A graduate of the French business school HEC, Ph.D in economics and with a degree in law, Alain Cotta is professor of economics at Paris-Dauphine. He is the author of many books, the most recent, published by Fayard in 2015, being La domestication de l’humain.
The theory Alain Cotta defends here is the following: the world will henceforth be ruled by the confrontation of two capitalisms, a corporate, private capitalism of American origin, and a State, public capitalism born in emerging countries, in response to the first.

There is no doubt that this dualism might lead to war, notably between the United States and China. And though Alain Cotta doesn’t rule out that hypothesis, he shows that the convergence of the two capitalisms – hypercapitalism – is more likely. Hypercapitalism will ultimately end in the fusion of oligarchies already in place while the middle classes will become homogenized.

In the hypercapitalist context, it isn’t material goods, but the production of information that will assure profit to the greatest satisfaction of the middle classes, and the security of oligarchies in place that control the media and social networks. Its stability thus seems assured in spite of inevitable economic and social crises. The single true threat that Alain Cotta foresees is that of demographic constraints and migration flows.