income tax is deducted from this net income. In the case study developed here, the marginal rate is 11%, while the average tax rate is approximately 4% to 5%, although it is higher for many households. The corresponding statement is reproduced in the appendix.
Marginal rate: 11%.
To remain consistent with a broad population whose tax position has not been optimised, we use a cautious average of 8% to 10% of taxable gross income.
Estimated average used: 9% income tax. A further 9% in national tax must therefore be deducted from net pay.
Local Taxes and Levies
Local taxes and levies on a wage-earning household
The documents reproduced in the appendix clearly show what local and regional authorities finance:
property tax, levied by municipalities and intermunicipal bodies;
the GEMAPI flood-prevention and aquatic-environment tax;
the household-waste collection tax (TEOM);
special levies;
taxes related to vacant housing;
taxes on land newly designated for development;
local tax-administration fees.
In the real example provided in the appendix for a standard dwelling, local tax amounts to €2,200 per year. Compared with an average annual urban gross income of €45,000, this represents 5% of annual gross income. These taxes finance:
roads;
schools;
water services;
waste services;
risk prevention;
municipal services.
In other words, they finance vital functions of everyday collective life.
A structural share of collective life is therefore already contained within the value produced.
Relative to gross income, this tax represents only approximately 5% of the wealth produced, even though it finances essential functions of everyday life.
A small share of wealth is enough to finance the essentials of daily collective life at local level.
Basis used: 5%.
VAT and Indirect Taxes
VAT is the least visible, but also one of the heaviest levies.
For ordinary consumption, the real weighted-average VAT rate lies between 15% and 18%. Although not all goods are taxed at 20%, most everyday consumption is. Wage earners therefore pay even when consuming what they themselves helped to produce.
Relative to total income, this represents approximately 20% to 25% of disposable income.
Cautious basis used: 21%.
Another Level That Has Not Been Quantified
Unreimbursed contributions and out-of-pocket payments
There is another level of deductions that we do not quantify here. It consists of the amounts that individuals—and wage earners in particular—must pay directly under the present system: co-payments, the €2 flat-rate contribution, medical deductibles, the daily hospital charge, flat-rate patient charges, the emergency patient charge (FPU), specific flat-rate charges such as €24, and, more broadly, every deductible and unreimbursed contribution.
These amounts are neither marginal nor exceptional. They increase mechanically whenever collective coverage is reduced. They constitute a direct further deduction from income in the event of illness, accident or emergency—that is, at moments of greatest vulnerability.
We have deliberately chosen not to quantify them here:
because they vary greatly according to individual circumstances;
because they are fragmented and difficult to understand;
because the purpose of this passage is not to keep adding indefinitely, but to make a structure visible.
It is nevertheless essential to understand that this level is added to the mechanism described; it does not contradict it.
Co-payments, medical deductibles, flat-rate charges and other out-of-pocket expenses have not been included in the calculation, in order to remain cautious.
Summary of These Compulsory Levies
This means that the figure of 86% obtained here is not an exaggeration but, on the contrary, a lower bound: 51% in social contributions, plus 9% in income tax, 5% in local funding levies and 21% in VAT.
Thus, 51% + 9% + 5% + 21% gives approximately 86% of the value produced by an ordinary individual. This value is mobilised to finance the protection of life and collective operations, then reincorporated into the prices of goods and services that make up turnover.
The Joule Model does not abolish this funding. It ceases to conceal it within the price of labour and goods and makes it intelligible. It no longer pretends that a product’s customer price is its actual production price. The intrinsic price of a good or service is 14%—100% minus 86%—corresponding to the residual productive share of the customer price, as we shall demonstrate later.
Wage earners already finance:
their protection;
their retirement;
their healthcare;
their local and regional authorities;
infrastructure;
public services provided by the State.
The Joule Model does not abolish this funding. It removes it from the market and from prices, but not from collective responsibility. Employers will no longer have to advance the funding from their capital. It will be financed by the Joule Energy Reserve.
Transition: if wage earners already finance all this through their expenditure of energy, why continue to make them buy it back through customer prices?
The Vulnerable Point: So-called ‘Employer’ Contributions
The vulnerable point is not moral. It is analytical.
A capitalist economist will say: ‘Employer contributions are paid by the employer. They form part of labour costs. They are not paid by the wage earner.’
Three levels must therefore be distinguished.
The Legal Level
In law, employer contributions are payable by the employer.
They are recorded as enterprise expenses within the accounting framework.
The enterprise pays them to the social-security contribution collection bodies, the URSSAF network.
There is nothing to dispute on this point, except to recall that it is the outcome of a long history of conflictual relations.
The Accounting Level
In accounting terms, these contributions form part of the total cost of labour.
This total cost determines:
the highest wage that can be offered;
the structure of prices;
the expected profitability.
They are not financed by wealth external to the enterprise’s productive activity and independent of work. Even if such external wealth existed, a human hand would be found at its source.
They are then incorporated into the cost price of production used to establish the public selling price—the price paid by consumers, most of whom are wage earners.
The Real Economic Level
No enterprise possesses an autonomous source of funding detached from human work and human consumption.
Distributed income—primarily wages and pensions—supports most demand. Households, wage earners and pensioners together with their families form the basis of consumption. We may also note in passing that the 86% in compulsory levies finances the incomes or wages of everyone who works for national or local government—that is, public servants. We do not evaluate this component here; depending on the source, they number approximately 5.8 million.
The wages paid by an employer are made possible by the capital available to the enterprise. But this capital did not appear spontaneously. It has a history.
A Brief Reminder
From the earliest state formations of the Neolithic period, through kingdoms and merchant empires and on to modern banking systems, capital was built through progressive accumulation:
conquests;
levies;
rent;
trade;
the exploitation of resources;
savings;
credit;
financial investments;
insurance;
productive investment.
What is sometimes called an ‘economy of pillage’ in relation to earlier periods is not a moral judgement but a historical observation: the first concentrations of wealth were formed by capturing surpluses, often through the violence of legal or armed coercion. Institutional legitimacy came after accumulation, not before it.
No one is born with money in their pockets.
All monetary wealth has a genealogy, just like the family history we explain to our children. At some point, it always derives from human work, an appropriated resource, a transfer of power or a mechanism of accumulation recognised by the institutions of its time.
Capital then circulates, changes form, is invested, lent and deposited, and is ‘laundered’ by time and legality until it becomes the equity, reserves or investment capacity of contemporary enterprises.
Thus, when an enterprise pays wages from its available capital, it is in reality mobilising wealth that has travelled through history.
But this wealth produces nothing without present-day work.
A machine does not operate without the hand that activates it.
An organisation is not administered without the intelligence that structures it.
A market does not function without buyers able to pay.
Financial capital yields nothing without real production behind it.
And this real production always rests on present human energy.
Capital therefore has a history.
Work has a present reality.
Consumption ensures its continuity.
Capitalism and money arose within this long chain. Neither emerged from accounting books; rather, they are what anchored those books as economic science.
The Joule Model’s interpretation belongs within this complete historical, economic and anthropological chain.
Within this framework, employer contributions are advanced by the enterprise, but the productive system recovers the arbitrated wage bill through the prices of goods and final consumption.
In other words:
the employer advances the cash;
the productive system recovers it;
the funding ultimately comes from the value created and consumed by human beings.
This is not an accusation. It is a description of the flows without which capital could not reproduce itself.
What the Figure Means: 51% as a Consolidated Estimate
This figure of 51% might suggest that we are adding together heterogeneous costs.
Yet the 51% represents neither confiscation nor dispossession nor an accusation.
It is an observation about the structure of the system.
A typical payslip shows:
approximately 22% to 25% in so-called ‘employee’ contributions;
approximately 26% to 29% in so-called ‘employer’ contributions, sometimes more depending on the circumstances.
Central estimate: 51% of taxable gross pay.
This figure is not polemical. It can be verified.
What it actually means is simple: before any further taxation, approximately half the value produced by a wage earner is already directed towards protecting life and pooling risks—healthcare, retirement, family support, unemployment and accidents.
In other words, wage earners already finance their social protection through their work.
The figure says nothing about whether this funding is just or unjust. It says only that the protection of life is already financed by the value produced.
This is where the Joule Model intervenes.
It does not abolish this funding.
It does not call protection into question.
It does not reduce rights.
It changes only the circuit.
Today:
the wage earner directly finances 22% to 25%;
the enterprise adds 26% to 29%, incorporated into its cost price;
these costs are incorporated successively into cost prices until they reach the customer price;
when wage earners consume, they contribute once again to financing these same costs through the customer price.
This is not theft. It is a circuit of monetary flows.
It is a financial circulation in which the protection of life is financed first through work, then reincorporated into prices and therefore partially bought back by wage earners and by additional consumption. This is what we call buying back one’s life.
The Joule Model proposes removing this 51% from prices.
At the same time, it also removes wages from prices, so that the protection of life and the income required for existence are financed directly by the Joule Energy Reserve, rather than through sequential incorporation into market prices. At the very least, it is logical that those who work and expend energy should not have to buy that energy back in order to finance their existence, since the energy each person possesses is what provides it.
This shift does not change the level of protection.
It changes the transparency and the source of funding.
It is not an abolition. It is a structural clarification that makes financial circuits visible.
Objections arising from conventional economics are legitimate.
They begin from the framework in which we live: one based on capital, labour costs, competitiveness and price formation.
We hear them and take them into account, subject to the purpose we seek to achieve through the Joule Model.
But one point must be made clear: we can accept only those objections that do not lead us to reconstruct the very model we are analysing.
If, in responding to criticism, we reintroduce:
the financing of survival through prices;
the confusion between the protection of life and production;
the idea that employer contributions arise from autonomous wealth detached from human work;
then we return precisely to our starting point.
The 51% finding is not a moral criticism.
It is a structural interpretation.
It shows that the protection of life is already financed through work.
The Joule Model does not challenge this funding.
It simply refuses to allow that funding to remain invisible and to be charged again through prices.
Objections are therefore useful when they strengthen the model’s robustness.
But they can be accepted only if they respect the fundamental principle: separating the protection of life from market production.
Otherwise, we correct nothing.
We merely dress the old system in new clothes.
And the work of clarification undertaken here would lose its meaning.
In the present system, all wealth derives from human activity, whether wage-earning, self-employed, entrepreneurial or collective.
Except in a small number of cases, the employer is not a source of wealth, yet remains indispensable. What we remove is the belief that employing someone entails a right to exploit them. We restore a partnership based on shared immediate interests in pursuit of a collective purpose that is not always perceived.
The employer is an organiser, a risk-taker and sometimes an innovator, but never finances anything with anything other than the value produced. To use a metaphor, their capital is merely a fruit-bearing tree in an environment where everything is scarce. Those who are hungry will pick its fruit without knowing that, for every apple they eat, they will have to produce three.
Everything the employer pays—wages, social contributions, taxes, local levies and corporation tax—necessarily derives from the work embodied in the goods and services sold.
We must also recall an obvious fact that is often forgotten.
No employer, entrepreneur or investor enters a world they created alone.
They are born into an already constituted society, with:
a language;
a culture;
accumulated knowledge;
infrastructure;
commercial law;
a banking system;
a currency;
a trained workforce;
roads;
ports;
energy networks;
a collectively funded education system.
Their education, skills and ability to organise and undertake ventures are the product of an environment built by previous generations and financed collectively. Above all, had it not been this person, it would have been another, because a place had already taken shape within the environment.
This analytical observation does not make the employer morally indebted for anything.
They did not choose their birth.
They did not choose the era into which they emerged.
They did not choose the historical accumulation that preceded them.
But they did not create themselves alone. They participate in an evolutionary trajectory larger than themselves.
Like every wage earner and every citizen.
This diminishes neither their merit nor their initiative.
It simply places their actions within a historical and collective continuity that consumer individualism causes us to forget.
The capital they mobilise, the institutions they use and the markets they access are the result of transgenerational accumulation.
The Joule Model does not deny individuality. It reminds us that every individual exists within a pre-existing collective fabric.
Recognising this reality is not a criticism. It places matters in perspective and points towards an essential bridge that is now perceptible: belonging to a single species whose geo-historical cultures should not set its members against one another.
Today, an employer pays:
gross wages;
employer social contributions;
corporation tax;
local business taxes and levies, including the CFE, the CVAE or their successors;
property tax on business premises;
various territorial contributions;
the administrative costs arising from fiscal and social complexity.
At first sight, these amounts appear to come from the enterprise itself.
Economically, however, an enterprise has only two sources of funding:
capital accumulated previously—equity, reserves and borrowing;
the value created by current activity—that is, the production sold.
Yet neither capital nor production is autonomous from human work and human consumption.
Capital is accumulated wealth from the past, as we have explained.
Production exists only when human beings carry it out within the division of tasks that has developed.
And it becomes revenue only when human beings purchase it—when they consume the goods and services they themselves have produced or supplied.
In other words, everything the enterprise pays necessarily derives, at one point or another, from the human value embodied in the goods and services sold.
No accounting entry can be financed sustainably by a source outside the production → sale → consumption circuit.
When the enterprise pays employer contributions, taxes or levies, it finances them through:
a reduction in its margin;
wage restraint;
higher prices;
reduced investment;
a combination of these mechanisms.
In every case, however, the burden is ultimately absorbed by the real economic chain: human life.
The enterprise may advance the cash.
It cannot create wealth independently of the system in which it operates.
Over the long term, what is paid must be covered by:
work;
productivity;
consumption.
This does not mean that ‘the employer pays nothing’.
It means that the final funding always rests on the human value produced and consumed.
It is in this sense that wage earners, as both producers and consumers, can be said to finance the entire system indirectly by virtue of their numbers.
Not because wage earners are victims, but because economic value circulates, changes form and always returns to its point of origin: human activity.
Increases in taxes, contributions or levies may temporarily be absorbed by the margin.
But over time, they are reflected in:
prices;
wages;
employment;
the productive structure.
This is the circulation that the present system makes opaque and that wage earners do not see, even though they are its essential actors.
The Joule Model does not invent this circulation.
It makes it visible.
The point is not to say, ‘The employer pays nothing.’
It is to recognise that the employer advances and organises, while the final funding rests on the value created and consumed by human beings. The individual employer is not an indispensable part of that process, but the role itself—whoever performs it—is irreplaceable in the struggle against scarcity.
The Joule Model does not deny this circulation.
It does not dispute the role of the enterprise.
It does not dispute legal ownership.
It does not dispute individual initiative.
It changes the point of view.
It begins from a simple observation: economic wealth exists only because human beings, endowed with finite biological energy, produce, organise, invent and consume.
This human energy is not created by the enterprise; it is given to each individual at birth.
It constitutes the primary source of all value.
The Joule Model therefore ‘takes’ nothing from the employer. It recognises that wealth arises from a common anthropological foundation: human energy.
And it organises the system so that this wealth returns to those who are its natural bearers: all citizens, without social distinction.
This is not done in the name of an abstract egalitarian ideology, but in the name of a fundamental biological fact: no one produces without mobilising vital energy that they did not give themselves.
The guarantee is therefore not moral. It is structural.
Wealth continues to be organised, invested and managed.
But its primary source is recognised.
It ceases to be implicitly captured.
It is explicitly redistributed from its real origin.
This represents an immense cultural step in a society still under the influence of innate archaism. Philosophically, it will inevitably raise existential questions for those who oppose it in order to perpetuate a system whose finitude is visible, together with weaponry presented as the guarantor of peace.
Under the Joule Model, the employer no longer pays:
employer social contributions;
corporation tax;
local taxes connected with productive activity;
taxes intended to finance the protection of life.
Why?
Because these functions do not belong to production.
They belong to the collective protection of existence: health, retirement, risks and social continuity.
Production and the protection of life are two distinct realities.
In the present system, they are combined within the price.
The price finances both:
the production of a good or service;
the biological and social survival of individuals.
The Joule Model separates these two functions.
This is not a claim that employers are ‘lying’.
It is a recognition of the independence of a structural mechanism that has gradually developed over the centuries.
People who devoted their knowledge, time and energy to caring for others could not materially subsist without resources of their own.
While caring for others, they do not cultivate the land, produce exchangeable goods or build their own means of subsistence. Their activity is directed towards the vulnerability of others. It partly suspends their ability to secure their own material survival directly.
Societies therefore had to organise around a constant principle: continuity of care requires continuity in the means of existence of those who provide it. This principle is not ideological. It is functional. A community that does not guarantee the subsistence of its carers will eventually and inevitably lose its ability to preserve life.
Historically, this organisation has taken various forms. In antiquity, care could be remunerated directly or supported by patrons. In the Middle Ages, religious hospital institutions assumed collective responsibility for it. In the modern era, public-sector salaried employment, contractual arrangements and then insurance systems structured this continuity. Yet behind these successive legal forms, the mechanism remains the same: in one way or another, the community contributes to the subsistence of those who take responsibility for human vulnerability.
Economically, this mechanism reflects a fundamental reality: care produces value that cannot be captured in full by an individual transaction. It generates major positive externalities—the preservation of productive capacity, reduced epidemic risks and social stability—from which the entire community benefits. The pooling of funding is therefore not a favour; it corresponds to the collective nature of the benefit produced.
Legally, the protection of health has gradually become established as a positive obligation of the public authorities. In contemporary states, it falls within the continuity of public service and the principle of protecting dignity and life. Guaranteeing carers’ means of existence thus becomes an indirect but necessary condition for this right to be effective. Without stable funding, the right to health remains theoretical.
This is therefore not a privilege granted to a professional group.
It is a structural mechanism of functional solidarity. Society protects those who protect life because its own continuity depends upon them.
Recognising this mechanism means establishing a realistic basis. Every reform, economic model and institutional architecture will have to incorporate this constant: the human energy devoted to protecting life must be compensated in a stable, predictable and organised manner.
Today, financialisation is weakening this principle.
The structural mechanism just described rests on a simple idea: carers’ subsistence must be guaranteed because it is a condition for the protection of life. Yet in the contemporary economic system, this guarantee is no longer primary. It has become secondary and dependent on unstable financial flows.
Financialisation has gradually transformed care into a cost centre, a market and sometimes an asset capable of being valued. Healthcare establishments may be subjected to profitability requirements, private organisations to return expectations, and professionals to systems of measurable productivity.
Within this framework, continuity of care is no longer organised first and foremost as a collective obligation, but as an activity that must find its balance within a system of pricing, reimbursement, competition or budgetary constraint.
Economically, this reverses the original principle. Instead of the community guaranteeing carers’ subsistence in order to protect life, carers and healthcare organisations must demonstrate their financial viability in order to continue operating. The stable supply of energy required for this vital function becomes dependent on budgetary variables, political trade-offs or investment strategies.
This development weakens the structural mechanism in three ways:
First, it introduces uncertainty into continuity of care. When funding is subject to profitability targets or capped budgets, the protection of life is constrained by financial balances.
Second, it shifts the purpose of the activity. Care may be assessed using accounting indicators that do not directly measure the human and social value produced, but rather its economic performance.
Third, it partly individualises risk. Professionals may find themselves exposed to costs, investments and economic responsibilities that do not directly relate to their primary mission: protecting life.
The point here is not to accuse a system or its actors. It is to observe that linking carers’ subsistence to commercial or budgetary financial flows weakens the initial anthropological and institutional principle: society must guarantee the means of those who safeguard life.
If we recognise that the protection of life is governed by a structural mechanism independent of the market, a logical consequence follows: the share of income corresponding to this vital function should not depend directly on occupational income.
Today, in most systems, social protection—retirement, sickness, insurance and risks—is tied to occupational income. It is funded through contributions levied on activity. This means that an individual’s ability to receive protection depends on their participation in production and the monetary value they generate.
Yet the protection of life does not derive from one’s occupation.
It derives from the very existence of the person.
Progressively separating the protection of life from occupational income does not mean abolishing remuneration for work. It means clearly distinguishing between two spheres:
the sphere of vital protection, which belongs to structural solidarity;
the sphere of economic activity, which belongs to production, exchange and initiative.
We therefore reject the idea that social protection should be channelled through the enterprise.
From this perspective, the portion of funding intended to guarantee health, minimum subsistence and fundamental security would no longer be a burden on occupational income. It would be organised as an autonomous and stable component, recognised as a primary infrastructure.
This separation would provide stability in three areas:
stability for carers, whose vital mission would no longer depend on immediate economic performance;
stability for working people, whose occupational income would no longer be reduced to fund what belongs to universal protection;
institutional stability, through a clear separation between the protection of life and commercial activity.
The transition does not consist in making a sudden break with the existing system. It consists in making visible what has been conflated: the protection of life is a foundation, not an adjustment variable.
A coherent accounting and institutional architecture can be built upon this separation.
Today, the enterprise does indeed advance contributions and taxes.
But these amounts are incorporated into production costs and then into prices.
And those prices are paid mainly by consumer households.
In other words, the protection of life is funded by the wealth produced by all human actors and then bought back through prices.
This mechanism is diffuse, fragmented and sequential. It is spread across millions of transactions and nowhere appears as a whole.
This is not deliberate concealment; it is a structural effect.
The human brain perceives accounting entries but struggles to perceive overall flows.
This is why the mechanism can persist without being clearly articulated: it is visible in accounting terms but structurally illegible.
The Joule Model does not denounce it; it makes it legible.
It removes from the price everything that belongs to the protection of life.
The protection of life and public needs is therefore funded upstream by the Joule Reserve, from the real wealth of everyone’s human energy, recorded only once rather than reintegrated into prices several times.
This shift does not abolish funding.
It abolishes the confusion surrounding it.
It is essential to dispel any confusion.
Separating occupational income from vital infrastructure does not mean that the employer would be subsidised. Nor does it mean that the entrepreneur would automatically become wealthier.
It does not mean that capital would be rewarded or privileged.
Employers, entrepreneurs and the self-employed are citizens in their own right. They participate in the collective organisation on the same basis as everyone else, within an unequal distribution of contributions and tasks. The Joule Model imposes no ostracism, penalty or sectoral favour.
The reform does not transfer a burden to one group in order to exempt another. It changes the institutional basis of collective funding for the benefit of all, without any scale of participation linked to income or social position.
What this really means.
It means that the price ceases to contain charges that do not belong to production itself.
Today, as a reminder, the price of a good or service includes:
remuneration for work;
remuneration of capital;
intermediate costs;
a substantial contribution to collective infrastructure—social protection, general taxation and transfers.
This layering makes value opaque. Consumers believe they are purchasing a product or service at the stated price. They believe that this is the intrinsic value of what they are buying. Comparing prices is a distortion of reality and an empirical legacy of necessity. We do not compare the prices of a product, but the human lives of all those who participated in its production. That is why assessing it in terms of energy is simply a matter of justice, as we have said.
Under the proposed architecture, production is paid for what it really is: a material or immaterial transformation that mobilises human energy and technical resources. The price will correspond to the costs of producing a good or providing a service.
The price then becomes intelligible: we know what it is paying for.
It represents the material and organisational cost of production without incorporating structural charges that are unrelated to the productive act.
This produces a major effect: competition ceases to be distorted by differences in social or fiscal bases.
The freedom to produce, innovate and compete in providing a good or service becomes visible and measurable on a consistent basis. That is what this really means.
This separation does not create an additional rent for the entrepreneur.
Removing from prices the charges that belong to collective infrastructure simultaneously removes the corresponding deductions from occupational income and employer costs.
The system is reconfigured. It is not lightened unilaterally.
In other words, the producer no longer pays to finance vital protection through the price, but contributes, like every citizen, to collective infrastructure through the common, streamlined and stabilised accounting mechanism.
There is therefore no gift, implicit subsidy or concealed transfer.
There is a separation of functions and legal clarification.
The principle of equality in relation to public charges remains intact; only its basis changes.
The contribution to collective infrastructure becomes universal and independent of occupational status. It no longer rests primarily on the employment contract or the price of goods.
Ordinary and humanitarian law is thereby strengthened, not weakened. No one will be able to claim that an excluded person or a foreign national is costly to society, because their energy will have been recorded.
A structural consequence follows when the price represents only real production:
the margin becomes identifiable;
performance becomes measurable;
economic responsibility becomes traceable;
competition becomes intelligible.
Transparency is not moral; it is accounting transparency.
And it is this transparency that makes economic freedom real.
The separation between production and vital infrastructure immediately clarifies what employers will no longer have to incorporate into their prices under the architecture of the Joule Model.
The following would no longer form part of the productive price:
mandatory health protection schemes;
compulsory supplementary payments connected with illness or risk;
the basic portion of economic partner income—up to 16 hours for non-salaried economic partners—now funded by the Joule Bank;
the indirect burden associated with the general funding of human survival.
These elements do not disappear from society; their funding basis changes and their financing will depend on other services.
They are no longer incorporated into the unit cost of the good or service. They belong to a distinct collective infrastructure and are accounted for separately.
These elements do not increase the figure of 86 per cent.
They help explain why the residual portion of the customer price—what is now called the ‘productive portion’—is structurally overvalued.
Under the present system, the final price of a good includes:
intermediate costs that are themselves burdened with social and fiscal charges;
direct and indirect social charges;
taxation embedded throughout the value chain;
the sequential repetition of contributions connected with collective protection.
When we state that the ‘productive portion’ represents approximately 14 per cent of the final price paid by the customer, we must be precise: that 14 per cent corresponds to the real cost of production—that is, everything strictly connected with the productive act: raw materials, transformation, organisation of productive work, depreciation of equipment and the accepted entrepreneurial margin—once the portion of the price that funds the protection of life under the present system has been deducted.
