Beyond Market Euphoria: Innovation, Social Progress, and the Search for Shared Development

Abstract

Market euphoria is usually interpreted as a speculative phenomenon: a bet on the potential of securities, on the strategies of economic elites, and on expectations of return. This reading, however, does not exhaust the meaning of stock-market movements, especially when they are observed over the medium and long term. Prices can in fact act as anticipatory sensors of the underlying economy, registering technological, productive, and social transformations before they become fully visible in the real economy. After the financial crisis of 2008–2010, the persistent growth of stock indices, not always justified by the immediate data of the real economy, may be interpreted as the reflection of deeper transformations. On the one hand, it accompanies the productive rebalancing brought about by industrial relocation toward Asia; on the other, it anticipates the new phase of investment and expectations linked to artificial intelligence. In this transition, finance, industrial reorganization, and technological innovation appear as distinct yet interconnected moments of the same historical transformation. The article therefore proposes moving beyond the immediate opposition between speculation and economic rationality. Financial euphoria should neither be celebrated nor taken as certain proof of the future but rather examined for its possible informational value: it may signal, imperfectly and at times confusingly, the collective perception of an ongoing change. From this perspective, artificial intelligence does not represent merely a new investment sector, but a possible lever of social transformation. If guided by cooperative and public objectives, it could reduce the costs of access not only to knowledge and services, but also to the material conditions that make a dignified life possible. The most concrete test of this possibility lies in the sphere of the production and distribution of goods necessary for life. In particular, increasing agricultural productivity, if accompanied by a more rational use of water, energy, and natural resources, may show whether technological innovation is capable of moving beyond the sole logic of profit and contributing to food security, the protection of ecosystems, and the survival of living beings. This gives rise to the concluding issue of the reflection: innovation, and artificial intelligence in particular, cannot be entrusted solely to competition among large corporations, states, and markets; rather, it must be oriented toward more cooperative management, capable of transforming technological progress into social progress and opening the way to genuinely shared development.