The Paris 2024 Organizing Committee, led by three-time French Olympian and Olympic rowing champion Tony Estanguet, is set to sign an agreement tomorrow (May 23rd, 2018) with the aim of achieving “triple zero” by eliminating carbon emissions, poverty, and unemployment in the French capital.
Estanguet and the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee will sign the agreement alongside the Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo. Also signing the agreement will be Eric Pliez, President of SAMU Social de Paris. SAMU, which has chapters in major cities across the globe, is an organization dedicated to providing emergency medical and nursing services to the homeless and other disenfranchised populations.
Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, founder of Grameen Bank, and philanthropist famous for utilizing microfinance and microloans to entrepreneurs who are too poor to get credit from traditional banks will also attend the meeting.
Paris 2024 and the other organizations signing the agreement will pledge themselves to working with social entrepreneurs and socially-responsible capitalists (think TOMS Shoes or Warby Parker Eyeglasses). The purpose of the agreement is to provide jobs for vulnerable members of the public.
Paris 2024 and the Yanus Center have already been working together since 2016 when they signed an agreement during the Olympic Bidding process. The bid to host the 2024 Olympic Games, which ultimately came down to a decision to give Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028, was characterized in many ways by each city’s willingness to involve its populace in the process, ensuring that residents of each host city actually benefit from the Games–historically, the Olympics and other major sporting events have done the opposite and retroactively harmed local economies when the events conclude.
An economic impact study done by the Centre for Law and Economics of Sports (CDES) at the University of Limoges that potentially 250,000 jobs could be created between the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, with up to €10.7 in economic benefits for France. With so much work becoming available, the organizations signing this agreement are optimistic that under-represented groups will be able to find work, and after the Games, further integrate into the workforce.
Depending on how you measure, it may not be as ridiculous as it sounds, but I’m still not a fan of goals like this. If they really mean zero net carbon emissions, zero people below some really extreme level of poverty, and zero percent of people who are actually looking having been without a job for some long period of time, then maybe they can get there or at least close. However, goals like this inevitably lead to problems. Either the definitions get adjusted to some level that creates a false perception that the problems are gone, or the people working on these problems get labeled as failures when they inevitably fail to make enough progress towards the unrealistic goal.
There you go, peeing in the Vichyssoise with your talk of “realistic”. They mean well and they agreed to it.
Full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing.
The “triple zero” goals may indeed be unrealistic by 2024, and everyone knows that politicians love to make lofty promises that they can’t keep.
The whole initiative is based on a book written by the 2006 Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. The title of the book is “A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.”
More useful than making broad comments on what everyone knows about political promises, would be to read the book, and to actually focus on the methods that Yunus proposes for reaching the triple zero goals… There’s plenty to agree with and object to. But it’d be more productive if people read it before making vague… Read more »
In full disclosure, can you confirm whether or not Mr Yunus traveled by private jet to accept his Nobel prize in 2006?
0% unemployment is actually bad for an economy. You need people moving between jobs and employers raising wages to attract talent.
They should be attracting all kinds of talent now that their latest nationwide unemployment rate is 9.2%!
But hey, 0% is totally doable. Besides, they all agreed to it.
Can’t have no unemployment because there’s always a natural rate of unemployment #econ
Yet there is no credible evidence for the natural rate of unemployment, and Milton Friedman himself said we “cannot know what the ‘natural’ rate is.”
Memorizing random undergrad #econ “facts” is fine, but the real world is more complicated than the simplistic micro and macro models they teach you in college.
Anyway, this is about initiatives that ensure that people who are willing and capable of working, can find work. I can’t imagine a natural law (hypothetical natural rates of unemployment theories aside) that prevents this from being possible.
I had an Olympic job as a wine waiter . They took my special favourite wine opener at security because you know I could attack VIPs with the seal opener blade & prise out their vitals with the corkscrew.
Unable to do that job I got diverted to the Aquatic Centre where I snuck inside & saw most of the races . Jobs at the Olympics are over stated . The best legacy is environmental rehab of sections of a city not jobs or even facilities ( which are usually inaccessible & inoperable after .) .
How do you “eliminate” poverty? By the very definition, regardless of economics, someone has to be on the bottom, right? Or are we looking at a utopian level thinking in which literally every person has the exact same amount (in economical terms)? Yeah, that’ll work…
Poverty is usually defined on a threshold basis – so bringing everyone out of poverty does not mean that everyone is equal, it simply means that no person lacks the fundamentals to survive comfortably (my rough definition, feel free to google for others). In other words, people can be at the bottom and not be in poverty.
So there are two options that will happen: either they’ll quietly change the definition of that “threshold” for France, and claim victory. Or inflation takes over (inevitable), and those people on the bottom…will still be on the bottom.
This is nothing more than “feel good” politics without taking into account actual reality.
A lot of Olympic sports involve athletes who exhale, and they don’t just exhale a little bit, but exhale a lot more than the average person would.
All you have to do is buy carbon off-sets, and yer good to go!
But that just rewards those who can afford it! What if someone ran or swam slightly slower, but could somehow demonstrate that they exhaled less CO2 than the winner? Hmmmmm???