The figure of 86 per cent corresponds to what political and economic leaders generally call ‘charges’ or ‘levies’ that weigh on production and affect competitiveness. In public debate, these levies are regularly cited as factors that ‘hamper competition’ or artificially increase costs.
From the customer’s point of view, however, this distinction is invisible. What the customer pays is perceived as the ‘price of the product’. Customers do not distinguish real productive transformation from the embedded funding of social infrastructure. The price appears to be a single figure, although it actually contains several superimposed functions, and customers are generally surprised when prices rise, even without speculation.
The 14 per cent therefore does not constitute some vague residual portion: it denotes production in the strict sense. The 86 per cent is not an anomaly, but the accounting expression of a historical choice to make the prices of goods and services bear the funding of collective protection.
The Joule Model does not deny the existence of these levies. It changes their basis. It ceases to route them through the price of production. It clearly distinguishes between:
what belongs to productive transformation;
what belongs to the protection of life.
The 86:14 ratio must be understood as an illustrative order of magnitude intended to make this structural confusion visible. It is not an absolute statistic, but an analytical tool for understanding that the price of a product, as it is perceived today, is not solely the price of production.
By clearly separating the protection of life from production, this portion becomes intelligible.
It does not disappear.
It is revealed.
But it then appears for what it really is: the transformation of a good or service through human energy and organisation. This is a structural economic effect.
The Joule Model does not make production disappear.
It does not reduce economic value.
It abolishes neither the margin nor entrepreneurial responsibility.
It simply ceases to make production bear the cost of funding human survival.
Today, production bears:
the funding of retirement;
the funding of healthcare;
the funding of risks;
part of general taxation.
Under the proposed architecture, production will bear only what belongs to:
productive transformation;
the organisation of work;
investment;
the accepted margin.
Human survival is funded by the collective infrastructure of the Joule Model, not by the unit price of the product.
For employers, this is not an artificial competitive advantage. It is a clarification.
The employer does not become subsidised.
The employer becomes responsible for the productive dimension alone.
The employer’s margin becomes identifiable.
The employer’s efficiency becomes measurable.
The employer’s competitiveness no longer depends on the social structure embedded in the price.
Competition then concerns:
innovation;
organisation;
quality;
energy and material efficiency.
It no longer concerns the ability to absorb or circumvent embedded social charges, taxes, levies and so forth.
The price paid by the customer represents:
the material reality of the product;
remuneration for productive work;
the accepted entrepreneurial margin.
It no longer finances general human survival indirectly and invisibly.
This separation makes the system more transparent, more traceable and more coherent.
Production ceases to be the accounting vehicle for a form of solidarity that it is not intended to bear alone.
Let us reconsider the reasoning in strictly mechanical terms.
Under the present system, the price of a good or service simultaneously includes:
remuneration for work;
social contributions;
direct and indirect taxes and levies;
VAT;
costs associated with market risks;
financial safety margins;
charges embedded by suppliers throughout the chain.
In other words, the final price has become the main vehicle for funding not only production, but also a substantial part of the country’s collective infrastructure.
Under the architecture of the Joule Model, the distinction is made at source:
everything relating to the protection of life is removed from the price; everything relating to collective infrastructure is removed from the price; each is funded by the Joule Reserve.
The price now remunerates only:
productive organisation;
innovation;
maintenance of technical resources;
logistics;
real material or immaterial transformation;
the accepted entrepreneurial margin.
It once again becomes a purely productive price.
In this configuration, the price no longer supports the funding of human survival. It no longer contains successive layers of levies intended to fund health, retirement, risks, compulsory schemes and contributions embedded throughout the chain.
This is the mechanism that theoretically makes possible a massive reduction in prices—on the order of magnitude already established, namely 86 per cent—without impoverishing anyone.
Why?
Because this reduction does not correspond to a reduction in real wealth.
It corresponds to a separation of accounting functions.
Production does not lose value.
It ceases to finance collective survival.
To obtain a real and stable order of magnitude, the calculation will need to include:
the current funding of provident funds specific to employers, artisans, farmers and self-employed professionals;
specific and supplementary schemes;
compulsory insurance arrangements embedded within professional structures.
Under the Joule Model, these elements also belong to vital infrastructure and are removed from the productive price.
However, complete freedom remains to supplement the universal infrastructure with private or specific arrangements. The model prohibits neither private insurance nor voluntary supplementary mechanisms. The consequence is that our estimate of 86 per cent is understated and our estimate of 14 per cent is overstated, but this has no major bearing on the reasoning.
The Joule Model is not a system of state control.
It does not nationalise production.
It does not abolish private initiative.
It does not confiscate the margin.
It establishes an accounting and institutional separation between:
production;
the protection of life.
This separation makes possible:
greater price transparency;
competition based on real efficiency;
a mechanical reduction in productive prices;
no reduction in social rights.
The next logical step would be:
to demonstrate why this reduction in prices does not create secondary inflation elsewhere;
to provide legal safeguards for the mechanism so as to prevent any gradual reintroduction of charges into the price;
to address international competition and imports.
The structure becomes coherent and complete.
Under the architecture of the Joule Model, the employer does not automatically ‘gain’ what is removed from the productive price.
Removing the funding of the protection of life from labour costs does not constitute an automatic transfer to profit.
It does not create a structural rent.
It does not allow value to be captured permanently for the benefit of capital.
Why?
Because the structural conditions of the economic relationship change.
The employed economic partner now has a guaranteed economic partner income.
Their material survival is no longer conditional upon obtaining a job.
Vital protection is no longer contingent upon the employment contract.
The wage relationship therefore ceases to be a relationship of existential dependency.
Competition can no longer be based on vulnerability.
The pressure exerted through fear of losing one’s means of subsistence loses its structural force.
Within this framework, the employer is restored to their real economic function: organising production that is useful, efficient and relevant.
The employer no longer holds indirect power over survival.
The employer once again becomes a productive actor.
As regards the formation of profit, if the employer can no longer rely on a vital asymmetry, the margin can arise only from:
organisational efficiency;
innovation;
quality;
genuine economic relevance.
The margin ceases to be linked to a position of social dependency.
It becomes the result of productive performance.
This does not abolish profit.
It changes its nature.
The Joule Model does not seek to eliminate the enterprise, private initiative or legitimate accumulation arising from the creation of value.
It seeks to eliminate structural poverty as a condition for the operation of the economic system.
It does not compensate for destitution by redistributing wealth accumulated by a few.
It eliminates the very condition that makes destitution possible as an instrument of regulation.
This approach may conflict with certain traditional conceptions of competition.
But it is not based on a punitive morality.
It is based on a separation of functions: survival belongs to collective infrastructure; production belongs to economic initiative.
The employer is neither stigmatised nor favoured.
The employer is restored to a clear role: producing useful output in an environment where the material dignity of economic partners is guaranteed independently of the employer.
The reform does not weaken the enterprise.
It weakens only the use of vulnerability as an instrument of economic leverage.
The separation between production and the protection of life produces an effect that extends beyond economics. It changes the very structure of our relationship with work.
Under the present system, work implicitly constitutes the right of access to life through the enterprise.
Social protection, retirement, health insurance and, often, material dignity are conditional upon employment or productive capacity. Economic existence precedes the social existence that depends upon it, under the dominance of a resource supplied by historically accumulated private capital.
Under the architecture of the Joule Model, this dependency disappears.
Life is no longer conditional upon employment remunerated by private or financial capital.
Vital protection is no longer tied to the legal employment contract, collective agreements or company agreements.
The security of social life and the funding of local authorities no longer depend on the capital created by work.
Work therefore ceases to be a right of access to the security of social life, protection against risks and funding for democratic institutions.
It once again becomes a compulsory contribution to economic survival in the face of natural scarcity.
This distinction is decisive.
When survival depends on work, productive activity is permeated by existential constraint. It may be accepted out of necessity, endured through obligation or negotiated under pressure.
When survival is guaranteed independently of employment, the status of work changes.
It becomes voluntary participation in collective organisation.
It regains an intrinsic dignity because it is no longer founded on fear, but on the responsibility of adults.
The economic partner no longer works in order to survive.
Economic partners contribute because their activity has economic, social or creative meaning and enables them to fulfil their responsibility in the face of ontological scarcity.
This does not mean that every activity becomes optional or free of commitment.
It means that the productive act is no longer underpinned by the threat of exclusion from the means of life.
This transformation changes our relationship with:
hierarchy;
wage negotiations;
initiative;
training;
responsibility.
With the constraint necessary to human and political life separated from production, commitment rests to a greater extent on recognition, competence and genuine usefulness.
Dignity no longer derives simply from having a job.
It derives from a contribution that is chosen and recognised, made by a citizen responsible for the evolution of their daily life and of their species on a planet where we must produce and extract what it contains and what we are able to take from it.
This shift is not moral. It is structural.
It is not based on generosity.
It is based on separating the protection of human life and political independence from production.
It does not abolish effort or the productivity associated with it in order to enjoy abundance in certain economic sectors.
It changes their foundation.
Work does not cease to be a condition of existence, personal fulfilment and social recognition; it moves from being managed through scarcity for some and capital for others to becoming a conscious act of participation.
The Joule Model therefore does not promise an end to effort.
It proposes an end to vital dependency upon financial power and makes democratic institutions independent of such powers.
Work remains the vehicle of an existential dependency upon reality.
Human beings still depend on production in order to live.
They depend on transformed energy, natural resources, collective organisation and accumulated knowledge.
Ontological scarcity does not disappear.
Machines mitigate its effects; they do not abolish its principle.
What changes under the architecture of the Joule Model is therefore not dependency upon production.
It is dependency upon a particular actor in order to gain access to survival.
Material constraint remains.
Vital hierarchical and financial dependency disappears.
In other words:
Human beings remain dependent upon work in the anthropological sense.
They are no longer dependent upon a capital holder in order to have the right to live.
Work continues to be necessary.
It may remain demanding.
It may remain collectively organised and sometimes compulsory.
But it ceases to be the place where individual survival is bound to private authority.
The reduction in productive prices described here is not an ‘injection’ of purchasing power without any material counterpart. It is an accounting reclassification: the funding of collective functions that form part of vital infrastructure is no longer included in the productive price.
It is therefore not a reduction caused by dumping, secured by suppressing wages or arising from a weakening of social rights. Production continues to be paid for, economic actors continue to be compensated and the protection of life continues to be funded, but through a separate channel.
Under these conditions, there is no automatic inflationary mechanism, because productive supply is not reduced and the real costs of production are not shifted into another price. One levy is not replaced by another concealed within the same price: it is removed from the price and institutionally ring-fenced.
Secondary inflation generally arises from three causes: an increase in real costs, a contraction in supply, or an increase in the money available without a corresponding increase in goods and services. Here, the reform works in the opposite direction: it brings prices closer to real productive costs and removes the layers of non-productive funding embedded in price formation.
The vigilance required lies elsewhere: in the risk that margins will absorb the reduction. If charges are removed from the price without traceability rules, some actors could artificially restore the former price level by increasing their margins. This is not inevitable ‘macroeconomic’ inflation; it is a risk of microeconomic behaviour. And that is precisely what the legal safeguard must prevent.
The critical issue is not the reduction itself. The critical issue is the stability of the separation: preventing vital-infrastructure charges from gradually being imposed on productive prices once again.
In legal terms, this must be treated as a rule governing the accounting architecture and mandatory transparency.
It can be expressed as a simple normative principle: under the principle of separation of functions, charges relating to the protection of life and collective infrastructure may not be included in the productive costs used to determine prices.
Every enterprise or productive organisation must distinguish in its accounts between flows relating to production and those relating to vital infrastructure. This separation is not a management option: it is a rule of faithful accounting. Employers may not include in the production price the economic partner income they receive, just like everyone else who works. Only the margin set by the Human Energy Council may be included in the production price.
Any ‘rebilling’ or additional charge intended to reintroduce into productive prices contributions used to fund functions already covered by the vital infrastructure calculated by the Human Energy Council is prohibited.
The methods used to calculate prices and add margins must be auditable and subject to oversight by an independent body—not in order to administer prices, but to verify the integrity of the separation.
The sanction must not be political, but accounting-based: adjustment and restitution, without penalties, followed, in the event of repeated infringements, by a temporary prohibition on certain pricing practices.
This safeguard is not intended to plan the economy. It is intended to prevent the functions from being conflated once again—which is precisely the affliction of the present system.
This turns an intuition—‘prices will fall’—into a mechanism that is understandable, verifiable and non-ideological.
Under the present system, a price does not reflect the real cost of a product. It is a stack of rebilled costs.
A price simultaneously includes remuneration for work, the funding of social protection, taxes on profits, local taxes, sector-specific levies, VAT, the administrative costs of compliance, a safety margin linked to social instability, a profit margin demanded by capital and, sometimes, an artificial scarcity premium.
In other words, the price pays for everything except what it claims to pay for: the television set itself.
It pays for fear, anticipation, constraint and opacity.
The founding principle of the Joule Model is a clear separation: a price should remunerate production alone.
The protection of life must never be included in a price. It is provided separately and funded by the quantified individual energy of the population. There is therefore no reason to make people purchase it through the customer price.
This entails a clear distinction between two spheres:
The sphere of protecting existence covers all citizens, without distinction of class or social condition:
health, retirement and risks;
compensation and learning;
all funded collectively by the Joule Reserve.
The sphere of production comprises materials, energy, organisation, maintenance, innovation and logistics, remunerated through the real price, to which the margin is added.
Under the Joule Model, a price no longer contains:
social security contributions;
tax on profits;
local taxes on production;
VAT on essential goods;
charges linked to human survival;
protective margins linked to insecurity.
This removal is not ideological.
It is structural, since these functions are already funded elsewhere through the Joule Reserve.
Let us take a deliberately ordinary example: the current price of an everyday good or service.
Retail price: €100
Implicit average breakdown (order of magnitude):
€51 — social protection, direct and indirect;
€9 — income tax;
€5 — local taxes;
€21 — VAT and indirect taxes;
€14 — real production plus margins.
Real production = €14 (itself overstated).
Everything relating to protection and the collective sphere is removed from the price.
The price becomes €14 to €18, depending on the sector. It is produced by an economic partner and, with their survival already guaranteed, that same partner—as the customer of their own work—pays for the product or service at a price reduced by 86%, without VAT on essentials and without embedded social charges.
Prices fall by around 80 to 86%, without any loss of real income for citizens or the population as a whole.
Why this reduction impoverishes no one is the point the reader must understand fully.
The 86% removed from the price did not remunerate production. It existed as energy expended in order to produce but was not recorded as such. These amounts were paid upstream and then repurchased in the sale price, together with the cost of collective organisation.
They represented the value of security in social life and the independence of democratic institutions.
The Joule Model does not abolish wealth; it abolishes its absurd circulation, inherited from a history of conflict among dominant actors and individualised by the liberal ideological narrative, which has never found genuine application. The Joule Model will bring it into being within the limits of finite energy.
The conversion of prices does not take place in a single day.
The Joule Model provides for:
the temporary coexistence of both systems;
progressive conversion, sector by sector;
neutralisation coefficients;
indexation to the actual Joule Reserve;
mandatory accounting transparency.
During the transition:
current prices are displayed alongside Joule prices, and the difference is explained.
Trust comes from intelligibility, not constraint. Decision-makers will nevertheless make the choices; we are merely proposing one possible approach.
Once survival has been removed from the price:
competition through social dumping disappears;
offshoring loses its appeal;
quality once again becomes a criterion;
durability becomes rational;
innovation regains a genuine purpose.
Poor-quality production is no longer profitable and entails energy expenditure for recycling.
Nor is pointless production profitable if there is no consumer for what is produced.
When prices cease to fund fear:
the threat of job losses collapses;
economic domination dissolves;
social violence falls mechanically.
Without moralising. Without promises. And part of the shadow economy disappears.
This results from an environmental architecture reshaped by new geo-historical behaviours, which we have briefly recalled.
We now know what an individual actually pays, what the employer will no longer pay, how a price can become real and where wealth comes from.
One decisive question remains: how, in practical terms, is economic partner income determined for each type of economic partner?
At this stage, a technical question must be addressed.
If productive prices are reduced by an order of magnitude that may approach 86%, and if economic partner incomes are henceforth calculated separately from the protection of life, how is this reflected in familiar macroeconomic aggregates?
Is gross domestic product reduced by the same proportion?
Does national wealth mechanically collapse?
This question is legitimate.
It arises from a natural reflex: to compare any structural reform with the existing statistical aggregates of the capitalist system.
A clarification is necessary precisely in order to avoid such a misunderstanding.
The 86% does not correspond to 86% of GDP.
It represents the proportion of the value produced by an ordinary individual that is mobilised, directly or indirectly, to fund the protection of life and collective functions, and then reincorporated into the prices that the same person pays through their purchases. This phenomenon is so dispersed across billions of economic transactions that it goes unnoticed.
It is therefore a real microeconomic reading, beginning with people's primary income and what they pay before, during and after the act of consumption.
In other words, the starting point is not a national average already ‘digested’ by the public accounts. It is the lived reality of an actual person—their payslips, taxes, bills and prices—and the same wealth is followed through its successive stages.
This is precisely where the misunderstanding arises.
GDP does not add up banknotes. It adds up value added.
Its definition is simple and rigorous: GDP = the sum of the final value added produced within the territory.
An enterprise's value added is the difference between what it sells and what it purchased in order to produce. In other words, it measures the wealth actually created at each stage.
Let us illustrate this.
Imagine a €100 banknote.
This banknote pays a carpenter.
The carpenter uses the €100 to pay a timber supplier.
The supplier pays a haulier.
The haulier pays a mechanic.
The mechanic pays a retailer.
The banknote remains the same. But at each stage, a different amount of value added has been produced.
GDP does not count €100 five times. It adds up the value added generated by each real transformation.
If each economic actor created €20 of value added in the process, then: €20 + €20 + €20 + €20 + €20 = €100 of GDP.
The initial banknote has not been multiplied.
It is the successive transformations that have been measured.
What the example reveals, however, is something else: the same unit of currency can support several successive economic transactions.
This is known as the velocity of money.
The faster money circulates, the more transactions it can finance and the more successive amounts of value added it generates.
GDP measures the sum of these successive creations. It does not measure the path taken by a particular euro through society.
Nor does it measure how many times the same individual's wealth is collected, redistributed and then reincorporated into prices.
The figure of 86%, however, does not describe the scale of national output. It describes a different phenomenon: the proportion of the value produced by an individual that is mobilised, directly or indirectly, to fund the protection of life and democratic collective infrastructure before returning in the prices that the individual pays.
GDP and the 86/14 ratio therefore do not contradict one another. They do not observe the same object.
The former measures total annual output.
The latter reveals a structural circulation of individual value—the wage—within the system.
This distinction is essential if any macroeconomic confusion is to be avoided.
The figure of 86% therefore does not ‘contradict’ GDP. It describes something else.
It is not a slogan. It is a reading of flows.
It is not an official macroeconomic statistic.
That is precisely why it appears nowhere.
No one undertakes this calculation—not because of deliberate concealment, but because existing accounting tools were not designed for it.
National accounts measure the financial wealth produced within a territory and, for certain indicators, express it as an average per inhabitant.
GDP per capita is not a methodological error.
It allows aggregate levels of output to be compared between countries or between periods.
But it does not describe the reality of social production.
Value added is not produced uniformly by every inhabitant.
It results from the activity of people engaged in production: employees, the self-employed, entrepreneurs, public-sector workers and members of the liberal professions.
Part of the population is not directly in a position to produce measured market value: children, retired people, people temporarily out of work, students, people unable to work, and so on.
Mechanically dividing aggregate wealth by the entire population therefore produces a statistical average that is useful for international comparisons, but does not reflect either the actual contribution of different social groups or the way in which value circulates between them.
To understand the real dynamics of wealth, a sequential reading would be necessary:
by category of activity;
by position in the production chain;
by type of income (work, capital or transfer);
by role in circulation (producer, consumer or beneficiary of infrastructure).
Classical national accounting was not designed to track such fine-grained flows from the individual onwards.
It aggregates, consolidates and stabilises large totals.
The Joule Model adopts another perspective:
it starts from the value produced by real people and follows its complete trajectory—production, deduction, redistribution and reincorporation into prices—in order to make visible what is currently dissolved within aggregates.
It does not contradict national accounting.
It views it from another angle.
Economic and financial accounting is designed to measure the performance of production units, track monetary flows, determine results, and organise investment and the remuneration of capital employed.
The accounting framework therefore filters reality according to what is relevant to ownership of the means of production, investment, management and profitability. It follows flows where they concentrate at the end of the chain, not where they circulate throughout people's economic lives.
It is not designed to trace human energy through its successive transformations, or to reveal how many times the same value—produced by work and human activity—is mobilised, collected, redistributed and then reincorporated into the prices paid by the same people when they become customers.
In other words, classical accounting observes what remains at the end of the process for privately held capital.
It does not observe what circulates before, during and after.
This is why the figure of 86% cannot appear in any standard aggregate: it corresponds neither to a budget line, nor to a single tax item, nor to a category of GDP. It corresponds to a cross-sectional, individual-centred reading that successively traverses wages, social contributions, direct taxes, local taxes, indirect taxation and prices.
The accounting framework is therefore not a tool for a collective reading of economic life. It could become one only under an assumption radically different from the present organisation: one in which every member of the community was a co-owner of every production or service unit, and in which accounting was designed to track value from the point of view of the community itself.
The Joule Model theoretically opens up this possibility. The payment of economic partner income could, in law as in practice, allow everyone to extend their participation to a form of generalised co-ownership of production and services, and thus to a fully collective reading of the value produced.
Yet we have deliberately chosen not to push the system that far immediately.
Not out of ideological renunciation, but out of anthropological lucidity.
The human psyche would not survive an abrupt shift of this kind. An immediate transformation towards full co-ownership of everything and wholly collective accounting would be experienced as a loss of bearings, a dissolution of responsibilities and a major symbolic violence for the archaic brain.
It is for this reason that the Joule Model always preserves the value of a product or service. The price remains present, legible and intelligible. It continues to serve as a cognitive reference point, a decision-making tool, a signal of scarcity and a means of coordination, even when its composition is profoundly transformed.
In other words, the Joule Model does not abolish the market.
It removes human survival from the market.
This distinction is essential. It avoids abruptly disorienting the ‘reptilian’ brain, which needs simple signals in order to orient itself in action: a price, an exchange, a visible decision. The proposed transformation is therefore progressive, psychologically sustainable and compatible with human capacities for adaptation.
Adaptation can then take place over centuries.
The Joule Model does not impose an end state. It creates a possible trajectory. It stabilises existence, makes production intelligible and allows time—the long time of learning, culture and the evolution of representations—to do its work.
We do not force anyone or any country to adopt the Joule Model. It is neither a programme nor a universal prescription. It has been written, it exists, and it is made available to those who choose to create a different environment.
For this is precisely what is at stake: not convincing individuals, still less addressing the archaic brain, but transforming the environment in which that brain acts.
When we show that there is a high probability—around 56% by 2100—that the destructive weapons developed by human societies will be used, it is not in order to moralise individual behaviour. It is not to identify culprits. It is not to accuse a generation.
It is to observe a structural phenomenon: as technological power increases, so too does the probability that this power will be deployed within a logic of domination, if the institutional environment remains founded on competition for survival and capture.
It is therefore not the ‘reptilian’ brain that must be addressed, nor even individuals taken in isolation.
The archaic brain cannot be reformed by discourse. It reacts to the environment in which it operates.
When the environment is organised around manipulated scarcity, competition for survival, fear of loss and the concentration of power, the reptilian brain acts in accordance with these incentives. It does not freely choose domination: it responds to a context.
The Joule Model does not claim to correct humanity.
It does not assume that human beings would suddenly become moral, generous or enlightened.
It proposes changing the structural conditions in which behaviours emerge.
By separating survival from the market, removing existential fear from economic competition, making production intelligible and making protection independent of private capital, the decision-making environment is altered.
We do not moralise.
We restructure.
For it is not the isolated individual who determines the course of history.
It is the institutional environment that selects the behaviours that predominate.
The Joule Model does not promise a perfect humanity.
It seeks to make the systemic activation of destructive behaviours less likely as technological power increases.
An immediate objection is this: if domestic prices fall sharply, what happens in relation to imports and the rules of international trade?
The reasoning rests on three points.
This is not a public transfer to businesses. It is the removal of infrastructure charges from the productive price, offset by separate universal funding. If that funding is genuinely universal and not targeted at exporting firms, the advantage is not a sector-specific subsidy; it is a change in the national funding base comparable to a structural tax reform.
If an imported product arrives with a price that incorporates a different social structure in its country of origin, a direct comparison is distorted. The consistent principle is to apply an infrastructure-equivalence rule at the point of entry: not in order to tax arbitrarily, but to prevent differences in social funding bases from becoming the principal factor of competition.
The objective is simple: competition should concern actual production—quality, innovation and efficiency—not the export of social costs or the absence of protection of life elsewhere.
This is necessary if we wish to remain within a framework of fair competition.
An exported product no longer carries layers of domestic vital funding in its price. It becomes more comparable with international ‘factory-gate prices’. This may improve competitiveness, but that gain is not a ‘gift’: it is the logical consequence of no longer financing human survival through the unit price of goods.
