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This investigation is concerned with determining the role played in the development of a body of economic thought by the philosophic, political, and economic forces prevailing in the eighteenth century.

Take a minute. Imagine Wiley Coyote and Road Runner are in a domestic partnership. What would that look like? Close your eyes and Pause for 30 seconds. Don’t you see? Coyote never catches up. They keep running faster and faster. Everything in the house gets swept into the whirlwind they’ve created in their paths - the books, the shelves, the bed, and the desk lamp. Their circling movement creates a vacuum, which ultimately causes the entire structure to implode upon itself. This text is an examination of my work and its relationship to the economic and the domestic. The metaphor of the tragicomic perpetually failing in the spotlight is a dominant motif standing against a backdrop of an overflowing bloat of unidentifiable mass desperately trying to repel gravity. In the first section of this text I offer a brief overview of my two-year trajectory, and an analytical perspective of my culminating thesis exhibition. In the second section, I share with you a trough of incomplete jokes, and standalone punch lines. This Rolodex I keep of “word sketches” catalogues my search for the shape of a laugh.

Le modèle ELIE (pour Equal Labour Income Equalization) est un modèle inédit de redistribution globale des revenus – qui a été proposé par Serge-Christophe Kolm dans Macrojustice (2005). Les enjeux de ce modèle, qui repose notamment sur une réflexion profonde concernant les implications économiques des systèmes de valeurs acceptés dans les sociétés occidentales contemporaines, méritent d’être discutés. Notre thèse est qu’en prenant ses distances avec le paradigme dominant en économie normative, à savoir le welfarisme, Kolm est conduit à modifier la définition de l’économie normative. Pour être plus précis, alors que l’économie normative ne traitait jusque-là que de la question des modalités de la redistribution, laissant celle de la nature de l’assiette de redistribution à la philosophie morale et politique (comme en atteste la controverse « égalité de quoi ? » initiée par Sen), Kolm entend réintroduire cette seconde question dans le champ de l’économie normative. La thèse se compose de trois parties portant sur les implications de ce changement de paradigme et de la redéfinition du champ de l’économie normative. La première partie s’attache aux fondements du modèle ELIE et plus précisément à la justification de la redistribution des revenus et à la détermination de son intensité à travers la question d’un choix social libéral. La deuxième partie aborde les implications théoriques de ce changement de paradigme et traite plus spécifiquement de la relation du modèle avec la théorie mirrleesienne de la fiscalité optimale et avec le welfarisme en général. La troisième partie se tourne vers les conséquences de ce modèle en termes de règles de redistribution. / The ELIE model (for « Equal Labor Income Equalization ») is a new model of global income redistribution – proposed by Serge-Christophe Kolm in Macrojustice (2005). What is at stake in this model, which is based on a Deep Thought concerning economic implications of values systems accepted in contemporary occidental societies, deserves to be discussed. I defend the idea that by distancing himself from the dominant paradigm in normative economics, namely the welfarism, Kolm is led to modify the definition of normative economics. To be more precise, while until then normative economics dealt only with the question of redistribution modality, leaving the question of nature of redistribution to moral and political philosophy (as shown in the « equality of what? » controversy initiated by Sen), Kolm reintroduces this second question in the field of normative economics. The dissertation is composed of three parts relating to implications of this paradigm shift and to Kolm’s redefinition of normative economics field. The first part focuses on fundaments of the ELIE model and, more precisely, on income redistribution justification and on the determination of the intensity of redistribution, through the question of a liberal social choice. The second part is about implications of this paradigm shift and is devoted more specifically to the relation of the ELIE model with the mirrleesian theory of optimal taxation and with welfarism in general. The third part turns toward this model’s consequences in terms of redistribution rules.