A lot of simple and false ideas fuel populist thought. This book, by the Cercle des Economistes, seeks to prove them wrong with facts and certified data.
Hippolyte d’Albis is a CNRS research director and professor at the Ecole d’Economie de Paris. Françoise Benhamou is a professor emeritus at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. She is the author of a number of books and articles about the economy of culture, media and digital technology. They both preside over the Cercle des Economistes. Other members include Yann Algan, Patrick Artus, Jean-Paul Betbèze, André Cartapanis, Jean-Hervé Lorenzi, Valérie Mignon, etc.

This book was born from a simple and powerful idea: there is a wealth of literature on populism, its origins and its recent manifestations, but none that analyse the arguments put forward by populists in the field of economics.
In other words, populism is treated as a political, social and societal subject, but the economic aspect of populist ideas is never explored.
Yet a lot of simple and false ideas fuel populism, based on “facts” and “data” and sometimes even “analysis”, that are in actual fact storytelling, a twist on the truth or cherrypicked figures used as and when they suit political ambitions.
17 economists and members of the Cercle des Economistes, all recognised in their field and even beyond, have decided to answer a range of questions, in 4 sections, explaining what they know, what they sometimes don’t know, what is correct and what is false: