A highly topical work on the choices, made by Europe’s leaders from the 1980s to today, to sacrifice jobs in their countries—and the devastating consequences of their choices.

For the last 40 years, political leaders have been hammering home a single main objective: to reach full employment. Yet through a meticulous, well-documented investigation rich in testimonies from former ministers and IMF employees, presidential advisors, bankers, economists, lawyers, sociologists, and philosophers, Benoît Collombat and Damien Cuvillier shows that this has simply not been the case. Collombat, a journalist, has investigated what brought about the dramatic change: how and why politicians "handed over the keys" of the world to leaders in economy and finance.