I think it’s a great goal and it’s a great contrast to see this as the standard compared to some other host countries of the past. I think the promising thing is that it’s going to be largely free market driven rather than government mandated. It would great to see the olympics be restored as a net positive to cities rather than the opposite.
So long as the jobs created carry a 12.83 Euros minimum wage, I’m ok with it.
Mostly agree, except for the blanket insinuation that free markets generally produce better results than government policy, particularly when the issues are environment (carbon/climate in this case) and inequality or poverty… The evidence shows the opposite. Not saying markets aren’t useful, just that when it comes to environmental and inequality issues, you can’t just leave it up to “free markets” (in any meaningful sense of the term). Policy is required.
Free-market economic systems do not have, as one of the intended outcomes, any intent to yield “equality.” What they provide is an environment that lets individual players pursue their own, unique interests to the best of their ability – with the individual innovator being free to succeed or fail on their own. Guaranteed “equality” of outcomes (however that is defined!) is an even bigger unicorn that is impossible to achieve and only guarantees misery and free-riders abound. Not sure if you’re American, but tell me how much good all the economic redistribution over the last 60 years has done to eradicate poverty in the US?
Well, first of all, the Golden Age of Capitalism, when progressive taxation and redistribution were at its highest ended in the 1970s (The marginal income tax for the highest income bracket was around 90% in the 1940s-50s, 70% in the 1970s, and is around 35% today). The effective corporate tax has also been steadily declining since the 1940s. Feel free to fact check.
Meanwhile, inequality really began increasing drastically during The Great Moderation beginning in the late 1970s/early 1980s through the present, as a result of neoliberal policies of deregulation (in many sectors, but particularly in the financial sector), international trade agreements that shifted manufacturing jobs abroad, and worker union suppression that decreased worker bargaining power…
So your question is… Read more »
Swisher – to your first comment, those were the tax rates, but you have to look at actual receipts. Many Economist have done this and found that clearly these high rates were never paid. They found loopholes and the effective tax rates for these high earner were drastically reduced.
I don’t doubt it, but the point remains that redistribution through progressive taxation is lower today than it was in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, while inequality is undoubtedly higher…
This is laughable. I never realized all that was needed to solve a problem was to sign an agreement that aims to eliminate a perceived problem. While they’re at it, they should sign an agreement that aims to eliminate murder, rape, drug use, child abuse, terrorism, drunk driving, littering, theft, assault, etc… Only the so-called “masterminds” who wish to rule over us plebes would announce something as ridiculous as this agreement. What a joke. I can’t wait to see the success that results from this noble agreement.
Let me get this straight.You think their objectives are futile and you can’t wait to see them fail in spite of the fact that they are communicating a desire to do good deeds? Are you from the dark side?
Yes you are correct. They are futile and they will fail. And with all do respect, I don’t care about government officials’ and bureaucrats’ desires to do “good deeds” or their so-called “good intentions”, I’m interested in results not alleged motives or feelings. Their objectives are absurd: there will always be some unemployment, poverty, and hopefully carbon emissions because people are inherently different. Any and every top-down government policy designed to eliminate or reduce unemployment and poverty is a disaster. And I don’t even agree that eliminating carbon emissions is a good thing; I want more carbon emissions as that is indicative of human progress and higher standards of living, particularly in the third world. If you want to reduce… Read more »
I think you’re probably looking at this from a very American perspective.
France has a “top down” political structure, in which the State apparatus (as opposed to the government of the day) is trusted to run vast swathes of the country’s industry and change comes from a parliamentary statute instigating wider societal change, rather than the reverse.
In that system, a government declaration to do something is seen as the natural means by which societal change comes about.
If it was as easy as that why did it take so long to make this declaration?
Probably because government initiatives in democratic societies require public support, and it’s taken time and a lot of work to raise public consciousness around large issues like climate, inequality and poverty. These problems have been consistently exacerbated in wealthy nations since the 1970s, so people are understandably more aware and concerned about them today.
But there are still people like yourself and BGNOLE97 who prefer to naysay good (albeit flawed) initiatives, with comments like “I applaud the initiative but prefer to complain about it because it’s unrealistic,” instead of showing support or suggesting improvements to the initiative. It’s easier to just criticize without making meaningful contributions…
I think the point is that such grand pronouncements, announced with fanfare, shimmering lights, and in recognition of the full-on virtue-signaling that they engender, are, in and of themselves, of no value. I am highly skeptical of their ability to achieve any of the 3 – although I am certain that they will declare that they have . . . . .
Valid point to an extent, but everyone knows politicians make grand pronouncements and don’t keep their promises…
Better to look into the details of the proposal to make valid critiques, rather than dismissing it all as useless. The agreement didn’t come out of thin air. There are actual actionable elements to the proposal. And it’s a public commitment, which means the public can and should pressure the politicians and hold them accountable.
People can choose to complain about the spectacle of it all, or to see it as a step towards goals that most of the population value: stable/healthy environment, poverty reduction, meaningful employment etc.
I actually see potential value in the initiative, despite all its flaws. But I see… Read more »
Signing an agreement is one thing, executing and being successful is another. Appauld the intent, but also realize from history that politicians often state intent without deleivering.