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AbstractThe last four decades have been characterized by growing concerns on two key matters: the "environmental question," arising out of the manifest and accelerating injury to the planet caused by human activity, and the "social question," concerning the growth of social polarization and the surge in inequality. This paper addresses the possible ecological impact of social polarization by employing an analytical framework where social classes are differentiated not only by their means but also by their tastes and preferences. We see that the ecological impact of social polarization (or, equivalently, of the decline of the middle class) remains unclear even when, as here, the middle class exhibits more proecological tastes than the other classes, so that we might have imagined that its decline would inevitably impair the planet. We then establish the exact critical threshold for the proportion of the middle class above which their accessing the upper class would harm the planet and discuss its sensitivity to key parameters such as, for instance, the level of inequality. Finally, we tackle the topic of public action to limit the risk that social polarization should lead to greater ecological injury.

AbstractEurope is oscillating between increased integration and permanent risk of dissolution. In this framework, one often debates the role of bilateral relations, with the following question: does bilateralism foster or delay overall co‐operation? We address this question in an experimental framework where we study the behaviour of agents who are confronted with a multiplicity of prisoners' dilemma games, either in a bilateral or a multilateral way. We surprisingly observe that the co‐operation between all is significantly higher when interactions are bilateral and that the difference between these two institutional contexts is growing in time in favour of bilateralism.