La société du commerce

Synopsis

The French translation of Commercial Society. A Primer on Ethics and Economics, published in 2019 by Rowman & Littlefield. Translated into French by Emmanuel Martin.

The book begins from a simple observation: there is almost nothing you do in a day that does not give you reason to be grateful to millions of people you will never meet. Try making a pizza entirely by yourself, growing the wheat, building the plough and smelting the metal it is made from, and you will give up quickly. Commercial society is the world in which, instead, your work rewards thousands of strangers across the world for the thousands of tasks that end in that pizza.

The volume is an introduction to ethics and economics built around that idea: the key concepts of trade, resources, costs, institutions and value; progress and the production possibility frontier; comparative advantage, the division of labour, supply and demand, price signals and spontaneous order; trust, property, the logic of the commons and environmental tragedies; market power, international trade and protectionism; financial institutions, fiscal and monetary policy, public choice and corruption; and the foundations of personal and business finance.

It is addressed first of all to pupils and students about to enter the world it describes, and to teachers looking for an introductory text in which ethics and economics are treated together.