by Thomas Lepeltier, Le Point, 18 May 2026
The biologist Olivier Hamant, a research director at INRAE, invites us to replace the pursuit of performance with the ‘robustness’ of living things. The opposition is artificial, the article replies, and giving up efficiency would lead to an economy of scarcity.
In brief
- The thesis under discussion: we have supposedly entered a ‘fluctuating’ world, in which optimised systems become fragile; only robustness, inspired by living organisms, would allow us to endure.
- For the author, the idea of a stable past is a myth: human history is made up of famines, epidemics, wars and crises, that is, a continuous succession of imbalances and adaptations.
- The solutions put forward (agroecology, repairability, relocalisation, short supply chains) have their merits in certain contexts, but cannot on their own form the foundation for the development of a society.
The column’s three arguments
Two dimensions, not two camps
A racing car must be robust enough not to break at the first bend, and an off-road vehicle fast enough without consuming too much. Every system balances efficiency, cost, safety and durability.
Progress came from efficiency
Specialisation, the division of labour, agricultural and industrial intensification, global trade: it is these dynamics that generated the surpluses needed to reduce poverty and extend life expectancy.
Innovation protects against shocks
It is by improving techniques that societies have learned to cope with shortages, disease and disasters. Distrusting optimisation and new forms of energy such as fusion would weaken this capacity.
‘One could even say that robustness is not the alternative to performance: it is often its product.’Thomas Lepeltier, Le Point, 18 May 2026
Why this debate interests us
‘Robustness’ has become established in the debate on transitions, from businesses to local authorities. APALA shares Thomas Lepeltier’s analysis: the resilience of societies comes from their capacity to innovate and to produce efficiently, not from giving up on performance. The critique here concerns a public thesis that is very prominent in the media, and which is worth discussing on its merits.
Questions for debate
- Can one be both high-performing and robust, and under what conditions?
- Is our era really more unstable than those before it?
- Agroecology, relocalisation, short supply chains: in which cases are they genuinely more efficient?
To go further on apala.fr
Summary written by Claude (Opus 5.5 model), an artificial intelligence, for APALA, based on the article published in Le Point on 18 May 2026. The views expressed are those of the author. Spotted a mistake? Write to us.
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