Today, the “wretched of the earth” are no longer those oppressed by colonization, but rather the unemployed and the working poor, migrants and refugees, landless peasants depending on public or familial assistance to survive—in a word, the economically useless.
Uselessness is the most pernicious form of inequality, because it drives these men and women into traps of poverty from which escape is all but impossible.
Drawing on economic theory, political philosophy, and demographic and scientific projections on human population and natural resources throughout the twenty-first century, renowned economist and author Pierre-Noël Giraud exposes the alarming ways that the rise of uselessness defined as such—not only lack of value in a labor market, but also the inability to independently improve one’s own standing—fuels the global resurgence of populism, engendering social and political risks from demagoguery and intolerance to mass migrations and civil war.
Like environmental change, economic uselessness is a reality from which nations and societies can no longer hide—and it is this urgency that may show us the way forward. The Useless Man concludes with a series of carefully reasoned recommendations concerning nature and climate, globalization, and finance, all evaluating potential public policies by how effectively they stand to stem the growth of uselessness.
A lucid assessment of our current geopolitical situation and a stirring forecast of what will happen if we fail to act quickly and collaboratively on a global scale, The Useless Man is an essential, compassionate addition to the debate around economic inequality and its political consequences.

Pierre-Noël Giraud is professor of economics at Mines ParisTech, Paris Dauphine University, and the EMINES School of Industrial Management in Morocco, as well as a member of the National Academy of Technologies of France. He is the author of a number of landmark books on economics, of which The Useless Man is the first published in English. 

1. Cover Page
2. Title Page
3. Copyright Page
4. Dedication Page
5. Introduction
6. Chapter 1 - The Useless Man
   1. “Uselessness”
   2. Useless men today
   3. Why inequality matters
   4. The “just” society according to Rawls and Sen
   5. Recent consensus goals
   6. Uselessness and politics
   7. Justification of the choice of criterion
7. Chapter 2 - Farewell to Malthus
   1. “Our mother, the Earth”
   2. Malthus's model
   3. Malthus's theory and conjectures
   4. What Malthus did not foresee
   5. Is Malthus's model obsolete?
   6. Our demographic and technological future
   7. The foreseeable consumption of natural capital
   8. So where are the limits?
   9. Conjectures in times of scientific uncertainty
   10. Conclusions
8. Chapter 3 - Globalizations and Inequality
   1. Globalizations in history
   2. Globalizations with differentiated effects
   3. A new “nomadic/sedentary” model
   4. Nomadic jobs, modern gold
   5. Statistical data
   6. Spatial inequalities and the narrow door of emergence
   7. Urbanization and global cities
   8. What are the consequences?
   9. The thickening fog around economic conflicts
   10. Looking ahead
   11. Conclusion
9. Chapter 4 - The Instability of Finance
   1. What some economists knew, with all due respect to the Queen…
   2. Establishment of and changes in the price of a financial security
   3. The mistigri
   4. What we learned from the 2008 crisis and what the Queen knew quite well…
   5. Let's reform!
   6. Still more fog around economic conflict
   7. The outlook
10. Chapter 5 - Recommendations
    1. Intermediate goals and levels of action
    2. With which indicators?
    3. Recommendations: nature
    4. Recommendations: globalization
    5. Uselessness and migrations
    6. Immigration policy
    7. Recommendations: finance
    8. General conclusion: the incompatibility triangle of useless men
11. Chapter 6 - A Political Economy of Populism
12. Acknowledgments
13. Notes
14. Contents