The precise form of an import-equivalence mechanism depends on the applicable legal framework (EU law, WTO rules and trade agreements). It must therefore be framed around alignment, neutrality, non-discrimination, traceability and price transparency, without wording that equates it with a ‘subsidy’ or a ‘protectionist barrier’.
The measurement of human energy is not an invention of the Joule Model. It belongs to the long history of science.
In the late eighteenth century, Antoine Lavoisier established that respiration is measurable oxidation, comparable to slow combustion: the human body became an objectively observable energy system. In the nineteenth century, thermodynamics and the principle of energy conservation (Helmholtz and Joule) turned energy from a philosophical abstraction into a universal, measurable and comparable quantity.
The kilocalorie became a practical measure of human metabolism. In the late nineteenth century, Wilbur Olin Atwater’s calorimetry experiments quantified the energy expenditure associated with food and work, measuring the body as a biological engine. Twentieth-century occupational physiology refined these data: oxygen consumption, basal metabolism, expenditure by activity, physical strain and muscular efficiency.
For more than a century, therefore, we have known how to measure the energy expended by a human being. The information has long been objectively available.
Why, then, has no one based economic value on this real human datum? The answer is not scientific. It is historical and anthropological.
For centuries, manual labour was reserved for dominated classes. Physical effort was not the basis of value but the social marker of a condition, regarded at times in Antiquity as fixed by birth. Elites administered, owned, fought and theorised, but did not work. Work was a necessity, not a principle.
Even when Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx placed labour at the heart of value, classical political economy lacked a unified scientific tool to translate it into a universal energy unit. Labour remained a social category, not a thermodynamic quantity integrated into state accounting.
We still follow this historical trajectory. Inherited mental structures—property, money, debt and the hierarchy of capital—shaped legitimate thought and sacralised as almost natural what were only Systemic Dominants. These dominants locked not only institutions but the cognitive frameworks within which consciousness and intelligence unfold.
As in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Blind Leading the Blind, each person still follows the rut traced by the one before. Information may be present; if life’s interpretative framework cannot connect it to collective organisation, it remains inert.
This confirms the point made by the psychologist Pierre Daco: faced with a radio, we are unable to turn the dial and listen to different music.
Thus, science measured human energy while economics organised monetary scarcity. The two bodies of knowledge coexisted without meeting.
The labourer expended energy. The doctor measured metabolism. The physicist defined the joule. The banker administered money.
Yet no system linked these elements within a comprehensive accounting architecture, despite the possibility of doing so.
Systemic risk is often needed before collective intelligence leaves the rut. From the 1980s, financialisation, soaring public and private debt, minority capture of technological gains and rising inequality exposed a structural tension: money grew scarce as productive capacity increased, while the international environment multiplied conflict risks—with three chances in four. The contradiction and its risks became visible.
Without this real ecological, social and geopolitical risk, the idea would probably have remained marginal. Systems are not transformed by logic alone; they evolve under pressure.
There is no vanity in having conceived the Joule Model; it is no heroic discovery. Sooner or later, someone would have connected the scientific measurement of human energy with society’s accounting organisation. The model claims no isolated invention: it forms part of a historical maturation shaped by the social and economic environment and by the vision of two trade unionists. Fernand Pelloutier pursued the emancipation of the working class (1867–1901); this became ‘Paying People to Learn’. André Bergeron advocated taxing machines to save social protection; this became the Machine Joule Reserve. There is therefore neither miracle nor genius, but the associative thinking we all possess. The question was how to turn the dial on the radio of life. Dr Lacambre’s invitation to read Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment provided the trigger. A framework was still needed to understand the geological evolution of human beings across the centuries; this gave shape to adultescence.
This leads to a simple observation: human energy has been scientifically measured for more than a century, yet no system has managed to make it the accounting foundation of a society.
This is the conceptual step we are taking, while briefly explaining its development. It took no less than 2026 − 1867 = 159 years to change a social organisation that has regulated scarcity for 12,000 years, since agriculture first appeared, and for around 9,000 years since it spread across the continents.
Writing these pages, I often felt a paradox: I seemed to formulate a new idea, yet believed it merely recombined elements already present in human thought.
I had already written in a 1999 essay: I have discovered nothing that others had not discovered before me.
At most, I have assembled scattered elements into new coherence. Human thought rarely advances by absolute invention; it reorganises existing knowledge. Concepts, observations and intuitions exist; often only the connecting architecture is missing.
Music may express this better: countless musicians have already written the notes, but music is born when someone arranges them into a new composition.
This is not peculiar to this book. Many thinkers have placed their work within an intellectual continuity far greater than themselves.
Isaac Newton expressed this with famous modesty: ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’
For Claude Lévi-Strauss, human thought was intellectual bricolage: societies and researchers use available concepts to build new interpretations of the world.
Michel Foucault likewise showed that ideas arise within a field shaped by history, institutions and accumulated knowledge, never in isolation. Works claiming wholly new thought often misunderstand their nature.
Major intellectual transformations do not arise from nothing, but when scattered knowledge becomes intelligible within a new organisation.
This approach belongs to that spirit. Its elements already exist in anthropology, economic history, behavioural science, institutional analysis and the study of energy’s role in society.
This essay does not invent this knowledge; it connects it, revealing a coherence scattered across disciplines. The Joule Model is not an isolated invention, but a formulation of intuitions humanity has long explored: understanding the material conditions of its existence and organising the resulting institutions more lucidly. Like any intellectual composition, this work does not discover an unknown truth; it sets to music ideas whose notes humanity already carries.
Humanity does not lack ideas; it usually lacks the environment that makes them possible.
Viewed against this long history, human societies still appear to be in an unfinished phase of maturation.
Like the foundational tales that accompany cultures through childhood, our economic institutions long organised survival in a world dominated by scarcity, fear and competition. They structured systems in which domination, accumulation and individual protection appeared to be rational responses to the material conditions of existence.
Yet when the environment changes, institutions suited to one era may become unsuited to the next.
Humanity today finds itself in a paradoxical situation.
Societies’ technical and productive capacities have never been greater, yet their economic organisation remains largely inherited from a world in which material scarcity was the rule.
The biological reflexes guiding our behaviour therefore continue to react to signals of shortage that no longer always correspond to the reality of our productive power.
Moral and spiritual traditions have often sought to resolve this mismatch by urging human beings to master their passions.
They have tried to raise human consciousness above its most archaic reflexes. Yet these endeavours have encountered a profound difficulty: human nature is not easily changed.
Societies can, however, transform the environment in which human nature expresses itself.
The Joule Model should be understood from this perspective.
It does not claim to produce a new and virtuous human being.
It proposes changing the economic conditions in which human behaviour unfolds, so that reflexes inherited from evolution cease to be fuelled by an environment artificially structured around scarcity.
Throughout the long history of the human species, major social transformations have never arisen from humanity’s sudden moral conversion.
They arose when societies learnt to organise the material conditions of their existence differently.
The Joule Model belongs to this continuity. It does not claim to break with human history, but proposes an institutional adaptation to a profoundly transformed technical and productive environment.
While the economic institutions of the past enabled humanity to survive in a world dominated by scarcity, contemporary societies now possess the means to move gradually beyond that logic.
The cultural evolution of the human species may not consist in immediately becoming more virtuous. It consists first in learning to organise the conditions of its collective existence with greater lucidity.
On the geological timescale, humanity still resembles a species learning its way. The economic structures inherited from the past bear witness to a long period of survival and conquest.
Yet the expansion of scientific knowledge, the interdependence of societies and the productive power acquired over recent centuries now open up the possibility of organising collective life more consciously.
From this perspective, the Joule Model is more than an economic reform. It can be understood as one sign of a broader cultural transition: the gradual passage from a humanity still largely governed by the reflexes of scarcity to one capable of organising the conditions of its shared existence more lucidly.
When human history is viewed over a sufficiently long period, one fact becomes clear: societies are not transformed solely by the will or intelligence of individuals. Above all, they change because the environment in which they live changes.
Human beings like to think of themselves as the authors of their destiny.
Historical narratives often suggest that major political decisions, conquests or revolutions are direct products of human intelligence. Yet when these events are restored to the long timescale of the species’ evolution, most social transformations prove to be responses first and foremost to the constraints of the geographical, technical and energy environment—to a geo-historical environment.
The historian Fernand Braudel used the term ‘longue durée’ in this connection. Behind visible events—wars, crises and political decisions—much slower structures unfold: material conditions, energy resources, available technologies and the organisation of exchange.
These silent structures profoundly guide societies’ choices, often without the people experiencing them even realising it.
The economist and anthropologist Karl Polanyi likewise showed that economic institutions arise not from abstract theory, but from societies’ gradual adjustment to their material environment. Markets, money and wage labour are historical constructions that emerge when certain social and technical conditions become dominant.
The gap between how societies perceive themselves and the forces that actually transform them stems from a fundamental characteristic of human beings.
The human species possesses a reflective intelligence capable of interpreting its history, yet that intelligence remains largely guided by far older biological structures.
The human brain was formed in successive layers over the course of evolution.
Neuroscience often describes this architecture by distinguishing several functional levels: primitive structures linked to survival and immediate reflexes, emotional and social structures, and finally the cortical regions associated with abstract thought.
This superimposition of biological organisations explains why human behaviour remains heavily influenced by mechanisms inherited from a very ancient past.
Reflexes linked to survival, domination or competition belong to this archaic part of human functioning.
These mechanisms, sometimes associated with the ‘reptilian brain’, are not directly accessible to intellectual reasoning.
They respond primarily to signals from the environment: scarcity, threat, insecurity or competition. This is why human societies have long tried to regulate such behaviour through morality, religion or personal discipline.
Spiritual traditions, ancient wisdom, moral philosophies and religions have all sought to transform human beings themselves. They have encouraged asceticism, prayer, meditation, wisdom or self-mastery. Ancient philosophies—Stoic, Buddhist and Christian, as well as great religious traditions such as Judaism and Islam—have all sought to produce an inner transformation capable of mastering human passions.
The great spiritual traditions proposed moral disciplines intended to contain the destructive impulses of the human species.
Even modern philosophy has often retained this orientation.
Thinkers such as Immanuel Kant believed that moral reason should enable humanity to overcome its natural inclinations.
In these approaches, transforming society required transforming the individual first. They produced intellectual and spiritual traditions of great depth.
Yet they all rested on an implicit assumption: to transform society, one first had to transform the human being.
Historical experience, however, shows that such inner transformation is slow, difficult and rarely generalisable to an entire population.
Educating a child takes time; educating an adult often takes even longer. Human behaviour does not change simply because a moral norm or social rule is proclaimed.
Educational science also recognises that learning never occurs through mere injunction. It requires repetition, experience and gradual adjustment.
Children learn by progressively modifying their environment of action.
Adults themselves change their behaviour lastingly only when the concrete conditions of their existence evolve.
When a society demands rapid behavioural change without altering the concrete conditions in which behaviour arises, it soon encounters difficulty. If the expected integration does not occur quickly enough, the prevailing response is to punish, penalise or exclude.
Conversely, when the expected behaviour is observed, society distributes rewards or signs of recognition.
Punishment and reward then become the two main instruments of social regulation. Yet these mechanisms do not necessarily alter the deeper causes of behaviour.
Contemporary social sciences have progressively revealed the decisive importance of the environment in shaping human behaviour.
Institutional economics, sociology and social psychology show that individuals respond above all to the structures within which they develop.
Human beings do not behave in the same way when their environment is organised around scarcity and permanent competition as when it is organised around cooperation and material security.
The philosopher Spinoza had already glimpsed this phenomenon when he explained that human passions do not disappear through moral condemnation alone, but through transforming the conditions in which they are expressed.
Montesquieu likewise observed that a society’s laws cannot be understood independently of the climate, geography and material conditions in which its people live.
Contemporary research in biology and neuroscience has reinforced this intuition. The work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela showed that the behaviour of living beings emerges from a permanent coupling between organism and environment. Human emotions and passions are not merely psychological or moral phenomena: they are deeply rooted in the biological organisation of life and its interactions with its surroundings.
From this perspective, human behaviour does not arise solely from rational decision. It develops within a relational space where material, social and cultural conditions play a determining role.
This approach leads us to consider social transformation differently. Instead of seeking only to transform human beings through morality or inner discipline, it becomes possible to transform the environment in which their behaviour takes shape.
The Joule Model belongs precisely within this perspective. It does not assume that humanity should suddenly become morally perfect or that individuals should abandon their deepest motivations. It begins from a much simpler observation: economic institutions organise the environment in which human behaviour unfolds.
When this environment is structured around artificial scarcity, permanent competition and economic insecurity, prevailing behaviours reflect those conditions. Reflexes of domination, accumulation or individual protection then become rational from the actors’ point of view.
If economic organisation changes that environment, however, collective behaviour can evolve gradually. By separating real production from the financing of human life and social institutions, the Joule Model alters the fundamental structure of the economic environment.
Prices cease to bear all the costs of the social system. Production becomes more intelligible, real purchasing power increases and material insecurity diminishes.
This transformation does not claim to eliminate human passions or change behaviour instantly. It acts upon the environment in which that behaviour unfolds.
Throughout human evolution, major social transformations have almost always been linked to changes in this material and energy environment. The Neolithic agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution based on fossil fuels and the current technological revolution profoundly transformed human institutions. Yet these periods remain extremely brief on the timescale of the species’ history.
Organised agriculture has existed for only about ten thousand years, whereas the human species is more than three hundred thousand years old. The Industrial Revolution began only two centuries ago, while the contemporary technological revolution has been unfolding for barely a few decades.
These short periods often create the illusion that human intelligence alone directs the destiny of the world. In reality, these transformations are largely guided by the constraints and possibilities opened by the technical and energy environment in which societies live.
The Joule Model can be understood as a further stage in this cultural evolution. It corresponds to a historical period in which societies’ productive capacity becomes high enough to permit an economic organisation based no longer on the permanent management of shortage, but on recognising human energy as the primary form of wealth.
From this perspective, the Joule Model is not a sudden break with history. It appears instead as an institutional adaptation to a new technical, energy and social environment.
The cultural evolution of the human species does not occur through instantaneous changes in human nature. It occurs when societies gradually learn to organise differently the conditions in which human behaviour takes shape.
The cultural evolution of the human species does not occur through instantaneous changes in human nature. It occurs when societies gradually learn to organise differently the conditions in which human behaviour takes shape.
To transform these conditions of existence lastingly, however, societies must possess tools that make such transformations intelligible, measurable and shareable. Every form of collective organisation rests on common instruments of measurement: measuring time, space and exchange.
Throughout the history of human societies, these instruments have often taken the form of currencies, weights, measures of length or calendars. They stabilise relationships between individuals by providing a common foundation for human activities.
If human energy constitutes the primary wealth of every society, an appropriate unit must still be available to measure it coherently and universally. This is precisely what the sciences of thermodynamics and physiology have gradually made possible.
The Joule Model belongs to this continuity: it connects the economic organisation of societies to a scientific measure that has already been available for more than a century.
The kilocalorie (kcal) is a practical unit historically used in nutrition and physiology. It corresponds to the energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.
The international scientific unit of energy, however, is the joule (J), as defined in the International System of Units (SI). The joule is used in physics, thermodynamics, mechanics and engineering.
The relationship between the two units is firmly established:
1 kilocalorie (kcal) = 4,184 joules
1 joule = 0.000239 kilocalories
Thus, when we initially use the kilocalorie, it is to remain within an accessible educational register, familiar to everyone through food and physiology.
In full scientific coherence, however, the Joule Model can convert all data into joules without any loss of rigour.
Example conversion:
2,628,000 kilocalories per person per year = 2,628,000 × 4,184 joules = 10,995,552,000 joules
= 11 billion joules per person per year
France’s annual energy reserve, previously estimated at 181,594,800,000,000 kilocalories, corresponds in joules to:
181,594,800,000,000 × 4,184
= 759,792,643,200,000,000 joules
≈ 7.6 × 10¹⁷ joules per year
There is therefore no discontinuity between human physiology and fundamental physics. The Joule Model rests on a universal unit, independent of currencies, cultures and political systems. Human energy is not a metaphor; it is a measurable physical quantity.
Monetising values of this magnitude would create difficulties in handling the numbers used for trade and everyday purchases.
The choice of the joule is not symbolic. It is strategic.
The joule is the universal unit of energy in the International System of Units (SI). Every state uses it, and nothing will be lost under the Joule Model. It is used in nuclear physics, engineering, electricity generation, mechanics and biology. It is identical in Paris, Tokyo, Lagos and Buenos Aires. It depends neither on a culture, nor on a political system, nor on a central bank.
A national currency can be devalued. An interest rate can be manipulated. A debt can be renegotiated.
A joule remains a joule.
This stability permits immediate comparability between states. Social dumping based on wages disappears, and that is fundamental: human beings are no longer an adjustable variable. Differences in production arise instead from economic capability.
If two countries state their Human Energy Reserve in joules, they use the same physical unit. Comparison is no longer subject to exchange-rate fluctuations, monetary policies, financial markets or speculation.
A country’s fundamental wealth becomes intelligible through three simple parameters:
its actual resident population;
its average energy expenditure;
its technological capacity to transform that energy.
A country poor in financial capital but rich in an active population and social stability thus possesses an objectively measurable energy foundation.
The Joule Model therefore introduces a universal, non-conflictual metric. It does not abolish local currencies, but establishes a common reference independent of relationships of monetary domination.
Naturally, the most populous states will have larger reserves. As they do today, they will be able to pursue policies of assistance and cooperation towards less populous countries.
The unit of energy is politically neutral. It belongs to no one. It cannot be created ex nihilo by decree, nor concentrated through a mere accounting device.
It exists because life exists.
This is what gives the Joule Model its international scope. It does not propose a competing currency; it proposes a universal physical standard already recognised by the scientific communities of every nation.
International cooperation can therefore be founded on comparable and stable quantities rather than on monetary power relations.
If the joule becomes the reference unit, a logical long-term consequence emerges: the possibility of an International Human Energy Bank.
This would not be a world bank in the present financial sense. It would be an accounting and transparency body responsible for publishing the human energy reserves declared by each state according to a common methodology.
Its role would be limited to:
defining a harmonised scientific protocol (resident population, calculation bases and conversion into joules);
ensuring the comparability of data;
publishing national energy reserves annually;
enabling balanced cooperation based on common physical quantities.
This institution would have no power to issue a world currency, impose a policy or impose sanctions.
It would be a body of measurement, not domination, unless the international political community—through an organisation such as the United Nations—chose to assign it a broader role.
The distinction is essential: power would no longer derive from controlling money, but from the real capacity to mobilise and direct human and technological energy.
In such a framework, international trade could gradually rest on energy equivalences rather than currency imbalances.
This prospect, however, belongs to a future stage of maturity.
The Joule Model does not require an immediate worldwide reform in order to exist.
Before pursuing any international ambition, the model must be coherent at the level of a single state.
We therefore return to France’s internal accounting structure.
The central point is simple:
The national Joule Reserve is an accounting instrument. It does not create energy. It makes that energy visible.
On the basis of the calculated annual human reserve (181,594.8 billion kilocalories, or approximately 7.6 × 10¹⁷ joules), the state has a stable reference framework for organising:
the protection of life (healthcare, retirement and childhood);
learning;
production;
the maintenance of infrastructure;
technological transformation.
The question is no longer: ‘How much money do we have?’
It becomes: ‘What share of our collective energy do we decide to direct towards a given function?’
Accounting changes in nature.
Instead of reasoning in terms of a monetary deficit, we reason in terms of energy allocation.
The French framework then becomes a coherent laboratory:
National energy reserve (physical base)
Energy mobilised by the active population (productive base)
Structural surplus (capacity for redistribution and learning)
Integration of machine energy as a temporal extension
Joule Energy Bank as the body responsible for distributing funding and verifying requests, with no power of arbitration
The model therefore remains national in the first instance, institutionally manageable and capable of being defined in law.
The international dimension will come through convergence, not by decree.
How is the value of energy-based funding under the Joule Model defined and calculated—that is, under a model founded on individual human energy, on a reality of existence that cannot be denied?
The starting point is simple: every human being is born with an amount of energy necessary to exist from birth until death. This energy is not a metaphor. It is a measurable, comparable and universal biological constraint. It is the common foundation that existed before, and preceded, all money, prices and accounting.
We are not starting from nothing. For decades, occupational physiology has measured the energy expenditure of human activities. We know that office work consumes approximately 100 to 150 kilocalories per hour, moderate manual work 200 to 300, heavy physical work can exceed 500, and some extreme activities reach 800 to 1,000 kilocalories per hour.
Society therefore already has objective reference values.
Under the Joule Model, artificial intelligence could refine these data and cross-reference them with age, health, rhythms, occupations and contexts, if states considered this necessary. Alternatively, if society so decided, it could retain a common normative value in order to remain intelligible and universal.
A state’s energy calculation would cover its resident population: from the first person born to the last person dying within its territory. It would include foreign nationals residing there on a long-term basis (registered address and residence permit) and exclude nationals who had gone to live abroad permanently. The unit of international comparison would remain the joule—or whichever unit of energy was adopted—regardless of the local currency. The issue of immigration would thereby be resolved.
This rule anchors the concept and prevents confusion between nationality and presence.
For this demonstration, however, we shall use France and its recorded population. We shall also adopt an indicative average value: for example, 300 kilocalories of manual work per hour of recognised social activity for everyone, active and inactive alike, including minor children.
The value selected is not an absolute truth. It is an intelligible, human and comprehensible starting point, showing that social wealth already rests, in concrete terms, on the biological energy of human bodies.
Today, technology makes such monitoring possible through a database made available to the Joule Energy Reserve Bank. This bank would have to be created to replace the Banque de France, or merely take its place while retaining some of its still necessary analytical functions.
The purpose is not to ‘monitor’ individuals, but to account for what already exists and make intelligible what is currently obscured within prices, wages and balance sheets.
Today, the population residing in France is estimated at 69.1 million people (66.8 million in metropolitan France and 2.3 million in the overseas departments).
Here, we have neither included foreign nationals legally present in the territory nor subtracted French nationals residing abroad on a long-term basis. This would have to be done in order to establish the actual energy present within the territory.
This actual human population constitutes the basis for calculating the energy available to sustain a society.
Assuming that a human being expends an average of 300 kilocalories per hour, the amount required for a full day is:
300 kcal/h × 24 h = 7,200 kilocalories per day.
To remain within readily understandable budgeting conventions, we use an annual basis:
7,200 kcal/day × 365 days = 2,628,000 kilocalories per person per year.
France’s annual energy reserve would therefore be:
2,628,000 kcal/year × 69,100,000 inhabitants = 181,594,800,000,000 kilocalories of human energy per year.
This is the national Joule Reserve: the overall energy equivalent available to French society for living, learning, producing, providing care, maintaining and transmitting.
What, then, is the energy actually mobilised by productive work and services—that of all citizens who worked during a given year, whether employers, employees or others?
The total number of economically active people is provided by INSEE. For 2025, Alternatives Économiques estimates it at 30,000,000 people in France across all socio-economic categories.
We use this figure because we do not need a breakdown by social class or sector here (agriculture, industry and services). Detailed data are available from the French government website and INSEE for anyone wishing to refine the estimate.
On the same average basis, the annual energy mobilised by the economically active population is therefore:
2,628,000 kcal/year × 30,000,000 economically active people = 78,840,000,000,000 kilocalories of human energy per year.
We can immediately observe that the population’s total Joule Reserve amounts to 181,594.8 billion kilocalories of human energy, while the energy mobilised by the economically active population amounts to 78,840 billion kilocalories.
Society therefore has a structural surplus of:
181,594.8 − 78,840 = 102,754.8 billion kilocalories of human energy, equivalent to 56% of the population’s total Human Joule Reserve.
We can already understand that, whether the currency is strong or weak and whether it is denominated in dollars, euros or yen, the economically active population will have expended 78,840 billion kilocalories.
Under the capitalist model, this biological reality is concealed.
Wage income constitutes the turnover of all businesses and, by extension, the funding base of the state and public services.
According to figures cited by Michael Page, the consultancy firm, the average salary amounts to €2,733 per month, or approximately €32,800 per year.
For 30 million economically active people, this represents an annual wage bill of approximately:
€32,800 × 30,000,000 = €984 billion.
In other words, under the current system, the whole of society lives on a monetary base of approximately €1,000 billion generated by the work of the economically active population—a base from which it must finance:
consumption;
businesses;
the state;
public services;
while also feeding rents, interest, dividends and speculation.
If we compare this monetary total with the energy actually expended by the economically active population (78,840 billion kilocalories), we obtain an ‘implicit price’ of approximately:
€984 billion ÷ 78,840 billion kcal = €0.0125 per kcal
or 1.25 euro cents per kilocalorie, expressed in the monetary value of today’s euro.
Applying the same order of magnitude to society’s structural energy surplus gives:
102,754.8 billion kcal × €0.0125 = €1,284 billion of surplus in the population’s Joule Reserve.
This means that, simply by changing the reference framework—by moving from monetary scarcity to energy reality—French society has an annual capacity equivalent to more than €1,200 billion which, under the capitalist model, does not exist as a common resource.
Under the current system, this capacity is neutralised by the artificial scarcity of money and by the obligation to borrow from capital holders.
Under the Joule Model, it becomes visible, shareable and capable of being directed through political choice.
