Juillet 2014
mardi 15 juillet 2014
mercredi 25 juin 2014
Pesticides : l'étude qui révèle leur impact sur les animaux | France info
Pesticides : l'étude qui révèle leur impact sur les animaux
par Anne-Laure Barral mardi 24 juin 2014
Ségolène Royal, ministre de l'Ecologie, s'est rendue dans une école où l'on abandonne les pesticides © maxppp C’est une étude qui ne va pas plaire aux agriculteurs français qui manifestent aujourd’hui contre la réglementation sur les pesticides. Un groupe international d’une cinquantaine de scientifiques indépendants s’est penché pendant 5 ans sur les effets des phytosanitaires sur la faune. Escargots, grenouilles, puces d’eau, papillons, serpents, fourmis, poissons, oiseaux...Tous sont exposés à ces substances appelées néonicotinoïdes que ce soit par le sol ou par l’eau. Leurs effets mortels sur les abeilles domestiques ont été plusieurs fois analysés à la demande des apiculteurs mais les scientifiques indépendants comme Noa Simon-Delso vétérinaire à l’université de Louvain en Belgique voulaient montrer que toute une biodiversité en est également victime. Utilisation préventive des pesticides Pour Jean-Marc Bonmatin, du CNRS et membre du groupe, l’usage systémique de ces produits et leur mauvaise évaluation depuis 20 ans entraine déclin brutal de ces espèces: "On n'est pas opposé à l'utilisation de ces pesticides mais le fait de les utiliser de manière préventive nous semble exagérée"Certains produits, ont été encadrés voir interdit comme le fipronil depuis l’an dernier dans l’Union Européenne mais pour les scientifiques, ce n’est pas encore suffisant. Ils devraient reprendre leur recherche pour un prochain rapport cette fois sur les effets de ces substances chez l’homme. Pesticides : l'étude qui révèle leur impact sur les animaux | France info |
dimanche 11 mai 2014
2014- May - [Robert and William Nordhaus] Brothers Battle Climate Change on Two Fronts - NYTimes.com
Brothers Battle Climate Change on Two Fronts
Photo
William Nordhaus an economist at Yale, came up with the idea of a carbon tax and developed a model for determining the price tag of climate change. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — In the New Mexico of the 1950s, the two brothers grew up steeped in the beauty of the landscape, the economics of energy and the power of science. They skied, fly-fished, explored on the family’s 50,000-acre sheep ranch, watched oil towns go boom and bust, and talked of the nuclear weapons up the road at Los Alamos.
Today the work of Robert and William Nordhaus is profoundly shaping how the United States and other nations take on global warming.
Bill Nordhaus, 72, a Yale economist who is seen as a leading contender for a Nobel Prize, came up with the idea of a carbon tax and effectively invented the economics of climate change. Bob, 77, a prominent Washington energy lawyer, wrote an obscure provision in the Clean Air Act of 1970 that is now the legal basis for a landmark climate change regulation, to be unveiled by the White House next month, that could close hundreds of coal-fired power plants and define President Obama’s environmental legacy.
Called the Manning brothers of climate change, the mild-mannered, dry-witted Nordhauses are scions of a New Mexico family long rooted in the land, which powerfully shaped who the brothers became. But for the Nordhaus brothers, protecting the earth depends far more on dispassionate thinking and intellectual rigor than on showy protests outside the White House.
Photo
Robert Nordhaus wrote a provision of the Clean Air Act that is now the legal basis for a landmark climate change regulation. Credit Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
They have neatly divided their world — Bill is the academic theorist, Bob the legal mind and political pragmatist — but their work is intertwined.
“I tend to have lots of crazy ideas, and I run them by Bob first,” Bill said by phone from the Acela train between Boston and New Haven, Conn. He described himself as “an academic economist” who has stayed out of policy debates, although his ideas have not.
Bob agreed. “Bill’s work is about what needs to be done and how soon, using the tools of economic analysis,” he said over a recent lunch in Washington. “My work is: How do you convert that into a legal and regulatory policy?”
The two have a friendly rivalry, but both believe that cutting carbon pollution is crucial to protecting the environment and the economy from the risks posed by climate change. They also agree on the best way to do it: A Bill-style carbon tax, they say, would be far more effective and efficient than a Bob-style regulation.
Their story starts in Albuquerque, where their father, the grandson of a wealthy Santa Fe merchant, started the ski resort at the top of Albuquerque’s Sandia Peak and with a partner built the city’s iconic tram up the granite cliffs to get there. A specialist in energy and Native American law, Robert Nordhaus Sr. won a Supreme Court case giving Apache tribes the authority to levy fees on the oil companies that drilled on their native land.
Like him, both brothers went east to Yale, where in 1963 Bob graduated from the law school and Bill from Yale College. From there Bob headed to Washington for a job as a staff lawyer in the House legislative counsel’s office.
