Académie de Paris

In a context of rising impact investment, development financialization, and the apparent moralization of global capitalism, this study examines the doctrinal, political, and performative scope of Pope Francis's economy. Rooted in the Church's social doctrine and amplified by Laudato Si' and Fratelli Tutti, it offers not a rival to capitalism, but an ethical compass centered on human dignity, gratuity, care for the vulnerable, and ecological conversion. It calls for radical discernment on the anthropological and spiritual foundations of economic choices. The analysis highlights tensions with current impact finance: short timeframes, obsession with measurability, instrumentalization of religious language, funding conditionality, and solvency-based selection of beneficiaries. Cases from blended finance, ESG, carbon markets, and investment forums show how capital absorbs ethical narratives without abandoning extractive logic.

Toxoplasmosis is a cosmopolitan protozoal disease caused by Toxoplasmagondii. Several studies have shown that at one instant approximately 1% of cats shed T.gondii oocysts in their faeces. In humans, the infection by this parasite is most often asymptomatic except for immunocompromised persons and seronegative pregnant women that were infected during the pregnancy. These women transmit the parasite to their foetuses who develop an infection with a variable gravity. In this context, there are two questions: what is the risk for a seronegative pregnant woman living with a cat and what attitude should she take toward this cat? Several preventive measures should be implemented to reduce the risk of T.gondii transmission from cats to pregnant women.

Sociotechnical systems, where technological and human elements interact in a goal-oriented manner, provide important functional support to our societies. Here, we draw attention to the underappreciated concept of timeliness—i.e., system elements being available at the right place at the right time—that has been ubiquitously and integrally adopted as a quality standard in the modus operandi of sociotechnical systems. We point out that a variety of incentives, often reinforced by competitive pressures, prompt system operators to myopically optimize for efficiencies, running the risk of inadvertently taking timeliness to the limit of its operational performance, correspondingly making the system critically fragile to perturbations by pushing the entire system toward the proverbial “edge of a cliff.” Invoking a stylized model for operational delays, we identify the limiting operational performance of timeliness, as a true critical point, where the smallest of perturbations can lead to a systemic collapse. Specifically for firm-to-firm production networks, we suggest that the proximity to critical fragility is an important ingredient for understanding the fundamental “excess volatility puzzle” in economics. Further, in generality for optimizing sociotechnical systems, we propose that critical fragility is a crucial aspect in managing the trade-off between efficiency and robustness.

Au sein de ce chapitre, nous allons nous attacher à un objet d’étude proposé par le programme de 2015 pour la classe de 4e, à savoir « la fiction pour interroger le réel1 ». Notre questionnement repose principalement sur la lecture de textes du xixe siècle. Les corpus prescrits sont « des œuvres et des textes narratifs relevant de l’esthétique ré