Capitalism organises collective life around monetary lack and scarcity.
The Joule Model organises society around a real abundance: that of human energy.
Human energy, however, is no longer the only force transforming the world. For two centuries, humanity has entrusted an increasing share of its effort to machines. They have replaced entire categories of employment, multiplied productive power, accelerated the manufacture of mass-produced goods and reduced the time needed to accomplish what once required thousands of hands.
This new power is a fact. It is already here.
Yet the benefits it has generated have not been shared. They have chiefly enriched shareholders, employers and financial investors, while those who produced goods or provided services continued to pay three times the real value of the labour required to acquire their assets and their own goods.
In other words, the machine has released human energy, but that release has been captured.
The Joule Model does not deny this power. It returns to its source. It recognises that mechanical, algorithmic and automated energy is nothing other than an extension of human energy accumulated over time.
It is the product of centuries of education, trials, errors, repeated actions and transmitted ideas. It is the legacy of discoverers, scholars, craftspeople, doctors and engineers—often of modest means, sometimes protected, rarely rich—who left the record of their work to succeeding generations.
History reveals one constant: great discoveries are not the work of rentiers or courtiers of the powerful. They arise from work, persistence and research—sometimes amid poverty, sometimes in the silence of monasteries, and sometimes at the margins of institutions.
Almost invariably, however, the benefits of these discoveries have accrued to others: states, empires, industries, shareholders and the dominant powers of the time.
The machine has thus become a captured collective force.
The Joule Model breaks with this confiscation. Since the machine is human energy quantified across time, it too must become a common form of wealth once again.
When we calculated the human reserve—population × 2,628,000 kilocalories per year—we established a biological fact: society lives on human energy, and when this is accounted for nationally as a reserve, it exceeds the amount used and monetised in euros.
Contemporary humanity does not produce with muscle power alone. It produces with engines, networks, infrastructure, algorithms, supply chains, organisational systems, accumulated knowledge, medical protocols that keep bodies capable of acting, and education systems that develop skills.
In other words, we produce through a body amplified by what human beings have invented to lighten work, multiply productivity and safeguard human health.
This wealth inherited from the distant past has never benefited those who made it possible because, through accounting, it accrued to the owners of capital. Calculating the Machine Reserve makes this visible.
The machine is not merely a tool. It quantifies past human energy that accumulates year after year. It is human time solidified in matter. It is the legacy of previous generations, made operational by the intentions of the living and driven by the pressure of effort in the struggle against scarcity.
What we call ‘productivity’ is nothing other than this extension of machine activity, since human energy is limited and its overexploitation creates harm.
A contemporary economically active person does not produce more because they are biologically superior to an economically active person in 1870. They produce more because they act through a technical system accumulated over more than a century and a half.
This power cannot be ignored if we wish to understand a nation’s real wealth.
If we account only for direct human energy, we massively underestimate actual productive capacity. We behave as though machines were external to humanity, as though they belonged to a different ontological category. Yet they are deferred human energy: the energy of human intelligence and achievements, and of their operation.
This is why a Machine Reserve must be defined.
Not to idolise technology. Not to glorify industrialisation. But to measure, in human-equivalent terms, what accumulated technological power actually represents.
The Machine Reserve is not an ideological abstraction. It is the energy expression of productivity.
This productivity can be estimated rigorously through employment, even over the long term. It would be possible to calculate it directly from the watts of energy consumed by machines, but no one maintains either these calculations or those relating to the investments devoted to them. Our estimate nevertheless remains grounded in reality and sound.
This initial reserve, however, is no longer sufficient to describe the true productive power of contemporary societies.
Humanity no longer produces solely with the biological energy of bodies. It produces with a second reserve, accumulated in machines, infrastructure and knowledge.
When we speak of the Machine Reserve, we are not referring merely to technological progress. We are referring to a structural transformation in productive power.
To demonstrate this, we must leave the present moment behind and go back in time.
The year 1870 provides a relevant point of reference. Modern national accounts did not yet exist. INSEE had not been established. Statistics were fragmentary. Yet economic historians have reconstructed long-term series from censuses, tax data, industrial archives and estimates of agricultural production. The work of the Maddison Project, now used by Our World in Data, makes comparisons over very long periods possible.
We do not possess perfectly precise accounts for 1870.
But we do possess robust orders of magnitude.
And when examining structural relationships, an order of magnitude is sufficient.
A modern monetary economy rests on a simple, almost circular sequence.
Businesses produce. They pay wages. Those wages become consumption.
Consumption validates production.
If production exceeds households’ purchasing power, stocks accumulate, prices fall, margins contract and businesses lay workers off. Unemployment rises. Equilibrium is restored painfully.
If wages rise too rapidly in relation to productivity, margins collapse, investment slows and competitiveness deteriorates. Economic activity contracts elsewhere.
The system does not seek justice. It seeks continuity.
It continually adjusts the relationship between production and effective demand. Yet this purchasing power depends chiefly on wages. Historically, labour’s share of value added stabilises at around 65 to 70 per cent. The profit share fluctuates around 30 to 35 per cent.
This is not a written law. It is an operating constraint.
If the wage share falls too far, demand contracts. If the profit share disappears, investment ceases.
This pendulum maintains a proportion of economically active people compatible with the absorption of production. The stability of the economically active population-to-population ratio is therefore not the result of a moral decision; it is the consequence of a closed economic circuit in which production and consumption must correspond.
In Europe, the role of the ECB—the European Central Bank—is not intentionally to organise the economically active population-to-population ratio. It stabilises inflation. But by stabilising inflation through interest rates, it indirectly stabilises economic activity, hence employment and therefore the proportion of economically active people mobilised. It acts as the guardian of the monetary framework within which this ratio can be maintained. It does not manage real energy; it manages monetary scarcity.
And it is precisely because the old system recognises only monetary scarcity that it must continually use unemployment and the contraction of credit to adjust what machine productivity makes potentially abundant.
When this equilibrium is disturbed, the system does not collapse immediately. It adjusts.
Unemployment emerges as an adjustment variable. It reduces the wage bill when production exceeds demand. It is socially painful but economically functional.
Delinquency and the informal economy also emerge when access to money becomes restricted. The biological instinct to conserve energy does not disappear. When part of the population is excluded from the monetary circuit, it seeks other means of gaining access to resources. This is not primarily a moral issue. It is a response to a structural constraint, with collateral distortions such as unemployment and economic delinquency. Production, wages, consumption, unemployment and delinquency—these five elements interact and adjust to one another. Thus, without our realising it, this ratio prevents economic delinquency or crime from disappearing. We never measure this because economic delinquency is treated emotionally as antisocial and emotive behaviour, whereas it can be observed economically. For example, when the value of gold rises, thefts also increase; this is currently the case with copper theft.
When we examine the relationship between the number of economically active people and the total population over a century and a half, one fact stands out.
In 1870, France had approximately 38 million inhabitants. The economically active population numbered between 16 and 18 million people. The ratio stood at around 0.44. In other words, nearly 44 per cent of the population participated directly in production.
In 2023, the population was close to 68 million inhabitants. The economically active population numbered approximately 30 million. The ratio was once again close to 0.44.
Between these two dates, everything changed: medicine, life expectancy, the length of education, women’s place in employment, mechanisation, computerisation, the shift towards services and globalisation. Working time was almost halved. Hourly productivity increased tenfold.
And yet the proportion of economically active people in the population remains almost identical.
This phenomenon cannot be the result of coordinated human intention. No political authority, employers’ organisation or trade union consciously managed this ratio over 150 years. There is no secret committee responsible for maintaining an economically active population of 44 per cent.
What we are observing is not an intention, but a structure.
The stability of the ratio over 150 years shows that capitalism does not create jobs out of a social vocation, as politicians claim. It mobilises the number of economically active people needed to sell the output and maintain profitability.
A business does not exist to create employment. It exists to produce at a profit. If machines enable it to produce with fewer people, it will do so. This behaviour is not immoral; it conforms to the principle of energy conservation inherent in living organisms.
The stability of the economically active population-to-population ratio is therefore the visible trace of a systemic equilibrium between production and consumption backed by purchasing power.
Yet this equilibrium still relies on direct human labour as the principal means of redistribution. Productivity, however, has soared. Machines now perform the equivalent of hundreds of millions of hours of human labour.
The structure itself has not changed. This is where the tension lies. Productive power has become largely mechanical, while redistribution remains largely wage-based.
As long as this mismatch persists, the system must maintain a form of monetary scarcity to compel participation in work. It cannot fully free human beings from compulsory labour because its system of redistribution still depends on that labour.
This was the period of the first surge of industrialisation.
First, a caveat in the interests of honesty—one that strengthens the demonstration rather than weakening it. For 2023–2024, we have detailed official statistics from INSEE and DARES. For 1870, INSEE did not exist, nor did modern national accounting. We therefore rely on historical reconstructions such as those of the Maddison Project, which were specifically developed to compare economic levels over the very long term.
We then deliberately choose a lower-bound estimate and ‘teaching’ assumptions that readers can reproduce in a few lines. The aim is not to arrive at ‘the’ sacred figure.
The aim is to prove that, on the scale of a country, the order of magnitude is enormous—and remains so even if the assumptions are adjusted slightly.
For France in 2023, we use three benchmarks, all of which can be verified.
INSEE gives nominal GDP as €2,822.5 billion.
INSEE gives the economically active population, according to the ILO definition, as 30.9 million people in France excluding Mayotte.
For actual annual working time, there are two prudent approaches, depending on whether we are referring to employees or to the economically active population as a whole; the order of magnitude nevertheless remains the same.
DARES gives an average of 1,592 hours per year for the economically active population as a whole in 2024, while INSEE gives 1,661 hours per year for full-time employees in 2024. For 2023, INSEE and DARES also provide similar orders of magnitude.
As we have done from the outset, we retain a readily understandable convention of 1,675 hours per year for ‘an average modern job’—not because this is an essential value, but because it provides a comprehensible basis for calculation that is consistent with these sources.
At this stage, we can calculate average productivity per economically active person and per hour—not ‘to celebrate GDP’, but to extract a factor for long-term comparison.
€2,822.5 billion in GDP ÷ 30.9 million economically active people = €91,300 per economically active person per year.
€91,300 per economically active person ÷ 1,675 hours per year = €54.50 per hour.
For 1870, we do not pretend to possess an administrative precision that did not exist.
For the population, nineteenth-century censuses provide a solid order of magnitude: approximately 38.4 million inhabitants around 1870.
For the economically active population, long-term series are available through historical research, including work by INED and historians of the labour force. For example, the 1876 census provides a quantified and sourced figure of 14.38 million economically active people, accompanied by methodological discussion concerning the late nineteenth century.
This point is important: depending on census definitions and on how women’s and rural work is ‘counted’, actual economic activity may be underestimated. This is precisely why we remain cautious and adopt assumptions that do not artificially inflate the result.
For GDP, we follow the practice used in long-term comparisons: we use a reconstructed estimate, of the Maddison type, and retain a prudent lower bound—GDP at around one-tenth of its present level in real volume. Depending on the conventions used, estimates often range from one-eighth to one-fifteenth. The Maddison Project exists precisely to make such comparisons over the long term.
Historical reconstructions place French GDP around 1870 at between €250 billion and €320 billion in constant euros. We retain €280 billion as a prudent median estimate.
For 1870, we do not claim to measure with contemporary statistical precision. National accounts did not yet exist. We therefore work with long-term series reconstructed by economic historians, which make it possible to establish a range for the level of national production. These reconstructions place French GDP around 1870 at approximately one-tenth of its present level in real terms.
In 2023–2024, France’s GDP is approximately €2,800 billion. Retaining a prudent median value for 1870, we estimate GDP at around €280 billion in constant euros.
The difference is therefore of the order of:
€2,800 billion − €280 billion = €2,520 billion.
Taken in isolation, this figure may appear to represent nothing more than monetary growth. But it is not merely inflation. We are reasoning in constant euros—that is, at comparable purchasing power. We are comparing real volumes of goods and services produced.
Between 1870 and the present, however, three major facts have been established:
The economically active population-to-population ratio has remained broadly stable.
Annual working time per economically active person has fallen sharply.
Human beings have not undergone a biological mutation.
The increase of €2,520 billion cannot therefore arise from an increase in direct human effort. It stems from a multiplication of hourly productivity.
There is nothing mysterious about this multiplication. It corresponds to the accumulation of machines, first fossil and then electrical energy, infrastructure, the scientific organisation of work, mass education, medicine, logistics, networks, computing and algorithms.
In other words, it corresponds to human energy accumulated and embodied in matter and systems.
What national accounting calls ‘productivity’ is, from another perspective, productive power equivalent to hundreds of millions of additional human hours. It is not an increase in the number of people. It is an increase in capacity.
The difference of €2,520 billion therefore represents the monetary expression of historical energy capital.
It does not result from direct human labour multiplied tenfold; it results from past human labour incorporated into machines and knowledge.
Under the capitalist system, this difference is incorporated into GDP as a productivity gain. It feeds margins, profits, investment and competitiveness. It never appears as a collective reserve. The population benefits from it unequally through the comforts produced by the economically active population.
If this productive power is the outcome of generations of accumulated human labour, then it cannot be regarded as the autonomous creation of present-day private capital. It is the energy inheritance of a civilisation built on work.
The difference between €280 billion and €2,800 billion is not a monetary miracle.
It is the materialisation of a long history of collective intelligence.
This conceptual shift is decisive. It does not reject the existing accounting system; it reinterprets it.
Within the conventional framework, this additional €2,520 billion is an increase in wealth measured in monetary terms.
Within the energy framework, it is the expression of a machine reserve equivalent to millions of jobs whose work has been displaced.
The question then becomes political without being ideological:
If this productive power now far exceeds the direct human effort required, why does redistribution remain exclusively indexed to salaried employment?
Why does money recognise only present labour, and not the accumulated power that arose from it?
It is precisely here that we can begin to consider monetary issuance founded not on debt or scarcity, but on real, tangible productive capacity.
This is not about inventing fictitious wealth.
It is about recognising wealth that already exists, but which traditional monetary accounting does not identify as a common reserve.
The difference of €2,520 billion is therefore not an abstract figure.
It is the monetary measure of a historical transformation: the transition from an economy powered by human muscle to an economy powered by accumulated energy.
This is the transformation that the Joule Model seeks to make visible by accounting for the energy of the jobs it has replaced.
But this initial reserve is no longer sufficient to describe the real productive power of contemporary societies.
Humanity no longer produces solely with the biological energy of human bodies. It produces with a second reserve, accumulated in machines, infrastructure and knowledge.
Nature does not distribute money; it has distributed energy, which we observe throughout the universe and name according to the forms it takes. Organic life is one such form, and human beings are one of its components.
The Sun provides energy.
The Earth transforms it.
Plants store it.
Animals consume it.
Human beings use it.
Everything we call ‘wealth’ is, in reality, a transformation of energy.
Every human being is born with a biological energy capacity: they breathe, eat, think and act.
This capacity is their first property; it comes neither from an employer, nor from the State, nor from an investor.
It is inscribed in their body.
From the beginning, human beings have sought to use as little energy as possible to achieve the greatest possible result, in keeping with their instinctive nature, even when doing so requires them temporarily to expend more.
This is what we call technical intelligence.
When gathering was no longer enough, they made tools.
When tools were no longer enough, they domesticated animals.
When that was no longer enough, they invented the machine.
Then the industrial machine.
Then automation.
Then computing.
Then artificial intelligence.
The aim is always the same: to do more with less human effort.
This pursuit of efficiency is not wrong.
It is logical, rational and even admirable.
But it creates a simple problem: in our present system, income depends on paid human labour.
Yet machines replace human labour.
The more efficient the machine, therefore, the fewer human beings are needed to produce.
And the fewer human beings are needed to produce, the fewer wages are distributed.
And the fewer wages are distributed, the fewer consumers have the purchasing power to buy what is produced.
We face a clear paradox: technical success erodes the income base that enables the system to function.
To compensate, profits are concentrated and debt is increased.
Consumption is artificially stimulated through consumerism, while competition is kept alive.
But the contradiction remains: machines make it possible to save on wages.
Yet those wages are the source of collective purchasing power and fund social protection.
In other words, what is a technical gain becomes a source of social fragility. Having overcome destitution, we institute poverty and austerity in obedience to an innate dominant/dominated pattern of behaviour within a world that has become cultural: the world of our knowledge and thought.
We have two complementary ways of justifying a factor F.
The first is direct and educational: historical orders of magnitude place the increase in hourly productivity between factors of 8 and 12, and we retain 10 because it is both readily understandable and conservative.
The second provides an economic check that ‘10’ is not an invention. It starts from 2023 data from INSEE and reconstructed orders of magnitude for 1870. Once the long working hours of the nineteenth century are taken into account, it produces a factor close to 12, confirming that ‘10’ is a prudent assumption, not an exaggeration.
From there, we calculate the number of jobs offset by machines.
We assume:
The present economically active population = 30 million economically active people (a contemporary order of magnitude).
We retain factor F = 10 as a prudent educational assumption.
To produce the same volume of goods and services with the productivity of 1870 would therefore have required approximately 30,000,000 economically active people today × factor 10, or 300 million.
Since the actual economically active population is 30 million, the difference represents (300,000,000 − 30,000,000) = 270 million ‘machine-jobs’.
We can now translate these machine-jobs into our common unit, kilocalories, using the standard we have already established and validated:
Average annual energy: 2,628,000 kilocalories per person per year.
Machine reserve (F = 10):
270,000,000 × 2,628,000 = 709,560,000,000,000 kcal/year
That is 709,560 billion kilocalories per year.
If we take F = 8, a highly prudent assumption, we obtain:
(8 − 1) × 30 million = 210 million machine-jobs
210 million × 2,628,000 = 551,880 billion kcal/year.
If we take F = 12, the more demanding version adjusted for working hours, we obtain:
(12 − 1) × 30 million = 330 million machine-jobs
330 million × 2,628,000 = 867,240 billion kcal/year.
In all three cases, the conclusion remains unchanged: the machine reserve is immense and far exceeds the energy of the economically active people previously calculated at 78,840 billion kcal/year. What we call the ‘raw power’ of the modern world does not come from a human being who has undergone a biological mutation. It comes from a technical, scientific and organisational inheritance—that is, embodied human energy working in our place.
This demonstration becomes politically explosive without requiring any political rhetoric: no capitalist balance sheet recognises these 709,560 billion kilocalories as common wealth. They do not exist as a ‘reserve’. They exist only as private power to produce, sell and appropriate.
The Joule Model does not create this power. It reveals it. It brings it into the accounts. And because it is the accumulated product of generations, the Model asks the question that the Old World avoids: whom should this power serve now?
2023 GDP = €2,822.5 billion
1870 GDP = €280 billion (conventional factor-of-10 assumption)
Economically active population in 2023 = 30 million
Economically active population in 1870 = 16.6 million
Annual productivity in 2023:
€2,822.5 billion ÷ 30 million = €94,083 per economically active person per year
In 1870:
€280 billion ÷ 16.6 million = €16,867 per economically active person per year
Annual factor:
€94,083 ÷ €16,867 = 5.58
This figure is already significant, but it does not take working time into account and must therefore be adjusted accordingly.
Working assumptions:
In 2023: 1,675 hours per year
In 1870: 3,650 hours per year (a value within the historical range of 3,120–3,744 hours per year)
Hourly productivity:
In 2023: €94,083 ÷ 1,675 hours = €56.17 per hour
In 1870: €16,867 ÷ 3,650 hours = €4.62 per hour
Hourly factor:
€56.17 ÷ €4.62 = 12.16. Since we have retained 10 for our calculations, the indicative value is sound.
Even under the most prudent assumption (factor = 8), the machine reserve vastly exceeds the energy mobilised by the living economically active population (78,840 billion kcal/year).
The productive power generated by machines therefore far exceeds that of direct human labour.
This does not mean that machines ‘work alone’.
It means that human labour accumulated over 150 years now acts like an invisible army.
This power is everyone’s inheritance. It appears in no conventional system of accounting.
It is captured as private capital. The Joule Model does not create it. It makes it visible.
It reveals the raw power on which modern production actually rests.
We can now assess claims that machines destroy jobs.
In 1870, France had a population of approximately thirty-eight million. The economically active population represented slightly less than half of that total. This ratio, around 44%, has remained remarkably stable, with only minor variations, to the present day. France now has approximately sixty-eight million inhabitants, and its economically active population is close to thirty million. The ratio has not soared. It has not doubled. Modernity has not fundamentally altered it.
Yet today we produce nearly ten times more real wealth than in 1870.
The question then becomes concrete: if this productive power did not come from machines, how many additional human beings would have been needed to produce the same amount using human labour alone?
We have established that modern productivity is equivalent to approximately 270 million additional ‘machine-jobs’. If we retain the historical ratio of economically active people to the total population—around 44%—then a total population of approximately 680 to 700 million would have been needed to provide 300 million economically active people: the actual 30 million plus the 270 million whose work has been offset.
Not 68 million. Nearly 700 million.
This means that, between 1870 and the present, the French population would have had to increase eighteenfold to achieve today’s level of production without technology.
This simple order of magnitude is enough to dispel the illusion.
We are not more numerous. We work fewer hours than people did in the nineteenth century.
And yet we produce as though French territory were home to almost seven hundred million inhabitants.
The conclusion is unequivocal: modern productive power is not primarily demographic. It is technological, organisational and scientific. It is the historical accumulation of human energy quantified and embodied in machines, networks, infrastructure and knowledge. It rests on knowledge and learning, which justifies our being able to learn throughout life while receiving an income for doing so.
In other words, France today produces as though it had an immense, silent and invisible population—a population of mechanical workers who appear in no census.
Let us take the surface area of metropolitan France: 551,695 km²
With 68 million inhabitants, this gives us:
68,000,000 ÷ 551,695 = 123 inhabitants per km²
This figure is consistent with the current real-world order of magnitude (France’s population density is around 120 inhabitants per km²).
With 700 million inhabitants, it would be:
700,000,000 ÷ 551,695 = 1,269 inhabitants per km²
A density of 123 inhabitants per km² is moderate and comparable to densities across Western Europe.
At 1,269 inhabitants per km², the density would be close to that of some Asian megacities.
For comparison:
India: 470 inhabitants per km²;
Bangladesh: 1,300 inhabitants per km²;
central Paris: 20,000 inhabitants per km²;
the Principality of Monaco: 18,000 inhabitants per km².
A France with a population of 700 million would therefore be a continuously urbanised, extremely dense territory, entirely unlike its current organisation, and requiring radically different agriculture, logistics and infrastructure.
And all this simply to replace the machine.
The contrast is striking: we produce as though there were 700 million of us, but we live at the population density of 68 million.
The difference is not demographic.
It is a matter of energy.
Fortunately, this population was not born. It was created by human intelligence, fostered by compulsory education since 1882.
It is the result of centuries of invention, learning and transmission. It is the legacy of past generations, embedded in today’s productive structures.
And yet, in conventional accounting, this ‘machine population’ does not exist as a common reserve. It appears only in the form of productivity, competitiveness, profit margins and returns on capital.
If our productive power is equivalent to that of 700 million inhabitants, then the scarcity that continues to structure our institutions is no longer an absolute physical scarcity. It has become a scarcity of organisation and distribution.
Machines have not merely multiplied production. They have changed the very nature of the constraint. We are no longer limited by the number of hands. We are limited by the way in which we account for and redistribute accumulated energy.
That is precisely where the Joule Model comes in: not to deny work, not to abolish effort, but to recognise that the collective power already acquired far exceeds what our current monetary framework reveals. We can then readily see that monetary value has been rendered obsolete by history, and understand why it has brought about its own collapse—unless people call upon states that possess weapons of mass destruction to destroy them.
Our capacity for energy wealth is sufficient to allow us to live in material comfort.
Under the Joule Model, the country will possess the combined total of the human population’s energy and the accounted-for energy of the ‘machine population’.
The human component is equivalent to:
2,628,000 kcal/year × 30,000,000 economically active people = 78,840,000,000,000 kilocalories of human energy per year.
To this would be added the embodied energy of the ‘machine’ component:
270,000,000 jobs × 2,628,000 kilocalories/year = 709,560,000,000,000 kcal/year.
Estimated total Joule Reserve:
78,840,000,000,000 kilocalories + 709,560,000,000,000 kcal/year = 788,400,000,000,000 kilocalories.
That is 788,400 billion kilocalories × €0.0125 = €9,855 billion.
(€0.0125 is the implicit conversion rate in euros per kilocalorie—the implicit price of active energy established in Section 19.12.)
To this would be added the conversion of private capital and individual savings.
We have enough to repay France’s €3,000 billion debt and make the population more clear-sighted, because our concern for the future should not be that we might leave a debt to future generations, but that we might leave them destructive weaponry.
To this, however, we must add the wealth currently held—very unequally—by the population, for which we created the Employers’ Bank.
In France, total household wealth—property and financial assets combined—exceeds €15,000 billion. Property accounts for approximately two thirds, with financial wealth making up the remainder.
If we isolate household financial wealth, the figure is approximately €6,000 to €6,500 billion.
This financial block mainly comprises:
life insurance: approximately €1,900 to €2,000 billion;
bank deposits—current accounts and unregulated savings accounts: approximately €1,600 to €1,800 billion;
regulated savings accounts—Livret A, LDDS and LEP: approximately €550 to €600 billion;
home savings plans and accounts—PEL and CEL: approximately €250 to €300 billion;
retirement savings—PER and older products such as PERP and Madelin contracts: approximately €300 to €400 billion;
listed shares and collective investment funds held directly by households: several hundred billion euros.
