Rarely an Act will have been the theater, even before being formalized, of so many theoretical controversies and passionate reactions. Two groups of economists have confronted their point of view in the press, each one putting on the front line the prestige of one of their contributors, a Nobel Prize, Jean Tirole, who supports the government project, and the author of a best-seller, Thomas Piketty, who is hostile to it.
For the first group, employee protections are considered as excessive. They are counterproductive and directly at the origin of unemployment. Modernity is not anymore going along with social progress. For ...