Science & Tech Quote by Laurent Fabius

Globalization, in Fabius's telling, isn't an abstract force; it's a lever pressed down by sheer headcount. By framing China and India as "demographic weight", he turns billions of people into an economic variable that Western workers can feel in their paychecks. It's a politician's choice of metaphor: not "competition" or "trade", but pressure - impersonal, mechanical, relentless. The effect is to make wage stagnation legible as something happening to "us", not something done by domestic elites or policy decisions.

The sentence also does careful blame management. China and India "have accomplished massive technological advances", a nod that preempts accusations of condescension while still treating their rise as a threat vector. Then comes the clincher: information technology and cheaper transport. In other words, the old buffers - geography, shipping costs, slow coordination - are gone. Labor markets are no longer local; they're networked. That shift recasts the social contract in Europe (and especially in France, where Fabius built a career inside the left's uneasy marriage of welfare state ideals and market reality) as newly vulnerable.

The subtext is political triage. If wages are being squeezed by global scale and frictionless logistics, then domestic remedies like stronger unions or higher minimums can be painted as insufficient, even naive. It's an argument for adaptation: industrial policy, skills, maybe protection at the margins. It also offers a socially acceptable antagonist: distant demographic giants, rather than nearer culprits like corporate pricing power, tax strategy, or deregulation.