If we refer specifically to ‘popular savings’ in the sense of regulated savings accounts—Livret A, LDDS and LEP—the total is approximately €550 to €600 billion. This is the most liquid form of saving and the one most widely distributed among less affluent sections of the population.
If we broaden the measure to include all investments held by households, excluding property, the total exceeds €6,000 billion.
If, however, we wish to speak of ‘capital available in France’ in the broad sense—including enterprises, banks and the state—we must also add:
the equity of non-financial companies, amounting to several thousand billion euros;
outstanding public debt, amounting to approximately €3,000 billion;
the financial assets of financial institutions—banks, insurance companies and funds—which amount to tens of thousands of billions in gross consolidated terms, although this includes extensive double counting.
What matters for our reasoning is not an exact figure to within €50 billion. It is the order of magnitude.
The €6,000 billion of private financial capital held by French households is on the same order of magnitude as two years of GDP.
Regulated ‘popular’ savings alone, at approximately €600 billion, already represent the equivalent of more than half of the state’s annual budget.
This gives a very concrete idea of the power of the existing monetary reserve, which will not disappear. It will be converted into joules and then monetised to facilitate exchange.
The population’s financial assets must also be included. They will be converted, and citizens will be free to choose whether to place their deposits in France with the Employers’ Banks or the Joule Bank, or with foreign banks.
Let us use an order of magnitude. These figures are indicative; the demonstration does not require them to be exact down to the last unit.
France’s GDP is approximately €2,800 billion, based on a 2023 estimate, and its economically active population is approximately 30 million.
Reference annual energy per economically active person: 2,628,000 kilocalories per person per year.
Total annual energy of the economically active population:
30,000,000 × 2,628,000 = 78,840 billion kilocalories
Monetary value of one kilocalorie relative to GDP:
€2,800 billion ÷ 78,840 billion kcal = €0.0355 per kcal
Visible Financial Wealth and the Real Energy Base Relative to GDP
| Measure | Accounting basis | Equivalent value |
|---|---|---|
| Visible financial capital (current system) | Observable financial accounting | €6,356bn |
| Human energy reserve | 181,594,800,000,000 kcal × €0.0355 | €6,447bn |
| Quantified machine energy | 709,560,000,000,000 kcal × €0.0355 | €25,189bn |
| Total Joule base | 891,154,800,000,000 kcal × €0.0355 | €31,636bn |
This table reveals a fundamental shift in perspective. In the ordinary capitalist representation, visible wealth appears to be synonymous with recorded financial capital—approximately €6,356 billion here.
Once society’s real energy base is restored to the calculation, however, the hierarchy changes completely.
The human energy reserve alone represents approximately €6,447 billion, slightly more than the visible financial capital.
When quantified machine energy is added, the total Joule base reaches approximately €31,636 billion.
In other words, visible financial wealth represents only about one fifth of the reconstructed real energy base.
Visible financial capital creates the illusion that it represents real wealth.
In reality, it represents only a fraction of it: €6,356 billion.
The reconstructed human and mechanical energy base reaches almost five times the wealth shown by financial accounting: €31,636 billion.
Finance appears dominant because it is counted.
Human energy appears secondary because it is not counted.
The Joule Model reverses this illusion: it shows that visible financial wealth is only a thin layer within a vastly greater real energy base.
Unit: billions of euros
Total Joule base: €31,636 billion
Quantified machine energy: €25,189 billion
Human energy reserve: €6,447 billion
Visible financial capital: €6,356 billion
When human and machine energy are converted into a monetary equivalent, society’s real energy base reaches approximately €31,636 billion—nearly five times the visible financial capital.
Finance then appears not as the source of wealth, but as a partial accounting representation of a much larger energy base.
Visible financial capital: approximately €6,356 billion;
human energy reserve: approximately €6,447 billion;
quantified machine energy: approximately €25,189 billion;
total Joule base: approximately €31,636 billion.
This comparison makes it immediately clear that:
visible finance is on a similar order of magnitude to human energy alone;
but it becomes a small minority of the total energy base. Other comparisons could be made, but we retain the one that is natural to the model: the human energy of total work—directly from those working today and indirectly from those whose effort is replaced by machinery.
The Joule Model offers a new reading of financial wealth.
If we take financial savings of approximately €6,000 billion and convert them using the ratio established earlier—one kilocalorie equals €0.0125—we obtain:
€6,000 billion ÷ €0.0125 = 480,000 billion kilocalories
This conversion does not mean that this energy physically exists in that form. It translates a monetary stock into an energy equivalent so that it can be compared with real productive capacities.
Let us recall the basis of this ratio:
For 30 million economically active people, with an average income of €32,800, the annual wage bill is:
€32,800 × 30,000,000 = €984 billion
Compared with the corresponding annual energy:
€984 billion ÷ 78,840 billion kcal = €0.0125 per kilocalorie
We therefore have a consistent reference standard with which to compare monetary and energy quantities.
Let us now compare:
annual energy of the economically active population under the Joule Model: 78,840 billion kilocalories;
energy equivalent of financial savings: 480,000 billion kilocalories.
The ratio is:
480,000 ÷ 78,840 = 6.1
In other words, household financial savings represent, in energy-equivalent terms, slightly more than six years of productive energy from today’s economically active population.
This finding is essential.
It does not mean that this energy is ‘unused’ or ‘lost’. It means that the accumulated monetary stock greatly exceeds the annual flow of direct production from living labour.
A significant proportion of financial wealth therefore corresponds not to present productive activity, but to a stock of economic rights: rights over future production, asset valuations, capitalised past income and return mechanisms.
It is in this sense that the current system allows monetary wealth to become relatively autonomous from the real energy base of production.
To refine the analysis, we must introduce a third element: the machine reserve.
Under the Joule Model, we estimated this reserve at:
709,560 billion kilocalories per year, assuming F = 10
We then obtain an illuminating hierarchy:
annual energy of the economically active population: 78,840 billion kcal;
converted financial savings: 480,000 billion kcal;
machine reserve: 709,560 billion kcal.
This comparison shows that:
the financial sphere is far larger than the annual flow of living labour;
but it remains smaller than total productive power once machinery is included—including the human manual and intellectual work that enabled productive effort to be transferred to machines.
This enables us to place the phenomenon correctly.
Finance is not purely ‘real wealth’.
Nor is it strictly aligned with immediate productive reality.
It lies between the two:
it exceeds present living labour;
but, in order of magnitude, it remains within society’s expanded productive capacity.
The Joule Model thus makes this gap visible—not to condemn it morally, but to understand it structurally.
It shows that accumulated monetary wealth cannot be interpreted solely as present real production, but as a combination of past production, capitalisation and anticipation of future production.
The central question lies precisely in this gap between accounting wealth and the energy base: how can we recognise, measure and organise this power without allowing it to become detached from what makes it possible—human energy and its mechanical extension?
Money does not create wealth; it is the energy that money forgets to count.
The conclusion is striking: the private financial capital held by households corresponds, in energy-equivalent terms, to several complete years of national work by 30 million economically active people.
The system has therefore accumulated a monetary reserve equivalent to several annual cycles of human production. The order of magnitude is impressive.
We can now compare these 480,000 billion financial kilocalories with:
the total human energy reserve under the Joule Model: 181,594 billion kcal;
the recorded machine energy reserve: 709,560 billion kcal.
This allows us to see where financial capital actually stands in relation to real productive power.
The comparison of these figures gives us much to consider.
Let us place them side by side, without unnecessary comment, because these orders of magnitude speak for themselves.
Annual energy of 30 million economically active people: 78,840 billion kilocalories.
Total human reserve for the entire population: 181,595 billion kilocalories per year.
Machine reserve, factor 10: 709,560 billion kilocalories.
Household financial savings, €6,000 billion: 480,000 billion kilocalories.
Now let us examine the ratios for France.
Financial savings represent approximately:
six years of annual energy from the economically active population;
2.6 years of the total human reserve;
68% of the estimated machine reserve, assuming F = 10.
What this suggests is subtle but profound.
The accumulated stock of financial capital is enormous on an annual scale. It far exceeds the energy capacity of a single year of living labour.
Yet it remains below the equivalent productive power generated by machinery—which, to a human psyche enclosed within the capitalist model, appears to destroy jobs.
Accumulated financial capital therefore represents a partial capture of machine power, not its full employment equivalent, which amounts to 709,560 billion kilocalories for France.
It does not correspond to all the energy accumulated under the Joule Model in France. It is a compressed monetary expression of it.
This is where the reasoning becomes especially stimulating.
Society has productive power equivalent to more than 709,560 billion kilocalories per year in its machine reserve, while private financial capital in circulation corresponds to approximately 480,000 billion kilocalories.
Private financial wealth does not therefore fully reflect real productive power. It is not the whole of that power, but a partial monetary translation constructed through geo-history.
Monetary accounting is not a complete measure of the collective energy available.
This discrepancy is precisely what makes it conceptually possible to issue money backed by real productive power—not to create an illusion of wealth, but to recognise wealth that already exists and that capitalist organisation requires workers to return to capital through the wages they spend on consumption and, for others, through income from assets.
When expressed in joules, this becomes visible. It is as though we were being asked to give back our energy. That is impossible in physical reality, but achievable within the monetary fiction.
These figures do not prove an injustice by themselves. They reveal a dissociation.
Machines produce abundance.
Money records part of it.
The remainder stays structurally invisible.
It is this invisibility that the Joule Model removes.
Using the French ‘quantified machine reserve’ as a benchmark for global extrapolation, we can make a simple and highly revealing calculation.
Calculation based on the French estimate:
France’s machine reserve: 709,560,000,000,000 kcal/year;
population of France: 69.1 million inhabitants.
This gives a machine reserve per inhabitant of:
709,560,000,000,000 ÷ 69,100,000 = 10,268,596 kcal per inhabitant per year
If we then project this French intensity across the world, using a global population of approximately 8.2 billion according to the United Nations’ 2024 estimates cited by the World Bank and INED, we obtain:
10,268,596 × 8,200,000,000 = 84,202,489,146,164,980 kcal/year
In more readable form:
84.2 quadrillion kilocalories per year,
or 84,202,489 billion kilocalories per year.
Using the GDP-based conversion value of €0.0355 per kilocalorie, this extrapolation gives:
84,202,489,146,164,980 × €0.0355 = €2,989,188,364,688,856 per year
In other words:
€2.99 quadrillion per year,
or, more simply, €2,989,189 billion per year.
Per inhabitant of the world, this is exactly equivalent to:
10,268,596 kcal per person per year × the GDP conversion value of €0.0355 = €364,535 per person per year.
The contrast with the global monetary economy is immense. The World Bank places global GDP in 2024 at US$110.98 trillion and global GDP per capita at US$13,631.20.
Our global energy extrapolation from French machine intensity therefore produces an order of magnitude approximately twenty-seven times greater than current world GDP, even before considering the euro–dollar difference. This confirms our argument: once human energy transformed into labour capital is included, it is far greater than the capitalist value created by the system of exploitation of human beings by other human beings. This estimate is deliberately high because it uses France as its reference and applies to the entire planet a technological and organisational level that is far from having been achieved everywhere.
The clearest formulation would undoubtedly be the following:
If the crystallised machine reserve estimated for France is expressed per inhabitant and that intensity is then applied to the world population, the result is a theoretical machine reserve of approximately 84,202,489 billion kilocalories per year. Converted at €0.0355 per kilocalorie, it would represent nearly €2,989,189 billion per year, or approximately €364,535 per inhabitant. This estimate is clearly higher than the actual technological reality of all the world’s states, but it provides an order-of-magnitude measure of what the whole of humanity could represent if it possessed machine intensity comparable to that of a country such as France.
Yet that is precisely what makes it valuable.
This estimate does not describe the world as it is.
It measures what the world would be capable of producing with what it already possesses in available human energy and in human energy offset by machinery.
It highlights a fundamental reality:
when humanity’s productive capacity is related to human energy and its mechanical extension, it bears no comparison with today’s monetary aggregates, which arose from the geo-historical and geopolitical history of nations.
It thus reveals the gap between:
what humanity actually produces in energy terms;
what humanity recognises as wealth within its economic systems.
This gap is not technical.
It is accounting-based.
And, ultimately, it is political.
The full passage can also be expressed in euros using a simple exchange-rate assumption of US$1 = €0.92—an appropriate order of magnitude for an essay without claiming market precision to the final decimal place.
‘World wealth’ may refer either to the flow produced in a single year—world GDP—or to the stock of accumulated wealth and net assets. These are not the same measure.
Using the latest available data, world GDP in 2024 was approximately US$110.98 trillion, or €102.1 trillion, while the world population was approximately 8.2 billion according to the United Nations. This gives approximately US$13,534 per inhabitant, or €12,451 per inhabitant per year—very close to the World Bank’s published figure for global GDP per capita in 2024. For comparison, the figures are €42,630 for France and €39,680 for Europe.
There is clearly ample room for growth, but not under the conditions or with the materials and resources used by wealthy countries. The global community cannot evade its responsibility to innovate for the future. This is why learning must train as many minds as possible for research without subordinating them to intellectual property, because the challenge is global. The Joule Model opens that door. The door that must close is the one through which these disparities become fertile ground for conflict and the use of weaponry.
The other calculation of wealth concerns global wealth as a stock.
In its Global Wealth Report 2025, UBS states that the fifty-six markets covered account for US$471 trillion, or approximately €433.3 trillion, and more than 92% of global wealth. Divided by 8.2 billion inhabitants, this already amounts to approximately US$57,439, or €52,844, per inhabitant for the wealth covered. A cautious extrapolation to 100% of global wealth from the 92% threshold gives approximately US$62,434, or €57,440, per inhabitant. Because UBS says ‘more than 92%’, not exactly 92%, this last figure should be read as an order of magnitude rather than as an exact official total.
In summary, wealth created each year represents approximately €12,500 per human being, while accumulated wealth is approximately €57,000 per human being as a global order of magnitude.
Let us now compare those figures directly with the Joule Model calculation of €364,535 per inhabitant per year.
Comparison Between Global Monetary Wealth and Energy Wealth under the Joule Model
Global wealth can be approached in several ways. If we retain only the annual flow of production, world GDP in 2024 is estimated at approximately €102,100 billion for a population of approximately 8.2 billion. This corresponds to approximately €12,450 per inhabitant per year.
This figure is currently the central benchmark for measuring wealth produced on a global scale.
If we now adopt an energy-based reading, the nature of the reasoning changes.
The world population, estimated at 8.2 billion people, has an annual human energy base of:
2,628,000 kilocalories per inhabitant per year
Across the world, this is:
21,549,600 billion kilocalories per year
Machine energy is added to this human energy. Using the machine intensity estimated for France—approximately 10,268,596 kilocalories per inhabitant per year—and applying it to the whole world population gives:
84,202,489 billion kilocalories per year
Adding the two gives an estimate of the total energy capacity that could be mobilised:
21,549,600 billion kilocalories + 84,202,489 billion kilocalories = approximately 105,752,089 billion kilocalories per year
Converted at the GDP-based rate of €0.0355 per kilocalorie, this capacity represents:
€3,754,199 billion per year
Per inhabitant, this is:
€457,600 per inhabitant per year
The gap with world GDP is considerable:
world GDP: €12,450 per inhabitant;
total estimated human and machine energy: €457,600 per inhabitant.
This is a ratio on the order of 1 to 37.
This gap does not mean that this wealth is immediately available in monetary form. It indicates something more fundamental:
humanity’s real productive capacity, when measured in energy, far exceeds what current economic systems recognise as wealth.
This difference does not arise from a lack of physical resources, but from a method of accounting that does not make human and mechanical energy visible as the primary basis of value.
What today’s economy measures as wealth is therefore only a fraction of what humanity is genuinely capable of producing. Humanity does not lack wealth; wealth lacks humanity in the way it is accounted for.
Humanity is not poor. It is blind to itself in its accounts. What it believes it produces is only a shadow of what it is capable of producing, and what it measures as wealth is only a narrative laid over a reality it no longer sees.
We do not live in a world of cultural scarcity. We live in a world that does not know how to see its abundance.
What the current economy calls ‘wealth’ is not a physical limit but an accounting construct. By keeping human and mechanical energy invisible as the primary source of value, the system organises a cultural scarcity that does not exist as such, according to its mode of consumption.
Production is not insufficient. Recognition of that production is being prevented.
Until that recognition occurs, humanity will continue to behave as though it lacked what it already possesses.
In fact, we do not lack wealth; we lack the courage to recognise it. Humanity does not lack means; it lacks lucidity.
In the twenty-first century, we are not poor; we are organised to believe that we are. That is a decision. Humanity does not lack human energy; the accounting framework forbids it from seeing that energy. Without this blindness, peoples would not live in scarcity while accepting the Systemic Dominants who manufacture it.
Peoples do not live in scarcity. They live within systems that manufacture it through a false method of accounting. We possess abundance; we merely organise its disappearance.
We are not poor. We are organised to believe that we are, on the basis of limited knowledge and particular consumption choices. We have lived—and still live—under an archaic innate nature that directs us without understanding that together we are more effective than alone.
In France, households’ outstanding financial investments amount to approximately:
€6,356 billion in 2024 (Banque de France).
This notably includes:
bank deposits;
life insurance;
shares and bonds;
investment funds.
This is what is generally meant by private financial capital.
Citizens also own property, businesses, land and professional assets.
In the national accounts, these are included in household wealth.
half of households have gross wealth exceeding €205,000;
the wealthiest 10% hold nearly half of total wealth.
Thus, even though capital legally belongs to citizens, it is highly concentrated.
The authorities do not calculate wealth by social class, which would reveal the enormous disparities.
When financial assets, property, infrastructure and productive capital are added together, we obtain what INSEE calls national economic wealth.
In France, this amounted to €19,559 billion in 2024.
This figure represents the total wealth of the French economy.
| Household financial capital | Approx. €6,356bn |
|---|---|
| Total national wealth | Approx. €19,559bn |
Visible finance therefore represents only around one third of the country’s real wealth.
What the model proposes is to show that real wealth rests on:
human energy;
machine energy;
productive organisation.
Finance is merely a partial representation of it.
Financial capital held by citizens often appears to be the measure of a country’s wealth.
Yet when we examine the national accounts, we find that it represents only a fraction of real wealth. In France, household financial wealth amounts to a little over €6,000 billion, whereas national economic wealth exceeds €19,000 billion.
In other words, visible finance represents only part of the country’s real wealth. The remainder consists of infrastructure, machines, land, buildings and, above all, the human energy that enables them to function but does not appear in the accounts.
This enables us to make a powerful and factually accurate statement: financial capital represents only a fraction of a nation’s real wealth. The true foundation of that wealth is human energy and its accumulation in technology, which we record in the Joule Reserve.
The concept of asset wealth is often used as though it directly described the real wealth of a society. In reality, a stock of assets constitutes effective economic wealth only to the extent that it can generate financing—that is, a flow of production or income capable of sustaining collective existence.
An empty building, uncultivated land or dormant financial capital represents a possession, but not necessarily a capacity to provide financing. Asset wealth shows how ownership is distributed; on its own, it does not measure a society’s real productive power.
In the capitalist system, this confusion is common. Mainstream economics records as wealth everything that can be monetised at a given moment: land, financial assets, patents, works of art, infrastructure and natural resources. This accounting creates the impression that wealth is identical to the monetary value assigned to possessions.
Yet this monetary value is historically contingent. It depends on a particular system of measurement at a given moment in history. When the United States attempted to estimate the monetary value of the world in dollars, it produced an accounting snapshot that was coherent within its financial system but devoid of universal anthropological or philosophical meaning. In another civilisation, the valuation might have been carried out in a different symbolic unit. The Aztecs might have valued the world in cocoa beans. The unit changes, but the underlying reality remains.
What such valuations measure is not the world’s fundamental wealth, but the capacity of a given economic system to assign a monetary value to the things it recognises as exchangeable.
A society’s real wealth rests on a different foundation: its capacity to mobilise energy to produce, transform and maintain the conditions of collective existence. This capacity comes from human energy, is extended by machines, and is organised through institutions and knowledge.
Within this framework, converting asset wealth into monetary terms is only a partial representation of real wealth. It measures neither the energy capacity of a population, nor the value accumulated in knowledge, nor the productive power of technical infrastructure.
The Joule Model seeks precisely to restore this hierarchy.
It distinguishes between:
asset holdings, as the historical distribution of possessions;
financing, as the real capacity for production and transformation;
energy wealth, as the fundamental basis of all economic activity.
From this perspective, much of the financial or property wealth accumulated in capitalist societies does not constitute new wealth. It often represents the historical capture of human energy already expended by others.
That is why it is necessary to distinguish the wealth of individual wage earners, often accumulated through a threefold contribution—labour, prices and taxation—from the wealth of holders of means of production or investment, who have been able to capture a disproportionate share of the financial flows generated by this collective energy.
The Joule Model does not deny the existence of these holdings or their legal reality. It simply shows that they are not the primary source of wealth.
The source remains collective human energy and its capacity for organisation.
‘Capitalism has never owned the wealth it claims to govern. It has merely managed it through an instrument—monetary scarcity—even though the true source of wealth is collective human energy.’ It has managed a political convention inherited from a murderous past without ever measuring the real wealth destroyed in conflicts.
A few years ago, the United States attempted to calculate the value of the world in dollars. On several occasions, economic institutions or financial analysts have tried to estimate the ‘total value of the world’ in dollars. These exercises involve adding together the monetary value of all existing assets: shares, bonds, property, farmland, infrastructure, natural resources, businesses and, sometimes, certain forms of intangible capital.
These estimates can reach several hundred trillion dollars.
The result is generally expressed in hundreds of trillions of dollars: impressive figures. Such figures always make an impression, especially on anyone comparing them with their salary, as we all naturally do.
But we must understand what these figures actually mean.
They do not measure the fundamental wealth of the Earth or humanity’s real capacity to produce and live. They measure only the value that the dominant economic system assigns, at a given moment in history, to the goods it recognises as capable of being monetised.
In other words, these valuations are accounting conventions.
This approach rests on a fundamental confusion. It assumes that the world’s real wealth could be expressed in a monetary unit invented by a particular civilisation at a given moment in its history.
From an anthropological and physical standpoint, this idea is absurd.
Money is merely a conventional instrument of measurement used by a society to organise its exchanges. It has no universal meaning. Had another civilisation carried out the same exercise, it would have used a different symbolic unit.
The Aztecs might have assessed the world’s wealth in cocoa beans. An ancient agrarian society might have measured it in quintals of wheat. An energy-based civilisation might measure it in joules or calories. Another civilisation might have measured wealth in sacks of wheat, bars of gold, shells or cocoa beans, as some pre-Columbian societies did.
The unit changes, but the physical reality remains.
The problem, therefore, lies not only in the unit used. It lies in the very idea that the wealth of the world can be reduced to a monetary value.
What truly sustains a society is not the unit of account used to value things. It is that society’s capacity to mobilise energy to produce, transform and maintain the conditions of collective life.
The physical reality of the world vastly exceeds this kind of valuation.
Every second, the Earth receives a colossal quantity of solar energy. The biosphere continually transforms this energy through living processes. Biological cycles, oceans, forests, soils and living organisms mobilise energy flows on a scale that exceeds human monetary calculations beyond imagination.
The energy at work in the universe, the Sun and the Earth’s biosphere is on such a scale that attempting to convert it into money is meaningless.
Humanity, with its monetary units and financial balance sheets, is confronted here with a radical disproportion.
When certain economists claim to ‘assess the value of the world’, they measure neither the real wealth of the Earth nor that of life. They measure only the extent of the accounting system they have constructed.
The monetary value of the world can vary considerably according to markets, interest rates or financial bubbles.
Humanity’s real energy capacity, by contrast, depends on much more fundamental factors:
the population and its health;
accumulated knowledge;
machines and infrastructure;
available natural resources;
the social organisation that enables these forces to be coordinated.
This reflex reveals an ancient anthropological behaviour: the tendency to want to measure, possess, classify and dominate everything.
Throughout human history, this drive for domination has often made it possible to organise hierarchical societies. But when it claims to encompass the entirety of the living world and the universe within a monetary unit, it becomes derisory.
It reveals what might be called the persistence of archaic behaviour.
The human brain still carries mechanisms inherited from very long periods of survival in environments of scarcity. These mechanisms encourage the capture of resources and the domination of the immediate environment.
But these reflexes do not provide a sufficient basis on which to conceive the organisation of a civilisation capable of understanding the energy scales of the universe and the living world.
Anthropological innovation does not consist in endlessly refining these mechanisms of domination.
On the contrary, it consists in recognising the limits of these archaic reflexes and organising society around more fundamental realities.
The Joule Model forms part of this approach.
It does not seek to replace one monetary unit with another for symbolic reasons. Nor does it claim to measure the value of the world.
It simply proposes that we recognise that the real wealth of a human society rests on an energy foundation: living human energy and past human energy accumulated in technical systems.
Money then remains an instrument of translation and circulation.
But it ceases to be confused with the source of wealth.
Monetary measurement is a historical convention.
