EDITORIAL

he state of health of France isnot at its best. Its strongpoints – such as the diversityof its territory or its numerouslocal initiatives – are oftenbadly known or badly recog-

nized, or even judged in a nega-tive way. Its handicaps, however, are

well known, from functional illiteracy and un-employment to indebtedness and lack of in-termediate enterprises. In such a context,what kind of ideas can best help us under-stand the present and build the future?Would a humanistic approach inspired by Al-fred Sauvy’s work be helpful?

A method towards…Alfred Sauvy was born in 1898 in the French Western Pyre-nees. In 1922, after graduating from the famous Ecole Poly-technique, he was appointed as a deputy statistician in theFrench Statistics Department (Statistique générale de laFrance) where he was first given the boring but essentialtask of collecting data. He belonged to a generation of en-gineers/economists marked by their youthful memories ofthe impoverished France of the post-WW1 period and itsMalthusian and deflationist reflexes. He progressivelyjoined networks interested in issues of expertise, economicdata and statistics. In his view, knowledge must be basedon the observation of facts and their analysis. Hence, he dis-sociated himself from the traditional political economicthought, writing for instance that “too many economistsbuild models which would be perfect if man did not exist”.

Without abandoning economics, but inspired by the impor-tance he attributed to human action in favour of the commongood, Alfred Sauvy started to delve more deeply into demo-graphic issues; yet at the time, in 1946, population studieswere still “a primitive science, without scholars or masters,nurtured only by amateurs – in the best sense of the word –or touched upon on occasion by economists, statisticians,ethnographers”1. Thus, he became the “Master of Demogra-phy”, a status recognised by the Collège de France when, in1959, this prestigious institution created for him a Chair of So-cial Demography, its first use of this denomination.

A witness of the achievements of modern medicine, AlfredSauvy, realising how an objective scientific approach allows

one to understand reality and make enlightened decisions,dedicated himself to the mission of sharing knowledge, ashe rejected the numerous political decisions based on anignorance both “well sustained” and “pushed further thanthat of Molière’s doctors”2.

He favoured a four-step method. The first step is data col-lection, followed by diagnosis, to identify issues. Duringthe third phase, prognoses or conditional prospects are es-tablished in order to aid reflection.

… enlightened actionFinally, the fourth and last step aims at enlightening ac-tions. Our expert-man of action was anything but a techno-crat. On the one hand, he considered that his mission wasto inform politicians of all descriptions, with analysesbased on a precise apprehension of the facts. On the otherhand, Alfred Sauvy launched a vast work of vulgarisationas he felt it just as important to offer useful insights to allcitizens. With this objective, he wrote numerous books andpublished regular articles in the most diverse periodicals,of the national, regional and specialist press.

Alfred Sauvy relied on his method and on a multi-disciplinary ap-proach (economics, demography, sociology, history) of manwithin society to fend off Malthusianism in all its forms. Hedemonstrated the inanity of simplistic arguments concerning thesupposed relationships between technical progress and unem-ployment, the problems of retirement, the issues raised by im-migration etc. His General Theory of Population is punctuatedwith comments on the obvious errors of judgment he discernedin the behaviour of individuals, social groups and political per-sons. With regard to old age pensions, he often deplored, espe-cially in the 70s, the lack of a demographic culture among hiscontemporaries who, taking no account of the implications of acareful scrutiny of age pyramids, proposed naïve projects: “Youcannot win an economic war by concentrating on easing the cir-cumstances of all citizens and ensuring their peaceful retirement,at as early an age as possible.” Placing the consideration of em-ployment above all others, his work La Machine et le Chômage(Machines and Unemployment) published in 1980 gave him theopportunity to describe the complex relationships between tech-nical progress and employment: unemployment mainly origi-nates in the ignorance of needs yet to be satisfied, in economicMalthusianism, in the insufficient elasticity of supply, threatenedby rigidities, whether already existing or created by nefariousdogmatic measures, overlooking the facts.

The interest of Alfred Sauvy’s method is to help us reflecton current issues and the way to resolve them. Solutionscannot be found without the observation and measurementof economic, demographic and social phenomena over along period, as well as their comparison and the bringingtogether of different disciplinary approaches3 .

(Translation: Sylvie Vanston)

by Gérard-François DUMONT

EDITORIAL

TMeeting the Challenges of the 21st Century :the Thought of Alfred Sauvy

P o p u l a t i o n & A v e n i r • n ° 7 0 8 • M a i - j u i n 2 0 1 2

1. Population, volume 1, n°1,Jan-March 1946. Though unsi-gned, this text was obviouslywritten by Alfred Sauvy, whocreated this journal.

2. Alfred Sauvy, La vie en plus,Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1981

3. An Association bearing thename of Alfred Sauvy has justbeen created, aiming at thestudy, dissemination and conti-nuation of his work. It can becontacted by mail, care of Po-pulation & Avenir, 35 AvenueMacMahon, F-75017 Paris, orby e-mail to:jean-pierre.baux@wanadoo.fr.

(Extract from Population et Avenir, n°708, May-June 2012, p.3)

Sauvy (Alfred)DemographyMethodologyPopulation studiesEconomicsSociology

KEY WORDS