Energy measurement is physical reality.
| Observable universe | ██████████████████████████████ |
|---|---|
| Energy of the Sun | ████████████████████████████ |
| Energy received by the Earth | ████████████████████ |
| Energy transformed by the biosphere | ███████████████ |
| Energy mobilised by humanity | ██████████ |
| Human muscular energy | ██████ |
| Human economic accounting | ███ |
| Global financial capital | █ |
The further down the scale we move, the more cultural and symbolic the measurement becomes.
Global finance then appears for what it truly is: a thin accounting layer at the top of an immensely larger energy system. Monetary accounting claims to measure the wealth of the world. In reality, it measures only a thin symbolic layer of an immensely larger energy system.
A very small symbolic layer at the top of an immensely larger and very real energy system: a diagram of orders of magnitude in energy.
| Total energy of the observable universe | ~10⁶⁹ joules |
|---|---|
| Energy radiated by the Sun each second | ~3.8 × 10²⁶ watts |
| Solar energy received by the Earth | ~1.7 × 10¹⁷ watts |
| Energy captured by the biosphere | ~1 × 10¹⁴ watts |
| Energy consumed by humanity | ~2 × 10¹³ watts |
| Human muscular energy | ~10¹² watts |
This diagram does not claim to provide exact figures. It illustrates orders of magnitude.
The further down the diagram we move, the smaller the energy scale becomes and the more cultural and abstract the measurement becomes.
Money and financial wealth then appear for what they truly are.
Human beings also appear for what they are when they seek to dominate the Earth: pretentious megalomaniacs.
The dominant economic system operates as though financial capital were absolute real wealth.
But if we place the economy back within physical reality—removing it from its speculative convention and restoring the proper order of importance among the relationships—money comes last in the hierarchy of energies. We give it a place wholly disproportionate to what it represents on the geological timescale.
universal energy
↓
solar energy
↓
biospheric energy
↓
human energy
↓
economic organisation
↓
money
Money becomes simply a tool of organisation rather than the source of wealth. The idea of assessing the value of the world in money is not a scientific measurement. It is the extension of an old reflex of domination, inherited from an archaic brain that seeks to possess what it cannot even measure.
The entirety of global finance—$500 trillion—has no physical relationship to these energy flows.
Finance is only an accounting convention and a tool of social coordination, not a measure of the world's real power.
Finance claims to measure the wealth of the world. In reality, it measures only an accounting system constructed by humanity and placed atop an energy universe whose scale far exceeds the monetary units invented by human beings.
To provide an order of magnitude, let us take a simple and observable reference: the average price of electricity.
One kilowatt-hour (kWh), corresponding to 3,600,000 joules, is commonly valued at around $0.10.
This gives an indicative equivalence: 1 joule = $2.78 × 10⁻⁸.
This value may seem derisory. It is so at the scale of an individual action, but it changes completely in nature as soon as we reason at the collective scale.
Every society mobilises colossal quantities of energy: billions and trillions of joules are consumed, transformed and organised every day. At that scale, what appears negligible becomes structurally significant.
This conversion does not claim to establish a universal value for energy. It simply illustrates an essential point: in its practical uses, money is already linked to energy, even though this relationship remains implicit.
The Joule Model proposes precisely to make this relationship explicit, measurable and understandable, starting not from prices but from the physical reality that makes them possible.
| Sun (total energy emitted) | ~3.8 × 10²⁶ J | ~$1.0 × 10¹⁹ — approximately ten billion billion dollars |
|---|---|---|
| Solar energy received by the Earth | ~1.7 × 10¹⁷ J | ~$4.7 × 10⁹ — approximately $4.7 billion |
| Global human energy consumption | ~2 × 10¹³ J | ~$5.5 × 10⁵ — approximately $550,000 |
| Global human muscular work | ~10¹² J | ~$2.8 × 10⁴ — approximately $28,000 |
| Global financial capital | ~$5 × 10¹⁴ |
|---|
A single second of solar energy received by the Earth equals several billion dollars.
A single second of energy emitted by the Sun equals billions of billions of dollars.
In other words, global financial capital represents a few dozen seconds of solar energy if this conversion is applied naively—and it is for the sake of those few dozen seconds that we are putting life on Earth at risk.
The attempt to measure the wealth of the world in money does not reveal the world's real wealth.
It reveals only the extent of a human accounting system and the pretension of an economic system that regards itself as the measure of all things.
If the solar energy received by the Earth were simply converted into dollars, a single second would already represent several billion dollars. The idea of assessing the value of the world in money therefore reveals not the world's wealth, but only the scale of the human ego that imagines it can measure the universe in its own units.
Finance does not measure the wealth of the world.
It measures only its own ego.
In 1870, France had a population of slightly under forty million. Today, it has around sixty-eight million. The increase is real, but it remains moderate over a period of one hundred and fifty years. The population has not exploded.
Yet we have shown that today's productive power is equivalent to what a France of around seven hundred million inhabitants would have produced if production had relied solely on human labour, at nineteenth-century productivity levels.
Seven hundred million.
We must appreciate what that implies.
To grow from thirty-eight million to seven hundred million in one hundred and fifty years, France would have had to sustain population growth of close to 2 per cent year after year for a century and a half. Not a temporary surge or an exceptional decade, but continuous acceleration, without any major interruption, demographic transition or collapse.
Each generation would have had to be vastly larger than the one before it. France would have had to absorb, feed, house, educate and employ hundreds of millions of additional human beings within its territory. It would have required a population density close to that of the most saturated regions of the contemporary world.
Yet nothing of the sort occurred.
France does not have seven hundred million inhabitants. It has not experienced a continuous demographic explosion. It has not transformed its entire territory into a megacity.
And yet it produces as though it possessed this invisible population.
This simple discrepancy is enough to reveal the reality.
Modern productive power is not the result of a biological multiplication of human beings. It is the result of a technical multiplication of their capacities—an adaptation to the constraints of the world. In this case, through intelligence, associative capacity and observation of the environment, human beings sought to conserve their own energy while producing what they needed within a condition of ontological scarcity. This is an innate biological reflex that capitalist economics translates into the search for the best value for money, as though it had invented the principle that governs all living things.
We have therefore not added millions of bodies—contrary to what is implied by those who deplore the existence of machines in place of jobs without ever performing an indicative calculation.
We have added millions of machines.
We have not extended the working year indefinitely; on the contrary, it has fallen from 3,000 to 1,500 hours a year.
We harnessed fossil energy, then electricity, then digital technology. Through learning, and with a broadly similar population, we will now have to train researchers to replace fossil energy and produce energy economically—the Sun having served above as an example for which we gave an indicative measure.
The additional €2.52 trillion in real wealth created since 1870 does not correspond to a population eighteen times larger. It corresponds to hourly productivity multiplied by the accumulation of knowledge and tools.
In other words, what we now call ‘productivity’ is in reality a mechanical demography. Its use will continue because it is driven by an innate system of energy conservation. The abundance made possible by the Joule Model will compel us to take responsibility for our choices so that this innate dynamic does not run out of steam, because the materials we use to make machines are finite.
France therefore produces as though it had given birth to an additional six hundred and sixty million inhabitants. But these inhabitants do not exist. They are engines, supply chains, algorithms, electricity networks, infrastructure and organisational systems.
This machine population appears in no census.
It appears in no population pyramid.
It does not vote, consume or demand anything.
And yet it works.
It is past human energy embodied in matter and placed at the service of the present.
The scarcity that continues to organise our institutions can therefore no longer be interpreted as a simple physical constraint. We do not lack hands. We possess power equivalent to that of a gigantic nation.
The question then becomes more profound than demography.
If we produce as though we numbered seven hundred million, why do we continue to redistribute as though only the immediate biological energy of thirty million economically active people counted?
Starting point: France's population around 1870 = 38 million; theoretical target without machines = 700 million inhabitants; duration of demographic change = 154 years (1870–2024).
We are seeking the average annual growth rate required to rise from 38 million to 700 million.
The required annual population growth is approximately 1.9 per cent a year for 154 years.
An average rate of 1.9 per cent a year over a century and a half is colossal.
The formula is:
M = 7.444^(30/154)
It translates total growth over a long period into a generational equivalent.
In everyday language, this means that if a population is multiplied by 7.444 over 154 years, then over a thirty-year period—roughly one generation—it is multiplied by M = 1.48.
In other words, this is an increase of approximately 48 per cent per generation.
This figure is considerable.
It means that with each generation, the population grows by almost half. Over several successive generations, the effect becomes cumulative and profoundly transforms social, economic and political structures.
Transposed to the global scale, this kind of dynamic mechanically brings about a transformation of the world.
We have seen that sustained growth of around 1.9 per cent a year over 150 years would have produced a world population of approximately 21 to 22 billion people, compared with around 8 billion today.
Although this scenario did not occur, the actual dynamic observed over the past two centuries has been strong enough to produce a comparable effect in one essential respect:
the interdependence of human societies.
When populations grow rapidly:
trade intensifies;
resources become interdependent;
production systems become connected;
human, economic and information flows accelerate.
In other words:
population growth and productive dynamics naturally lead to globalisation.
Globalisation is not solely a political or economic choice. To a large extent, it is the mechanical consequence of increasing interactions between growing populations and interconnected production systems.
But this transformation occurred much faster than our capacity to absorb it.
Our institutions, political representations and collective reflexes remain largely structured by logics inherited from a world that was less dense, less connected and less interdependent.
This is where a major discrepancy appears:
our power to act has changed scale, but our capacity for intellectual and social adaptation remains behind.
This delay is not neutral.
It results in:
difficulty in thinking about phenomena at the global scale;
the persistence of national logics in the face of global problems;
misunderstandings between societies subject to the same dynamics but interpreting them differently;
the growing fragmentation of representations of reality.
At the same time, the gaps widen:
between technical capacities and social understanding;
between wealth produced and distribution as it is perceived;
between levels of education and genuine access to an understanding of the issues;
between social groups integrated into the transformation and those that endure it.
This intellectual and social divide is not merely a matter of economic inequality.
It affects the very capacity of societies to understand themselves.
And if it continues to grow, it carries a major risk:
a shift towards increasingly violent, even explosive, tensions.
A society that no longer understands the mechanisms running through it becomes unstable. It reacts more than it anticipates. It sets forces against one another more than it coordinates them.
In this context, the question is no longer merely economic or demographic.
It becomes profoundly anthropological:
are we capable of adapting our representations, institutions and modes of coordination to the real scale of the world we have produced?
For this adaptation is not optional.
It is the condition that will prevent the power we have accumulated from turning against us.
In other words, the evolution of the world cannot stop. Our capacity to understand and organise it must also continue to advance.
For comparison:
France's actual long-term rate has been around 0.4 to 0.6 per cent;
1.9 per cent over 150 years represents an extremely strong, continuous demographic dynamic;
few countries in modern history have sustained such a rate for so long without a major crisis.
Above all, this would presuppose a persistently very high fertility rate for more than a century, with no demographic transition, slowdown or massive food crisis.
Let us now transpose this reasoning to the global scale.
If an average annual growth rate of 1.9 per cent is applied over 150 years, the multiplier is approximately:
(1.019)^150 = 16.7
In other words, the population is multiplied almost seventeenfold.
Taking a world population of approximately 1.3 billion around 1870 as a base gives:
1.3 billion × 16.7 = 21.7 billion inhabitants
This figure provides a striking order of magnitude.
The current world population is around 8 billion people. A scenario of 1.9 per cent over 150 years would therefore produce a population almost three times larger than that observed today.
This simple calculation shows that such a dynamic cannot continue indefinitely without encountering structural limits.
These limits do not arise solely from visible material constraints—resources, food and space. They also arise from deeper mechanisms found throughout the living world.
We have already mentioned systems of population self-regulation, highlighted in particular by Robert May's work on population dynamics and John B. Calhoun's experiments on social behaviour under conditions of extreme density.
This work shows that beyond a certain threshold, populations do not continue to grow indefinitely. They enter regulatory regimes: reproduction slows, social organisation breaks down, behaviour changes, and collapse may even occur.
This point is essential.
This self-regulating mechanism does not operate solely through external constraint. It is embedded in a more fundamental logic of the living world: the conservation of energy.
All species seek to optimise their energy expenditure. They develop strategies for surviving while consuming the least possible energy for a given result.
In human beings, this logic takes a particular form:
it is expressed through technical and mechanical creativity;
it is also expressed through the gradual limitation of births.
In other words, the same dynamic that drives the invention of machines to reduce human effort also contributes indirectly to reducing demographic pressure.
The demographic transition is not an accident.
It is one form of this self-regulation.
This observation may leave us questioning certain contemporary approaches.
On the one hand, policies or public discourse may be guided by an emotional approach to immigration without always taking these long-term dynamics into account.
On the other, some strategies seek to increase the native-born population within a productivist logic, as though demographic growth remained a necessary engine of wealth.
Yet in a world where productivity increasingly rests on mechanical energy and technical accumulation, this equation is no longer self-evident.
We therefore continue to reason using models inherited from periods when wealth depended directly on the number of available hands.
But we do not always perceive that our collective choices remain largely guided by deep biological, energetic and behavioural mechanisms that we still understand only partially.
In other words, we believe we are choosing our trajectories while we are still, to a large extent, following the invisible logics of the living world.
And this is precisely where a new requirement emerges.
These dynamics do not stop at borders. They are global, systemic and interdependent.
Demographic, energetic, ecological and productive phenomena intertwine at the planetary scale.
In these circumstances, remaining confined within strictly national logics amounts to trying to address global problems with fragmented tools. This is why nationalisms—beyond the innate need for an emotionally measurable space within the reach of our senses—are a source of war: the planet has no borders, and interdependencies circulate.
This creates tensions, misunderstandings and contradictory policies.
Conversely, these observations argue for coordination at the global scale—not to standardise societies, but to recognise that certain realities, including energy, population, resources, climate and production, now extend beyond national frameworks.
The real challenge is therefore no longer merely to govern territories, but to understand and organise balances at the scale of the living world itself.
And this may be the most difficult transition:
from a logic of competing sovereignties to a logic of shared responsibilities.
Replacing machines with human beings to obtain modern productivity cannot be explained by demography. It is necessarily technological and organisational.
The following calculations greatly strengthen our demonstration, because they show that the ‘machine population’ is not merely a metaphor. It corresponds to a genuine demographic impossibility.
To understand the true scale of the transformation brought about by the Industrial Revolution, it is useful to conduct a simple thought experiment.
We return to 1870, when the French population was approximately 36 million. Now imagine that by 2024 this population had reached 268 million. This scenario would represent a gain of 200 million people.
In other words, in terms of productive capacity, this would correspond to the appearance of a gigantic population of additional workers.
The question then becomes: what demographic rate would have been required to achieve this result?
This change can be expressed using a simple relationship:
36 (1 + r)^154 = 268
In this relationship:
36 represents the initial population, in millions;
268 represents the final population;
154 is the number of years between 1870 and 2024;
r is the average annual growth rate.
Solving this relationship gives an average annual growth rate of approximately 1.31 per cent.
In other words, steady demographic growth of 1.31 per cent for 154 years multiplies the population by approximately 7.44.
Demographic phenomena, however, are often better understood by generation than by year. If an average generation of thirty years is assumed, the required multiplier becomes:
M = 7.444^(30/154)
We have already explained this formula and its implications.
The result is approximately 1.48.
This means that each generation would have to be around 48 per cent larger than the preceding one.
Translated into the language of family life, this corresponds to approximately 1.48 daughters per woman reaching reproductive age. Taking into account that around 48.8 per cent of births are girls and that only a proportion reach adulthood, this gives an order of magnitude of approximately 3.1 children per woman, sustained on average for more than a century and a half.
This simple thought experiment allows us to understand an essential point.
France clearly did not produce 200 million additional workers through demography. Yet its capacity to produce, transport, calculate, extract and build increased as though an immense population had been added to human labour.
The reason is simple: this additional population is not human. It is a machine.
To measure this power in concrete terms, we can compare the energy available in a modern economy with the muscular power of a human being.
A human being can sustainably provide around 75 watts of mechanical power. This is equivalent to continuous physical exertion comparable to that of a worker or a cyclist at a moderate pace.
The average energy power mobilised by the French economy, however, is around 180 gigawatts, or 180 billion watts. This estimate corresponds to the country's total energy consumption. (Sources: French Ministry for the Energy Transition, Energy Balance for France; International Energy Agency.)
Comparing this power with that of human labour gives:
(180 × 10⁹) / 75
or approximately 2.4 billion human equivalents.
In other words, replacing all the energy used by the French economy with muscular labour would require approximately 2.4 billion people working continuously.
That is more than thirty times the country's present population.
This reality can be expressed even more vividly.
When this power is divided among the population, each citizen of an industrialised country has access on average to approximately 2,600 watts of energy power.
Compared with human power of around 75 watts, this energy corresponds to:
2,600 / 75
or approximately 35 human equivalents.
In other words, every inhabitant of an industrial society works at all times surrounded by some thirty invisible energy servants.
These workers are not people. They take the form of engines, agricultural machinery, electricity networks, industrial systems, computers and technical infrastructure.
The Industrial Revolution therefore did not merely introduce machines. It added to human societies an invisible energy population equivalent to billions of workers.
This new power, however, has not been distributed equitably. Machine energy, produced by the accumulated work of entire generations, has been appropriated primarily by those who organised its use, rather than by those who helped to produce it through the collective history of human labour.
This situation is not the result of a natural law. It is the product of a particular economic and legal organisation.
If we recognise that this technical power arose from the accumulation of knowledge, infrastructure and the work of past generations, it then becomes logical to regard it as an extension of collective human energy.
In other words, the machine is not an autonomous form of wealth. It is human energy quantified in matter and made available through intelligence and work accumulated over time.
This is precisely the reality that the Joule Model seeks to make visible.
The aim is neither to eliminate the machine nor to challenge its use, but to record this machine energy in the accounts as a reserve arising from the collective history of human labour.
If this energy comes from human activity accumulated over generations, proposing that it should benefit the whole community is not an economic fiction. It is simply a recognition of the reality of its origin.
The Joule Model therefore merely expresses, in a new accounting form, a physical fact: all material wealth comes from human energy, whether expended directly by the body or extended through machines.
A recent development makes this reality still more visible.
For a long time, machine energy remained abstract to most citizens. It took the form of engines, industrial plant, electricity networks or computers. These devices multiplied human power but often remained invisible in everyday experience.
Robotics is now introducing an important transformation.
For the first time in industrial history, machine energy is beginning to materialise in the form of autonomous machines capable of directly carrying out human tasks. Industrial robots, automated machinery, robotic logistics systems and, more recently, service robots make perceptible what the industrial economy had previously done diffusely: the substitution of organised mechanical power for human labour.
In modern factories, a growing number of operations once performed by workers are now carried out by robots. In logistics warehouses, fleets of machines move goods. In agriculture, automated systems are beginning to perform sowing, harvesting and crop-monitoring tasks. In transport, assistance and autonomous systems are also advancing.
These machines do not represent an intelligence independent of humanity. They are the result of accumulated scientific knowledge, engineering and human labour. They extend into matter the energy and intelligence accumulated over generations.
But their emergence has an important consequence: it makes visible what was previously abstract.
When we see a robot performing a task, we immediately understand what the power of machine energy means. The comparison with human labour becomes concrete. Robotics thus openly reveals a reality already present in the industrial economy: material production relies increasingly on technical power that far exceeds human physical strength. This will become still more obvious when everyone has a human-like robot at home.
This development confirms the diagnosis set out above. Modern societies possess a gigantic energy army made up of machines and technical systems that multiply individuals' capacity for action.
The central question then becomes clearer still.
If this power comes from the historical accumulation of human labour, knowledge and collective infrastructure, it is legitimate to ask how it is recorded and distributed.
The Joule Model does not propose eliminating this technical power. It simply proposes recognising it for what it is: a material extension of collective human energy.
By increasingly materialising this power directly in the form of machines capable of acting in the world, robotics merely makes this reality more visible still.
In other words, the invisible energy population that the Industrial Revolution began to introduce gradually is now being made physically observable by the robotics revolution.
The economic and political issue then becomes obvious: how should we organise a society in which a growing share of production rests on this machine energy arising from the collective history of human labour?
‘If the productive power of modern societies comes largely from this invisible energy population, the fundamental economic question becomes simple: how should we measure this energy and relate it to the human energy from which it originates?’
That is precisely the question to which the Joule Model provides an answer.
If the ‘machine population’ represents a genuine demographic impossibility, then the claim that we simply need to ‘work more’ to resolve public debt or restore prosperity appears in a different light.
Let us go through this calmly.
We have established that France would have needed a population of nearly seven hundred million to produce, without technology, what it produces today. Yet this demographic explosion did not occur. What increased was not the number of bodies, but technical power.
Under these conditions, continuing to present direct human labour as the sole legitimate source of wealth amounts to ignoring the material transformation of the world.
When political leaders state that the solution is to ‘work more’, they implicitly assume that the economy remains fundamentally an economy of human muscle. They speak as though modern productivity were merely a marginal gain rather than a structural transformation.
This assumption reveals a belief: that capitalism is the natural expression of the economic order, as though wage-based organisation, the centrality of compulsory labour and monetary scarcity constituted an unsurpassable horizon.
Yet the history we have just described says precisely the opposite.
The machine has already replaced the equivalent of hundreds of millions of workers. It continues to do so. Automation, artificial intelligence, robotisation and intelligent logistics networks are carrying this dynamic forward. The movement is irreversible.
Within the capitalist framework, this substitution creates a permanent tension: every technical advance becomes a threat to employment. Every productivity gain leads to restructuring, job cuts and painful adjustments. The system relies on wage labour as its primary means of redistribution; as work becomes scarcer, redistribution contracts.
This is where the risk of potential collapse lies: not in a spectacular collapse, but in a progressive weakening caused by the mismatch between real productive power and monetary distribution based on wage labour.
The Joule Model proposes a reversal.
Rather than regarding the machine as a competitor to human labour, it recognises it as the accumulated extension of past human energy. It is not an enemy. It is a reserve.
Replacing human beings at work therefore no longer means excluding them; it means freeing biological time.
If machine power represents the equivalent of hundreds of millions of jobs, then that power can provide the basis for a compensatory income—not a welfare benefit, but an income grounded in a measurable energy reality.
Human beings are no longer compelled to sell their time in order to survive. They can devote a growing share of their lives to learning, research and gaining command of the materials and processes they consume. They can become co-pilots of the collective machine.
The occupations required to operate, maintain and innovate do not disappear. They evolve. They require continuous education and constant adaptation. Work does not vanish; it changes in nature.
This shift opens up a prospect that is neither utopian nor naïve. It entails greater responsibility.
Under capitalism, hedonism often takes the form of individual escape: accumulating wealth so as no longer to work, consuming to compensate for constraint, and seeking rentier income as a substitute for the ancestral gatherer. The system sustains the dream that everyone could become a rentier, even though its structure makes such a generalisation impossible.
In the Joule Model, hedonism becomes responsible.
The aim is not to eliminate effort, but to redirect our innate impulse to conserve energy without sliding into environmental egotism, as happens today when the possession of capital or money makes it possible to avoid work and thereby becomes destructive to the species, which protects itself through scarcity. Abundance brings with it responsibility and a need to give meaning to one’s life that are far greater than under capitalism’s risky self-regulation.
The aim is not to abolish physical scarcity, but to stop maintaining artificial monetary scarcity.
The machine makes it possible to reduce direct biological constraint. This reduction can serve to broaden consciousness and collective competence: more of us learning, more of us understanding production chains, and more of us gaining command of the ecological and material impacts of our choices.
The future would no longer be structured by the fear of losing a job, but by the capacity to help govern our technical power.
Where capitalism risks colliding with its own logic—the accumulation of productivity without adequate redistribution—the Joule Model proposes incorporating productivity as an explicit basis for distribution.
It does not promise a paradise of idleness.
It opens up the possibility of time set free and directed towards knowledge.
A hedonism that would no longer be an escape from constraint, but the joy of existing in a world understood and mastered collectively.
The machine is not the end of work.
It can be the beginning of a different relationship with work.
And perhaps this is where the next stage of human evolution will unfold: towards the gatherer’s Eden that humanity depicts in the Bible.
Before setting the value of the kilocalorie and translating energy into hourly income, we must dispel a major illusion.
For the capitalist model we are leaving behind is not merely an economic system. It is a psychological system. It has conditioned innate behaviours. It has established reflexes. It has cultivated a certain form of collective childhood and sustained the need for a leader instead of fostering growth; it has kept society in geological childhood rather than emancipating it, without being conscious of any of this. The adult was the person co-opted by the Systemic Dominant - the capitalist liberal or neoliberal - to preserve the system and exclude its opponents.
During the Cold War, our elders may remember an argument that recurred endlessly: in the Soviet Union, people were said to queue outside shops. This image served as proof. It proved the failure of a system. It proved scarcity.
In the West, people pointed to full shop windows, plentiful shelves and the absence of queues. The comparison seemed decisive, and the West prevailed. Yet over time, what had appeared to be a victory revealed its true face: the narrative changed, austerity expanded for some, and the fortunes of others increased.
But this Western shop window presented an incomplete picture.
The absence of a visible queue in the West did not mean the absence of scarcity. It meant that scarcity was distributed in a different form. In the Western system, those without enough money did not make the journey. They did not queue. They stayed at home. Scarcity was silent. It was not seen in the street; it was experienced through going without.
There was indeed a queue. It was simply monetary.
In one case, supply and demand were brought into balance through physically waiting outside a shop.
In the other, they were brought into balance through financial exclusion: an insufficient amount of money in one’s pocket.
But in both cases, the reality was the same: production must come before consumption.
No system can escape this order.
Capitalism shifted the limit. It transformed a physical constraint into a monetary one. It does not say, ‘We have not produced enough.’ It says, ‘You do not have enough money.’ Scarcity becomes individual. The limit becomes personal.
And gradually, an illusion takes hold.
Money creates the feeling that the good already exists, ready to be seized. It erases production time, raw materials, logistics chains and human labour. It gives the impression that desire summons the object into being. Yet nothing appears merely because it is desired.
A good exists because it has been produced. If it has not been produced, no amount of money will make it appear.
This illusion is not neutral. It has shaped a particular behaviour: the ‘customer is king’ mentality.
Capitalism has encouraged individuals to think of themselves first and foremost as buyers. They have repeatedly been told that their freedom consists in choosing and that their sovereignty is expressed through the act of purchase. A low price has become a personal victory; a special offer, an acquired right.
But this customer is also, in most cases, a wage earner.
And therein lies the paradox: as a wage earner, this person demands a high income; as a customer, ever-lower prices. To protect immediate purchasing power, this person accepts cost compression, relocation and lower wages elsewhere, without seeing that this feeds the very mechanism that ultimately bears down on them and replaces them with a ‘machine’.
By becoming a customer, the wage earner personally ushers the wage earner they are towards the door.
Their wage becomes an ‘excessive cost’ within the very system they support as a consumer.
This circle is one of the most powerful psychological drivers of modern capitalism. It maintains a permanent tension between production and consumption. It flatters immediate desire while compressing the wage base. Here again we see the reptilian brain at work, incapable of reflection.
We are not deceived by this mechanism.
And that is precisely why we must be extremely clear about what the disappearance of artificial monetary scarcity means in the Joule Model, and understand why paid education is indispensable in supporting society’s progress towards cultural adulthood.
If, under the new framework, productive prices represent only 14 per cent of their current level while nominal incomes remain close to today’s levels, then theoretical purchasing power does not increase by 86 per cent.
Depending on the circumstances, it would be multiplied approximately four- to sevenfold. This is not a simple adjustment.
It is a systemic shock.
A sudden fall in prices combined with unchanged incomes would immediately cause:
an explosion in demand;
pressure on physical production capacity;
real shortages;
pressure on non-renewable resources;
disorderly catch-up mechanisms.
In other words, the physical limit would immediately reappear. Desire would not be confined to those living in destitution or poverty; it would also encompass the desires born of the frustration sustained by the scarcity of a system that draws the growth of its capital from wage earners. The expansion of a few people’s fortunes, and the number of such fortunes, gives some indication of the scale of this frustration.
The purpose of the Joule Model is not to produce consumerist euphoria. It does not aim to make ‘everyone four to seven times richer’. It aims to remove survival from the price mechanism without creating material imbalance.
We are not naïve about the ‘childlike’ behaviours that the old model sustained by continually stimulating desire.
A society abruptly released from monetary scarcity could see the emergence of:
conspicuous consumption;
psychological compensation;
mass purchasing;
accelerated replacement;
waste.
This is precisely what we must anticipate. Here lies a new responsibility of cultural adulthood, one that human beings are still far from possessing within a capitalist organisation that grows through consumption more than through existential need.
Monetary abundance is not material abundance.
Capitalism has cultivated an anxious hedonism: consuming to compensate for fear. If I consume, then I exist.
The Joule Model must open the way to responsible hedonism: enjoying life without destroying the ecosystem, and fostering research and innovation as the key to preserving our comfort.
The limit does not disappear. It changes in nature.
Under the old system, it was concealed by price.
Under the new one, it becomes visible through real energy capacity.
Margins are capped. Money no longer produces money. Financial rent dies away. Inflation driven by expanding credit disappears. The wealthiest have no interest in consuming their capital on a massive scale.
But the risk does not come from the wealthiest.
It comes from collective consumption if that consumption becomes disconnected from production.
This is why setting the value of the kilocalorie cannot be a simple arithmetic calculation designed to neutralise the current 86 per cent. It must be calibrated consistently with:
actual national production;
the human reserve;
the machine reserve;
ecological sustainability;
the territory’s material capacity.
What is at stake is not a promise of spectacular enrichment.
It is an intelligible form of stability. This is not the law of the strongest in the market; it is the responsibility of populations to manage their own existence. The Joule Model no longer co-opts any Systemic Dominants, because it no longer appeals to the archaic dominant/dominated frame of reference. Instead, it requires us consciously and intelligently to move beyond it, acting upon the reptilian brain by changing its environment. This cannot happen instantaneously.
Before defining the minimum social income, before setting the basic hourly income, before calculating the productive cost price and the entrepreneurial margin, we must establish a coherent energy standard.
Here we leave the critical register and enter the accounting register.
The value of the kilocalorie will not be a magic number; it will express a balance between productive abundance and material limits.
The model can endure only on the basis of this standard.
This transition must bear the anthropological shift on which everything else depends.
‘A society capable of multiplying purchasing power four- to sevenfold can no longer behave like a frustrated society. Abundance demands lucidity.’
We can make an observation similar to one made by General de Gaulle when he used very harsh phrases about ‘the French’, whom he sometimes compared to herds: ‘The French are calves.’
On the basis of the present observation, it would be appropriate to say that most people are digestive tracts. It is a metaphor that may at first shock or humiliate.
But this in no way expresses contempt - something we do not feel - for human beings.
Its purpose is to caricature a primary behaviour sustained by consumerism, which is based on supplying a surplus of consumer goods, to the point that life seems devoted solely to feeding the mouth and excreting waste into our environment. This applies both literally, to eating, and industrially, to production.
We do not cloak this in the language of communications professionals; we are as direct as General de Gaulle was, and he loved France no less for it.
Had we written that human beings had become no more than a conduit for flows of goods, advertising, credit and waste, we do not think this abstraction would have caused offence.
The caricatural image we use is violent. But it points to something real that cannot be denied.
We need only observe what happens in ordinary situations. In France, during strikes by waste-collection services, bags quickly accumulate outside homes and along streets and boulevards. In the absence of an alternative organisation or individual responsibility, everyone deposits what they no longer want as close as possible to their immediate living space, leaving others to make it disappear.
This behaviour is not exceptional. It reveals a dependency that has become structural: that of a society which externalises the management of its own material consequences. As long as the system functions, this reality remains invisible. But as soon as it is interrupted, even briefly, that reality reappears with a clarity that is difficult to deny.
In regions of the world where such services do not exist or remain inadequate, this situation is not temporary but permanent. Waste accumulates within the living environment itself, making visible what organised societies strive to keep at a distance: the material trace of their consumption.
What appears, then, is not an anomaly but a constant: the human difficulty of collectively taking responsibility for the consequences of our own production whenever no organisation assumes responsibility for them.
Contemporary capitalism does not need strong political subjects. It needs regular consumers. The individual becomes a biological interface between global production and the global landfill.
The individual absorbs, eliminates and begins again. They decide neither what is produced, nor how it is produced, nor the ecological consequences of this cycle.
This is where the metaphor acquires its meaning. In prehistoric societies, human beings ate and relieved themselves in the same place because their technical and symbolic horizons were limited.
Today, despite our technological sophistication, we sometimes do the same thing on a planetary scale: we consume and discard within the same ecological territory. The difference is that we know. And yet we continue to pollute, even though that pollution returns to us in the form of illness.
And this is where the Joule Model changes the perspective.
It does not turn our ‘gut’ into a moralist. It turns the consumer into an accountant of real energy. It restores awareness of the energy cost already in operation, visibility of the associated flows, the separation between the protection of life and commercial production, and collective responsibility for organising abundance.
In other words, it puts the frontal lobe back above the digestive tract.
Perhaps the metaphor can evolve so as to gain force without expressing contempt: ‘Capitalism has reduced the citizen to a tube: they absorb and discharge. Every population has participated in this; we are not singling out producers, for this is an interrelated whole, and those who have remained silent while taking part for years by discarding their waste in public spaces are no less actors in it.’
The Joule Model seeks to turn the citizen back into a being conscious of the energy they transform, through means other than punitive sanctions.
Awakening does not come from insulting the cultural adult. It comes from bringing the mechanism to light.
And what we are proposing, at heart, is not to condemn citizens. It is to free them from a system that treats them as biological conduits rather than as responsible adult energy subjects. The metaphor then becomes a lever rather than the slap it is not intended to be.
We accept that this may appear humiliating when the sole aim is to make us aware of the reality of what we are, despite all scientific advances. We are participants in this digestion, yet it escapes us through the state of economic infantilisation in which the population is both kept and involved, in a world of frustrating scarcity. There is nothing insulting about looking at ourselves in a full-length mirror, in a looking glass, rather than hiding in the shadows of Plato’s cave.
The reference to Plato’s cave is a philosophical invitation to rise towards the light, at the risk of seeing ourselves as we are. This reality is powerful, and we must embrace it fully. The metaphor of the digestive tract may shock. It may appear humiliating. But its purpose is not to insult; it is to describe what we see yet choose to look away from.
In contemporary capitalism, the citizen is assigned an extremely limited function: to consume and eliminate. They absorb flows of goods, images and credit, then discharge material and symbolic waste.
Production is elsewhere, decision-making is elsewhere, responsibility is elsewhere. All that remains to the citizen is the biological role of passage. This is not a moral accusation. It is a structural observation. We participate in this digestion.
We derive comfort from it. But it escapes our control. Economic infantilisation lies precisely in this: we are treated as sovereign consumers, even though we control neither real energy flows, nor production chains, nor the ecological consequences of our choices.
We are flattered with the notion that ‘the customer is king’, but denied a systemic understanding. To say that we have become digestive tracts is not to deny our intellectual capacities. It is to say that our economic role has been reduced to a biological function within a technical system beyond our control.
There is nothing insulting about looking at ourselves in a mirror. What would be humiliating would be refusing to see. The reference to Plato’s cave is relevant here.
In the allegory, the prisoners are not guilty of being chained. They take shadows for reality because they see nothing else. Leaving the cave does not mean despising them, but facing the light, with all the pain that entails.
Philosophically, the Joule Model forms part of this movement. It does not propose moralising consumption. It proposes making energy flows visible. It does not condemn human beings for what they are. It restores their ability to understand what they do. Rising towards the light does not mean becoming perfect. It means accepting that, despite our scientific advances, we have allowed our economic organisation to operate at an almost preconscious level. And lucidity is never a humiliation. It is the first step towards responsibility.
We can put it this way: ‘If the metaphor of the digestive tract shocks, let it shock. It is not an insult. It is a mirror. We are reduced to this not by nature, but by organisation. The Joule Model does not accuse humanity. It invites us to become conscious once again of the energy we transform.’
It is demanding. But it is dignified.
Leaving the shadows for the light is not a humiliation. It is an elevation. It entails a moment of confusion, of disorientation. But it opens the way to understanding. Leaving behind the slogans of communications professionals in order to see what is kept invisible—allowing the metaphor of the digestive tract to shock while recognising that its purpose is not to insult but to describe—is a process of maturation towards adultescence.
The Joule Model does not blame humanity.
It proposes reintegrating human beings into an awareness of what they transform.
It does not deny the ‘reptilian’ brain. It recognises that if human beings ignore the archaic part that governs their decisions, they fall back into power struggles. In a discussion, those who lack words use their muscles. In an economy, those who lack vision resort to brutal competition.
Capitalism has institutionalised this archaic reflex as a modern cultural behaviour.
The Joule Model seeks to contain it through consciousness.
Relative abundance is not in itself a danger. It becomes dangerous if it remains governed by a scarcity mindset.
A society capable of making life four to seven times cheaper can no longer behave like a frustrated society.
Abundance does not excuse irresponsibility; it makes it visible.
And that is precisely why setting the value of the kilocalorie will not be a mere calculation.
It will be a civilisational choice.
For the standard we are about to define will determine more than incomes and prices.
It will determine the pace at which a society accepts the transition
from the digestive tract to energy consciousness.
Contrary to beliefs sustained for decades, the economy is not an autonomous science suspended above human beings. It does not exist independently of the human behaviours that make it function. It is structured by desire, fear, rivalry, imitation and the need for recognition. It is the institutionalised extension of our psyche.
We should therefore not be surprised to have linked numbers and the psyche.
We should not be surprised to have placed the psyche before the numbers.
Restoring the primacy of human beings over money is not a stylistic flourish. It is a methodological requirement.
Modern capitalism has presented itself as a ‘natural’ economy, as though generalised competition were the spontaneous and definitive expression of the human species. In reality, it is a historical choice, born in a context of relative energy scarcity, material insecurity and political fragmentation. This choice shaped behaviours. Those behaviours, in turn, reinforced the system.
Today, we must acknowledge something uncomfortable.
Contemporary capitalism has gradually reduced the citizen to a biological function: that of a digestive tract.
The formulation may appear brutal. It may shock. It may seem humiliating. It is not. It is descriptive.
In the current model, the individual is placed in an extremely simplified position:
they absorb flows of goods, images and credit,
they discharge material and symbolic waste,
and then start again.
Production is elsewhere.
Strategic decision-making is elsewhere.
Systemic responsibility is elsewhere.
All that remains is transit.
This is not an insult.
It is a mirror.
We participate in this digestion. We derive comfort from it. But it escapes our control. Economic infantilisation lies precisely in this: we are treated as sovereign consumers, flattered with the notion that ‘the customer is king’, even though we control neither real energy flows, nor the global organisation of production, nor the ecological consequences of our choices.
The sovereign customer is a flattering illusion.
As an employee, that same individual pushes open the very door that will ultimately reduce their own income.
This is the same mechanism historically observed in poorly managed economic stimulus policies.
In 1981, income redistribution was undertaken in France. Wages rose. Long-suppressed consumption was unleashed. But the productive base had already partly been relocated abroad. Imports surged. The trade deficit widened. Two years later, the shift to austerity became unavoidable.
It was not redistribution that had failed.
It was the absence of structural transformation of the productive system.
This historical reminder is not anecdotal.
It is a warning.
If the Joule Model makes it possible to multiply purchasing power four- or sevenfold, depending on the circumstances, because prices carry only the productive component rather than the protection of life, then demand could soar. Especially for symbolic and technological goods with strong image value, often produced outside the country.
Ignoring this risk would be irresponsible.
Abundance, if it is not thought through, reproduces the imbalances of scarcity, only faster.
The decisive difference lies elsewhere.
In 1981, incomes were increased without changing the structure of the system.
In the Joule Model, we transform the accounting treatment of value, the separation between production and protection, the visibility of energy flows and the responsibility of the actors involved.
The question is no longer: ‘How much can citizens buy?’
The question becomes: ‘What do we collectively decide to produce?’
Multiplying purchasing power four- or sevenfold means multiplying responsibility sevenfold.
At that precise point, a new responsibility emerges.
When monetary constraint ceases to be the principal regulator of behaviour, society must ask itself questions it had previously avoided.
If every citizen wishes to have an individual vehicle, the question is no longer solely financial. It becomes material: do we genuinely have the metals, energy, infrastructure and space required to provide one car per person?
If every household wishes to equip every room with electronic devices, the same question arises: what quantities of glass, plastics, metals and industrial energy would this represent on the scale of an entire country?
In the present economy, these trade-offs are made implicitly by the market and through prices. Citizens consume, but they do not directly see the physical constraints governing that consumption.
In an economy based on energy measurement, these constraints become visible.
This idea is not new. As early as the 1970s, the Club of Rome report known as The Limits to Growth showed that economic growth cannot be analysed independently of the planet’s physical resources. Several thinkers associated with degrowth, including Paul Ariès, have drawn on this work to remind us that every society must make choices about how it uses its resources.
The Joule Model does not adopt this line of thought in order to call for scarcity or a decline in living standards.
It draws a different conclusion from it.
When material abundance becomes possible, the question ceases to be: ‘Do we have the money to produce?’
It becomes: ‘Do we have the resources to produce, and do we genuinely wish to direct our collective energy towards this use?’
The decision does not disappear.
It simply becomes conscious.
Since the 1970s, a number of studies have already drawn attention to this material dimension of the economy. The Club of Rome report, published under the title The Limits to Growth, issued a warning that has remained famous: ‘If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached within the next century.’
This diagnosis has often been interpreted as a call for degrowth. But it can be understood differently: it simply means that every economy is first and foremost a transformation of energy and materials.
The Joule Model does not dispute this observation.
It proposes making it visible.
‘And that is precisely why setting the value of the kilocalorie will not be a mere calculation. It will be a civilisational choice.’
Let us consider some simple examples.
If a population whose purchasing power has suddenly increased substantially decides that every dwelling should have a television in each of its rooms, the question is no longer solely economic. It becomes material.
In France, this would represent more than one hundred million additional sets. Yet behind this familiar object lie considerable quantities of materials: glass, plastics, metals, electronic circuits, rare earths, and industrial energy for manufacture and transport. The demand seems trivial on the scale of an individual. It becomes massive on the scale of a nation.
Let us consider a second example.
If every citizen wishes to own an individual vehicle, the same question arises. France currently has around forty million cars for nearly seventy million inhabitants. Providing one car per person would mean producing nearly thirty million additional vehicles.
A single vehicle already requires more than one tonne of materials: chiefly steel, but also aluminium, plastics, copper and numerous electronic components. On a national scale, such a decision would represent tens of millions of tonnes of raw materials to be extracted, processed and transported.
In the present economy, these trade-offs are invisible to most citizens. They are absorbed into market prices, global industrial chains and technical decisions made far from collective scrutiny.
A society with greatly increased purchasing power can no longer accept this invisibility. It must be able to see what its choices actually entail.
Example A: ‘One Television in Every Room’
Let us take as our starting point the orders of magnitude available for France (main residences): approximately 30.9 million households, with an average of around 4.0 rooms per dwelling.
1. ‘Political’ Demand Expressed by the Population
If the objective becomes ‘one television per room’, the target volume is therefore:
30.9 million dwellings × 4 rooms = 123.6 million televisions.
2. Corresponding Physical Mass (Simply to Make It Tangible)
A modern 40-inch television weighs around 8.1 kg (excluding its stand, based on an indicative manufacturer figure).
The total mass is therefore: 123.6 million × 8.1 kg = 1,001,000 tonnes of equipment (= 1 million tonnes).
3. The ‘Responsibility’ Point (What the Expert Must Say)
The expert is not there to prohibit anything, but to say: ‘This is what it physically entails.’
For LCD/FPD screens, the technical literature on displays indicates a very high proportion of glass (published order of magnitude: approximately 87.2% glass and 12.7% plastics in the composition of the LCD display itself).
Thus, even without itemising the entire television (metals, circuit boards and so forth), it is immediately apparent that the demand for ‘one television per room’ is not merely a consumer whim: it entails the large-scale mobilisation of glass, plastics, metals, logistics, maintenance, waste management, recycling systems and so forth.
Pedagogical conclusion: under the model, the population may want this, but it must confront the question: ‘Do we have the materials and industrial capacity to produce them on this scale, and at what real collective cost?’
Example B: ‘One Vehicle per Person’
Here, one official figure is particularly useful: as at 1 January 2024, France had 39.3 million passenger cars in circulation.
France’s resident population was approximately 68.4 million on 1 January 2024.
1. ‘Political’ Demand Expressed by the Population
‘One vehicle per person’ → target = 68.4 million cars.
Difference from the current situation:
68.4 − 39.3 = 29.1 million additional cars.
2. Materials: A Simple and Telling Order of Magnitude
A technical source on automotive materials provides a useful order-of-magnitude benchmark for an average vehicle: approximately 1,163 kg of iron and steel and 150 kg of plastics.
If these orders of magnitude are applied to the 29.1 million additional cars:
• Iron and steel: 29.1 million × 1,163 kg = 33.9 million tonnes
• Plastics: 29.1 million × 150 kg = 4.37 million tonnes
3. The ‘Responsibility’ Point
The expert does not make a ‘moral’ judgement. They state the material footprint of the choice and its associated constraints (resources, imports, energy, infrastructure, space, maintenance and end-of-life treatment). The population then decides.
This is precisely where the example changes the reader’s perspective: when abundance is possible, the question ceases to be ‘Can I afford it?’ and becomes ‘Is it physically sustainable, and is this what we collectively prefer?’ This naturally opens the way to a preference for public transport and the prioritisation of needs.
It is precisely to make this reality intelligible that we must now define a common instrument of measurement. ‘Setting the value of the kilocalorie will therefore not be a mere calculation. It will be a civilisational choice.’ Human beings do not invent in a vacuum; they reorganise the reality they learn to see.
In an economy of monetary scarcity, scarcity regulates behaviour.
In an economy of relative abundance, regulation must become conscious.
This entails:
a deliberate industrial policy;
explicit environmental priorities;
planning for climate-resilience infrastructure (water, forests, wildfire prevention and energy-efficient refurbishment);
massive investment in education;
manageable class sizes;
a school system capable of reducing dropout rates;
nurseries, facilities for older people and neighbourhoods that cease to be social ghettos.
There is no shortage of activities capable of absorbing surplus purchasing power without increasing the turnover of disposable goods. What is lacking is a system capable of directing collective energy towards these priorities.
Today, the ecological transition is proclaimed, but it is rarely funded on a scale commensurate with the climatic upheavals. We speak of adapting ‘as events unfold’, whereas floods, droughts and fires call for structural transformations: widening river channels, large-scale reforestation, water storage and durable infrastructure.
Capitalism responds to crises by accelerating.
The Joule Model must respond with lucidity. The transition from organised monetary scarcity to a relative abundance of productive power is not merely an economic adjustment. It is an anthropological shift. And this shift cannot be naive.
We are emerging from a model that has behaved like a collective addiction. Capitalism promises recovery through growth, but treats its crises with the very mechanism that produces them: more volume, faster turnover, more credit and greater competitive pressure. To borrow an image, it is an addict treating itself with the drug that is making it ill.
When consumption slows, demand is stimulated. When wages stagnate, prices are driven down by squeezing costs. When profits decline, ‘machine’ productivity is intensified. At every point of tension, the response is to accelerate the very movement that creates the tension.
This cycle has produced two seemingly contradictory effects: persistent monetary poverty for a growing section of the population, and the material overconsumption of disposable goods.
Frustration fuels impulse buying. Low prices become a form of psychological compensation. People buy because something is ‘a bargain’, not because it is necessary. They replace things because doing so is cheaper than repairing them. Considerable energy is then spent managing the waste of growth that has become circular in the worst sense of the term: produce, consume, discard, recycle, reproduce.
In this context, any talk of increasing purchasing power is explosive. A population frustrated by deprivation may initially rush not towards fundamental needs, but towards symbols of comfort, distinction and recognition. The danger is not poverty. The danger is social revenge.
This is where collective responsibility must be clearly established.
The relative abundance made possible by the Joule Reserve is not a licence to consume without limit. It is a historic opportunity to redirect human energy towards what is genuinely lacking: climate resilience, water infrastructure, reforestation, fire prevention, the thermal adaptation of cities, large-scale renovation of the housing stock, regenerative agriculture, food security, fundamental research and sustainable innovation.
Let us consider some concrete examples.
Exceptional rainfall causes large-scale flooding. Responses made ‘as events unfold’ always cost more than anticipation: widening river channels, creating flood-expansion areas, building suitable embankments and planning intelligent relocations.
Heatwaves require water reserves, storage infrastructure, modernised irrigation systems, ambitious forestry plans, and permanent, trained fire-prevention teams. As a final example, ocean currents concentrate tonnes of plastic waste in the Pacific. It will break down into microplastics that will be ingested by those who eat the fish caught there. We know this, yet only the UN has organised its recovery with The Ocean Cleanup, which promises to recover floating waste, even though this accounts for only 1% of total pollution. The answer lies elsewhere. It exists, but still remains marginal. Since 1950, around 10 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced worldwide, most of it since the 2000s. Global production doubled between 2000 and 2020, reaching 460 million tonnes per year.
None of this is theoretical. None of it lacks purpose.
All that is missing is a system capable of mobilising collective energy on a scale commensurate with the challenges.
Today, society speaks of ecological transition without giving itself the means to finance it on a scale commensurate with climatic disruption and the accumulation of pollution. It sustains the illusion of action through piecemeal measures because the monetary framework structurally limits long-term investment. It adjusts at the margins when deep reorganisation is needed, because it finances this out of the purchasing power of those who work—and they no longer want further levies.
The Joule Model makes precisely this redirection possible.
It does not abolish entrepreneurial freedom. It does not abolish the margin. It does not abolish initiative. But it frees society from the obsession with immediate profitability, allowing effort to be directed towards what genuinely increases the power to live.
Yet this potential energy abundance does not mean that the transition will be simple.
Industrial societies still rely very heavily on hydrocarbons, and transforming this energy system represents a historic challenge on a scale comparable to the great industrial revolutions of the past.
To measure the scale of this transition in concrete terms, it is useful to recall a few physical orders of magnitude relating to the global energy system.
Our world, seeking to emerge from a past existence it considers cruel, has built organisations that might be described as ‘eugenic’.
Through our social cultures, we have learned to select and to favour certain traits at the expense of others, under the guise of progress or civilisation.
It is no longer war or brute force that does the sorting, but social norms, fashion and the economy.
The quest for the perfect human being, once chimerical, is returning in subtler forms: surgery, performance and image.
The discovery of the genome has only widened this field, offering both the hope and the fear of a humanity that is reprogramming itself.
But at what point does the pursuit of wellbeing become an enterprise of exclusion?
At what point does medicine become eugenics?
Capitalism has behaved like a ‘living’ organism.
It has grown, mutated, expanded its territory and nourished its cells—us—while imposing its own metabolism upon them.
Its life force is money; its purpose is its own reproduction.
By altering its environment, it has altered human beings.
The nervous tensions, artificial rhythms, foods and technologies it imposes do not transform what is innate; they build upon it by activating ancient biological mechanisms that consciousness often merely accompanies without mastering. They exploit those mechanisms to organise behaviour and guide choices in the direction of its own reproduction. They use our oldest reflexes and push them in directions that often lie beyond our control.
Through its crises, it acts as a form of accelerated evolution: selection is no longer natural; it is economic.
The capitalist system is now a factor in the evolution of our species, perhaps anticipating, through the reshaping of humanity, the emergence of a successor to Homo sapiens sapiens.
Through mass culture, advertising and imagery, capitalism has disseminated a uniform ideal of the human being.
The fashion model, the perfect body and profitable intelligence have become the new standards of evolution. The popularisation of genetics could soon make these models attainable through biology itself.
So, after how many copies of the same ideal will we begin to speak of eugenics?
And what will become of those who refuse to conform to it?
We have not yet grasped the scale of this transformation. It does not belong to some distant future: it is already the beginning of a humanity that chooses its genes as it chooses its brands.
It is already the beginning of a humanity that is starting to intervene in its own biological heritage. Neurobiologists such as Jean-Didier Vincent have shown that human beings have already been transformed by their own technologies, and that the boundary between the natural and the artificial is tending to disappear.
The idea that humanity is entering a phase in which it can intervene in itself is not a recent speculation. It forms part of a continuum of scientific and philosophical thought developed over several decades, with which the Joule Model will have to contend.
As early as the 1990s, scientists such as Claude Allègre emphasised that science no longer merely observes the world: it is becoming capable of transforming its equilibria, including those of living organisms.
In neuroscience, Jean-Didier Vincent reminds us that human beings have already been profoundly altered by their own creations. Language, culture, medicines and technologies have gradually transformed their behaviour, biological rhythms and modes of interaction with the environment. Human beings are no longer strictly ‘natural’: they have already been hybridised by their own inventions.
Research in genetics and molecular biology has opened a further stage. With tools such as CRISPR-Cas9, it is becoming possible to intervene directly in the genome—that is, in the very mechanisms by which life is transmitted. This capability marks a break: humanity no longer merely acts upon its environment; it can now act upon its own biological structure.
In the field of technological foresight, authors such as Ray Kurzweil have popularised the idea of a convergence between biology, computing and artificial intelligence, leading to a profound transformation of the human being. Although some of these visions are debated, they nevertheless reflect a real trend: the growing integration of technologies into human functions.
Finally, contemporary bioethical thinking, advanced in particular by institutions such as France’s National Consultative Ethics Committee, shows that these transformations are not merely technical. They raise fundamental questions about the limits of human intervention in living organisms, the definition of what it means to be human, and collective responsibility in the face of these new capabilities.
These different strands of work converge on the same idea: humanity is entering a phase in which it no longer merely endures the conditions of life, but becomes capable of altering its rules.
The Joule Model belongs within this perspective, not in order to encourage or restrain these transformations, but to recall an essential reality:
every transformation, whether technical, economic or biological, always rests on an energy base.
It is this base that must now be made visible if we are to understand what we are really doing when we transform the world—and ourselves.
When considering the transformation of human beings, the evolution of living organisms and the limits of the economic framework, the point here is not to criticise what some call transhumanism.
Every reality that emerges has a reason for being, even if we do not immediately perceive its meaning.
Since its origins, life has explored different paths. It does not follow a conscious plan, but unfolds possibilities from the constraints and opportunities offered by its environment.
What we call ‘progress’ is, in this sense, merely one form of that exploration.
Nature does not ‘decide’ in the human sense of the word; it selects, preserves and transforms.
It brings configurations into being, then retains some of them over the long timescale of evolution.
This movement does not stop at non-human nature; it also passes through humanity itself.
Humanity participates in this movement while imagining that it acts in full awareness and with its own consent.
But we do not yet have the words to describe this phenomenon: the impression that we are choosing even though our decisions take shape under environmental constraint.
Our choices develop from our temperament and character, themselves continually changing through interaction with external conditions.
We believe that we escape determinism, but we fail to perceive it, partly because of our ignorance and the limitations of our senses.
Our consciousness itself operates with a delay, as though it were trying to interpret, after the event, processes that move faster than it does.
We therefore proceed with a slow brain in the face of a reality that surpasses us.
We call this ‘deciding’, but it may be only a way of narrating what we do not control.
Our consciousness, and later our capacity for associative thought, were themselves emergent phenomena in their time. We do not know whether human beings faced questions like those confronting us today as they saw these faculties emerge.
They opened up new possibilities that no one could fully anticipate.
Today, we find ourselves in a comparable situation.
We are developing technical, biological and cognitive capabilities that allow us to intervene in living organisms themselves. We are building tools that extend our intelligence, alter our environment and are beginning to act upon our own biological structure.
But we do not know what the evolutionary process will retain from these transformations.
We construct narratives, formulate intentions and project possible uses.
But the geohistorical evolution of humanity does not bend to our conscious intentions.
It is traversed by deeper mechanisms, some of which we have identified:
energy dynamics;
material constraints;
biological mechanisms of self-regulation;
psychological restraints inherited from our evolutionary history.
Today, we possess an unprecedented advantage over earlier periods: we have accumulated knowledge, sciences, models and analytical capabilities.
But this advantage no more guarantees our lucidity than consciousness and associative thought do.
It merely gives us the means to understand, provided that we use them.
In this context, a central question arises.
Can what we are developing today—biotechnologies, artificial intelligence and the modification of living organisms—unfold in a manner beneficial to the human species within the present organisational framework?
That is far from certain.
These transformations are not neutral. They take place within an economic and social system that directs their development.
Within a capitalist framework, the dominant logic remains that of capturing value, competition and appropriation.
Innovations are not primarily directed towards collective benefit, but towards profitable uses that create differentiation, concentrate power and favour the wealthy.
Contemporary authors such as Idriss Aberkane have emphasised that the knowledge economy could generate a new abundance, but that, in its present form, it tends to concentrate its benefits in particular centres—especially ecosystems such as Silicon Valley—for the benefit of already dominant actors.
In other words, these new capacities to transform the world and living organisms may benefit only a minority if they remain embedded in a logic of organised scarcity.
The problem, therefore, is not the emergence of these technologies.
The problem is the framework within which they develop.
If humanity is entering a phase in which it can intervene in itself, then the question is no longer merely scientific or technical.
It becomes profoundly political and anthropological: within what form of organisation can these transformations unfold without intensifying existing imbalances, forms of domination and divisions?
For the psychological, social and cultural obstacles we have identified in the development of the Joule Model do not disappear with technological progress.
They continue to operate and may even be amplified by the tools we create.
There is therefore a real risk that unprecedented capabilities arising from the collective intelligence of living systems will be used within logics that are incompatible with the equilibrium of the species.
This gap between technical power and social organisation lies at the heart of the present period.
It also connects directly with the question raised by the Joule Model.
For if every transformation ultimately rests upon an energy base, whether human or mechanical, then the way in which that energy is recognised, measured and distributed becomes decisive.
It is not the emergence of possibilities that creates the problem.
It is how we organise them.
In other words, the question is not how far humanity can go, but within what framework it does so. We have acquired the power to transform living organisms; we have not yet learned how to organise the responsibility that this power demands.
In its pursuit of maximum profit, the capitalist system acts as an unconscious engine of evolution. By altering our ecosystem, it prepares the emergence of a new being: technological man.
This new human being lives in permanent tension between his biological capacities and technological demands that surpass him.
Yet, deprived of species consciousness, he no longer knows why he acts.
Money has become his symbol of power, but it has lost what humanity had given it: consciousness.
Dying capitalism will not disappear without bequeathing its mutations: it will leave behind a conditioned, high-performing and devitalised being.
Yet one path remains: education, as a self-regulating structure and the consciousness of the species.
Learning to doubt and to think through uncertainty means preserving the living part of humanity. Knowledge must no longer be a means of exploitation, but a means of understanding ourselves.
For although capitalism has, in some respects, imitated life, it does not possess the consciousness of living systems.
Education must ensure this continuity, teaching the fragility of reason and responsibility for evolution. Thus, through its own excess, the dying capitalist system may have revealed what human beings needed to become: beings conscious of their limitations and capable of making them the source of their survival.
Moving away from hydrocarbons is now presented as a necessary transition, sometimes as a technical inevitability and often as a political emergency. Yet as soon as we leave the realm of intentions and consider orders of magnitude, the full complexity of reality becomes clear.
Energy is not an abstraction. It is the material condition of every form of human organisation. Production, transport, heating, food and communication: each of these activities depends upon continuous, massive energy flows organised on a planetary scale.
For more than a century, these flows have depended very largely on hydrocarbons. Their energy density, ease of storage, transportability and integration into industrial systems have made them the foundation of modern development.
Replacing this foundation is not simply a matter of substituting one source for another in a simple equation.
It requires entire systems to be reconfigured:
production infrastructure;
distribution networks;
industrial uses;
the organisation of territories;
and collective behaviour.
In other words, this is not a marginal transition, but a change of scale comparable to the great industrial ruptures of the past, with one additional constraint: it must take place in a world that is already saturated, interdependent and finite.
This is where orders of magnitude become decisive.
Figures allow us to move beyond intuitive representations and enter the physical reality of the problem. They show that the energy question cannot be reduced to a technological choice between different sectors; it engages the whole of economic and social organisation.
The following table is not intended to decide between solutions. Its purpose is to make a fundamental constraint visible:
the substitution of hydrocarbons is a long, demanding and structurally difficult process.
It highlights an essential point for the remainder of our reasoning:
no single energy source will be able to replace the present system without a profound transformation of our uses, expectations and way of organising production.
In other words, the energy question is not merely a question of technology; it is a question of human organisation.
Reading: these orders of magnitude do not describe a solution, but a physical constraint.
| Global primary energy | ≈620 EJ (≈172,000 TWh) |
|---|---|
| Share of fossil fuels | ≈80–86% |
| Oil alone | ≈210 EJ (≈58,300 TWh) |
| Current nuclear capacity | ≈400 GW (398 GW installed) |
| Nuclear capacity required to replace oil | ≈7,300 GW (×18) |
| Realistic requirement, allowing for electrical efficiency | ≈2,400–2,500 GW |
| Current uranium production | ≈67,000 tonnes/year |
| Uranium required for 2,400 GW | ≈400,000 tonnes/year (×6) |
| 1 EJ | 277.78 TWh |
|---|---|
| Annual output of a 1 GW reactor | 7.9 TWh/year (90% capacity factor) |
| Capacity required | (277.78 × X) ÷ 7.9 GW |
| Example (70 EJ) | 2,460 GW |
| 400 GW of nuclear capacity | 67 kt U/year |
|---|---|
| Ratio | 170 tonnes/GW/year |
| Requirement for 2,400 GW | 400 kt U/year |
| Consequence | Closed fuel cycle and a massive expansion of mining |
| Energy scarcity | Inflation |
|---|---|
| Energy imbalance | Shortages |
| Political reactions | National tensions |
| Social retrenchment | Rise of nationalism |
An exajoule (EJ) is a unit of energy.
1 EJ = 1 billion billion joules;
that is, 10¹⁸ joules.
This is an immense quantity of energy, used to measure the energy consumed by countries or by the world as a whole. 1 EJ = 277.78 TWh.
A terawatt-hour (TWh) is also a unit of energy.
1 TWh = 1 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 10¹² Wh.
It measures energy consumed or produced over a period, often a year.
Example: a country’s annual electricity consumption is measured in TWh.
A gigawatt (GW) is a unit of power. 1 GW = 1 billion watts, or 10⁹ W.
It measures the instantaneous production capacity of an installation.
Example: a nuclear power station rated at 1 GW produces that level of power at a given moment.
The essential distinction is that GW measures instantaneous power, whereas TWh and EJ measure energy over time.
A simple reading: GW is an instantaneous flow rate; TWh and EJ are total quantities.
An easy image to remember: GW is the size of the tap; TWh and EJ are the amount of water that has flowed through it.
GW measures power at a given moment. TWh and EJ measure energy produced over time.
Scarcity produces inflation, imbalances lead to shortages, and together they drive societies towards retrenchment, which in turn fuels nationalism. We have already been experiencing this mechanism since the spread of austerity programmes.
No single energy source will replace fossil fuels on its own: the transition is systemic, long and constrained. We are not merely facing a technological choice, but a physical limit.
This finding leads us to a requirement that extends beyond the energy question alone.
For if the orders of magnitude presented here remain misunderstood, and if they are accessible only to a minority of specialists, no collective transformation can be truly mastered.
The problem is not merely technical.
It is cognitive.
A society that does not understand the physical constraints running through it can neither anticipate, decide nor organise a coherent transition. It endures events. And when it does, it reacts through the mechanisms we have described: inflation, shortages, retrenchment and the rise of nationalism.
This is where the Joule Model comes fully into its own.
It is not limited to proposing a new unit of measurement or a new accounting tool. It entails a profound transformation in the relationship of individuals to knowledge and responsibility.
If everyone becomes the recognised bearer of a share of collective energy, then everyone must be able to understand the mechanisms that organise that energy.
In other words:
the Joule Model presupposes a society of educated adults.
This means viewing education not as an initial phase of life, but as a permanent function.
Adult education then becomes a priority energy investment.
Not in a symbolic sense, but literally:
to train individuals capable of reading orders of magnitude;
to understand physical constraints;
to connect economic choices with energy realities;
and to participate in defining collective priorities.
Without this rise in competence, the responsibility presupposed by the Joule Model remains theoretical.
With it, that responsibility becomes effective.
But this effort is not limited to understanding.
It must also foster an interest in scientific research.
For the challenges we face—energy substitution, the transformation of productive systems and resource management—can be met only through a massive mobilisation of our capacity for innovation.
Educating adults who are capable of understanding also means educating people who are capable of research.
In other words, education becomes both a tool for understanding and an engine of transformation.
It is the condition for moving from a society that endures constraints to one that organises them.
From this perspective, investment in education takes on a new dimension.
It is no longer merely a matter of transmitting knowledge.
It is a matter of making it possible to exercise collective responsibility commensurate with the challenges.
This also includes the most decisive human domain: education.
Classes of thirty pupils do not allow knowledge to be transmitted effectively. They produce disengagement, frustration and a loss of meaning. Families that can afford to do so move to private education. In practice, state schools become schools for the poor. This silent segregation fuels social ghettos, antisocial behaviour and petty crime—not through moral inevitability, but through a lack of structural investment.
If society has abundant energy capacity, why not reduce class sizes? Why not fund more nurseries? Why not expand the number of care centres for older people? Why not strengthen the educational presence in vulnerable neighbourhoods?
There is no shortage of socially useful activities capable of absorbing surplus purchasing power without multiplying destructive material flows.
This is where true degrowth lies: not in lowering the standard of living, but in reducing the needless turnover of objects and compensating for it by increasing human capabilities. We do not pursue degrowth in dignity; we pursue it in waste.
What is lacking today is not the capacity to teach. It is not the capacity to learn. It is not the capacity to organise. What is lacking is a universal right to time for learning.
The Joule Model entails creating local university institutions throughout the country—not abstract temples of knowledge, but open and accessible places devoted to human development.
To facilitate education when trainers or teachers are needed, we have artificial intelligence, which can be asked to generate every kind of programme and help to deliver it.
This shift nevertheless requires a clear understanding of our psychological structure.
We have discussed the ‘reptilian brain’ because it cannot be ignored. When human beings ignore the archaic part that governs their reflexes, they act on impulse or through power relations. In an argument, those who lack words use their muscles. In an economy, those who lack vision resort to brutal competition. Capitalism has institutionalised this reflex: permanent competition as the collective expression of an archaic brain seeking domination or survival.
The idea that the ‘customer is king’ is one such reptilian figure. The customer believes that low prices confer power. Yet, as an employee, he drives himself out of work: he makes himself redundant. He demands cost reductions that will ultimately reduce his own income, because he is accounted for as a cost to be cut. Lacking this awareness, people look to political leaders who carefully avoid explaining it to them. It is the same mechanism as that of a society which seeks growth to offset its crises, thereby worsening the conditions of the next crisis.
Developing an intellectual solution to this is not simple.
It is not enough to proclaim principles.
We must transform the environment that influences behaviour.
If the real energy limit becomes visible, if sustainable production is valued, if education is strengthened and material security guaranteed, then the reptilian brain is no longer in command. It is not eliminated; it is contained by collective consciousness, and in this new environment it will seek a new form of expression.
The Joule Model does not deny human nature. It organises a framework in which impulse is no longer the rule, but a factor to be managed.
This is where the fundamental shift takes place: from a society addicted to material growth to one capable of investing its power in mastering its future, through other, less energy-intensive forms of consumption that will naturally emerge from the development of knowledge.
An increase in purchasing power is therefore neither a threat in itself nor a panacea. It is energy to be directed. If it fuels infantile consumption, it will destroy more rapidly. If it fuels education, resilience, research and lasting quality, it will elevate society.
Capitalism promises freedom through accumulation.
The Joule Model offers freedom through security and responsibility.
And it is precisely because this transition touches our archaic impulses that it must be thought through in depth, even before the value of the kilocalorie and hourly incomes are set.
For the monetary standard that we are about to define will not be merely a number.
It will be the rhythm of this transformation.
The digestive-tract metaphor takes on its full meaning here.
In prehistoric societies, human beings ate and excreted in the same place because their technological horizons were limited. Today, despite our scientific advances, we consume and discard on a planetary scale. We know this. And yet we sometimes act as though we did not.
Saying so is not an insult; it is an acknowledgement of our true condition.
Looking at oneself in a mirror is always uncomfortable.
But it is more dignified to look at one’s own image than to remain in the shadows.
Plato’s allegory of the cave illustrates this perfectly. The prisoners are not to blame for being chained. They take the shadows for reality because they see nothing else. Emerging into the light is not a humiliation. It is an elevation. It entails a moment of confusion and disorientation. But it opens the way to understanding.
The Joule Model does not accuse humanity; it proposes restoring human beings to an awareness of what they transform. But, as we have already written, we do not know what the evolutionary process will retain from these transformations.
It does not deny the ‘reptilian brain’. It recognises that if human beings ignore the archaic part that governs their decisions, they fall back into power relations. In a discussion, those who lack words use their muscles. In an economy, those who lack vision resort to brutal competition.
Capitalism has institutionalised this reflex.
The Joule Model seeks to contain it through consciousness.
Relative abundance is not a danger in itself.
It becomes a danger if it remains governed by a scarcity mindset.
A society capable of making the cost of living four to seven times lower
can no longer behave like a frustrated society.
Abundance does not excuse irresponsibility.
It makes it visible.
And that is precisely why setting the value of the kilocalorie will not be a simple calculation.
It will be a choice of civilisation.
For the standard that we are about to define will determine more than incomes and prices.
It will determine the pace at which a society accepts the transition from the digestive tract to energy consciousness.
Recent history has already given us a warning.
In 1981, when François Mitterrand came to power, a policy of demand-side stimulus was launched: an increase in the statutory minimum wage (SMIC), higher incomes and a commitment to redistribution. The intention was simple: to restore purchasing power to those who lacked it.
The effects were immediate.
Higher incomes unleashed consumption that had long been held back. Households turned en masse to consumer comforts—household appliances, electronics, cars and textiles—a large proportion of which were already produced outside the country. The trade deficit widened. Monetary pressure mounted. Two years later, the ‘shift to austerity’ became unavoidable, driven in particular by Jacques Delors.
This episode is often interpreted as the failure of a socialist policy.
But in reality, it reveals something else.
It shows that redistribution carried out within a globalised economy structured by monetary scarcity and industrial dependence automatically causes demand to leak abroad.
It was not redistributive justice that had failed.
It was the absence of structural transformation of the productive system and the price system.
If the Joule Model makes it possible to multiply purchasing power four- or sevenfold, it is because prices now carry only the productive component (14 per cent), no longer the protection of life, which is entrusted to the Joule Bank. The phenomenon observed in 1981 could then occur on a much larger scale.
A population suddenly freed from the frustrations of monetary constraint accumulated over decades would:
consume more symbolic goods;
turn to attractive technologies;
import on a massive scale if domestic production were not ready;
place the balance of trade under strain.
It would be irresponsible to claim that this will not happen.
Abundance, if it is not thought through by economic actors, reproduces the imbalances of scarcity, only faster.
The difference between 1981 and the Joule Model is nevertheless fundamental.
In 1981, incomes were increased without changing the structure of the system; the socialist system was brought down by its own voters.
In the Joule Model, we transform:
the accounting treatment of value;
the separation between the protection of life and production;
the responsibility of economic actors;
the collective legibility of real flows.
This is not a short-term stimulus; it is a structural transformation. The question is no longer which supply should generate growth, but what we collectively decide to produce in view of the physical resources available to us.
Capitalism governs society through the fear of scarcity.
The Joule Model will have to govern society through its capacity not to waste.
The former confines society to permanent frustration.
The latter demands collective consciousness.
The transition may be demanding.
There will be tensions, adjustments and difficult choices.
But these transitional difficulties are not comparable to the systemic risks of the current model:
chronic energy dependence;
lasting deindustrialisation;
predatory financialisation;
accelerating ecological destruction;
geopolitical conflicts fuelled by permanent competition.
Abundance is not a danger in itself; it becomes a danger only if it remains governed by a scarcity mindset.
It can be summed up as follows: a society capable of making the cost of living four to seven times lower
can no longer behave like a frustrated society.
Abundance does not excuse irresponsibility.
Responsibility makes it visible.
And that is precisely where the Joule Model becomes a mature political choice.
| French | English |
|---|---|
| Modèle Joule | Joule Model |
| partenaire économique | economic partner |
| revenu d’actif | economic partner income (working term; context-sensitive) (French p.80 reads “revenu d’acteur”; translated here according to the established concept and flagged for French harmonization.) |
| capital de civilisation | civilization capital |
| plan comptable | accounting framework |
| boucle salaire–prix–capital | wage–price–capital loop |
| Conseil de l’Énergie humaine | Human Energy Council (HEC) |
| Chambre d’Évaluation Humaine | Human Evaluation Chamber (HEVC) |
| Banque Joule | Joule Bank |
| Réserve Joule | Joule Reserve |
| Trésor public | Public Treasury |
| monde factuel / vécu / transmis | factual / lived / transmitted world |
| solidarité égoïste interdépendante | interdependent self-interested solidarity |
| géohistorique | geo-historical (author’s neologism; working translation) |
| puissance technique | technological power |
| stabilité civilisationnelle | civilizational stability |
| acheter sa vie | buying one’s life |
| rareté ontologique | ontological scarcity |
| solidarité égoïste | self-interested solidarity |
| réserve collective | collective reserve |
| monétiser l’énergie | monetize energy |
| monnaie scripturale | book money / bank-deposit money (context-dependent) |
| féodalisation affective | emotional feudalization |
| féodalité émotionnelle | emotional feudalism |
| dominant systémique | Systemic Dominant |
| rapport dominant/dominé | dominant/dominated relationship |
| invariance d’échelle | scale invariance |
| contre-pouvoirs | counter-powers / countervailing institutions (context-dependent) |
| SCOP | worker cooperative (SCOP; French legal form) |
| syndicalisme | trade unionism |
| planche à billets humaine | human money-printing press |
| inculture économique | lack of economic culture / economic illiteracy (context-dependent) |
| énergie humaine quantifiée dans les machines | human energy quantified and embodied in machines |
| réserve Joule humaine | Human Joule Reserve |
| réserve Joule machine | Machine Joule Reserve |
| socle comptable | accounting foundation |
| socle énergétique | energy foundation |
| Banque des employeurs | Employers’ Bank |
| requalification du capital | reclassification of capital |
| détenteurs de capital | capital holders |
| changement d’étalon | change of standard / change of reference standard |
| économie de la connaissance | knowledge economy |
| économie de l’inventivité | economy of inventiveness |
| sécurité civilisationnelle | civilizational security |
| bifurcation institutionnelle | institutional bifurcation |
| environnement cognitif | cognitive environment |
| réel psychique | psychic reality |
| cooptation | co-optation |
| économie d'effort | economizing effort / conservation of effort (context-dependent) |
| loi énergétique | energy law |
| capital énergétique | energy capital |
| Réserve d’Énergie Joule (RJ) | Joule Energy Reserve (JR) — working institutional term |
| Banque de Réserve Joule | Joule Reserve Bank — source wording on p.108; institutional naming to be harmonized |
| CEH — clarification institutionnelle | Author clarification applied in English: Human Energy Council (HEC) determines and budgets needs; Human Evaluation Chamber (HEVC) authorizes release of funding and sends it to the Public Treasury. The French source should be harmonized accordingly. |
| 26.2 / 26.3 — numérotation source au sein du chapitre 28 | Numbering harmonised to 28.2 / 28.3 in the English translation to preserve the chapter sequence. |