He was still there in 1970, working on the bill that would become the Clean Air Act, when his bosses came to him with an unusual assignment: The legislation already included language to regulate known pollutants, such as mercury and smog, but could he write a provision giving the federal government the authority to regulate as-yet-unknown pollutants of the future?
Bob wrote the provision — it became Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act — at a time when carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, was not considered harmful. It was not until 2009 that the Environmental Protection Agency defined carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant because of its contribution to global warming. Thus it falls into the category of an unknown “pollutant of the future.” Section 111(d), after languishing in obscurity for decades, is now the legal rationale for the Obama administration’s plan to regulate carbon emissions without a law passed by Congress.
While Bob began his career in Washington, Bill received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began teaching at Yale. By the late 1970s, when an increasing number of scientists were raising the threat of global warming, Bill wrote a paper proposing a tax on industries and businesses based on the amount of carbon they emitted into the air. The idea was revolutionary at the time, but economists, scientists and many world leaders now say it will have a powerful market effect and is the best way to stave off the catastrophic impacts of a warming world. Already, more than 30 countries have passed carbon-pricing laws.
In the ensuing decades at Yale, Bill developed an economic model that put a price tag on the effects of climate change, like more droughts, flooding and crop failures and stronger hurricanes. He called it the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, or DICE.
“The name was both descriptive (representing a dynamic integrated model of climate and the economy) but also consciously aimed to suggest that we are gambling with the future of our planet,” Bill wrote in an email.
DICE profoundly changed climate policy. Although the chief political argument against curbing carbon emissions from cars and coal plants has long been that doing so would harm the economy, the DICE models show that, depending on various scenarios, one ton of carbon pollution can inflict $20 to $30 in economic damage — a major cost, given that the global economy emits about 36 billion tons of carbon a year.
Bill’s work “was seminal,” said Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.
But it is, for the time being, politically untenable in the United States. The conservative Heritage Foundation has called the DICE model “flawed beyond use for policy making” and warned that it should not be used to justify “trillions of dollars of government policies and burdensome regulations.”
Here the work of Bob comes in: Mr. Obama tried but failed to push a carbon-pricing bill through Congress in his first term, which is why he has turned to Bob’s section of the Clean Air Act as the legal underpinning for the regulation due out in June.
Bob, who was an energy adviser to President Jimmy Carter and general counsel at the Department of Energy under President Bill Clinton, now says that because he was not writing the provision with climate change in mind, the new regulation is an imperfect and perhaps legally vulnerable solution to regulating carbon pollution. Environmental lawyers note that it has almost never been used.
“I call it the 40-year-old virgin,” said David Doniger, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.
But one way the E.P.A. will justify the new regulation is with an analysis showing that the economic benefits of the climate change rule would outweigh the costs.
A core component of that analysis? The DICE model.
Back in New Mexico, Bob recalled, he and Bill — the oldest and youngest brothers among four siblings — could not help noticing the changing world of energy around them. In the 1950s, he said, as the Los Alamos weapons program expanded, the state changed “from a pastoral economy, split between ranching, irrigated farming and extractive industries, to defense-related work, which was a whole different world.”
They also paid close attention to the climate changes, and periodic droughts, that affected the family ski business and their lives outdoors.
“Growing up in New Mexico,” he said, “you’re aware of the very fragile ecosystem.”
Brothers Battle Climate Change on Two Fronts - NYTimes.com
dimanche 2 mars 2014
How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia | Science | The Guardian
How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia
Like all the best hoaxes, there was a serious point to be made. Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees.
It took only a handful of days. The students wrote a simple computer program that churned out gobbledegook and presented it as an academic paper. They put their names on one of the papers, sent it to a conference, and promptly had it accepted. The sting, in 2005, revealed a farce that lay at the heart of science.
But this is the hoax that keeps on giving. The creators of the automatic nonsense generator, Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, have made the SCIgen program free to download. And scientists have been using it in their droves. This week, Nature reported, French researcher Cyril Labbé revealed that 16 gobbledegook papers created by SCIgen had been used by German academic publisher Springer. More than 100 more fake SCIgen papers were published by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Both organisations have now taken steps to remove the papers.
Hoaxes in academia are nothing new. In 1996, mathematician Alan Sokal riled postmodernists by publishing a nonsense paper in the leading US journal, Social Text. It was laden with meaningless phrases but, as Sokal said, it sounded good to them. Other fields have not been immune. In 1964, critics of modern art were wowed by the work of Pierre Brassau, who turned out to be a four-year-old chimpanzee. In a more convoluted case, Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France's best-known philosophers, was left to ponder his own expertise after quoting the lectures of Jean-Baptiste Botul as evidence that Kant was a fake, only to find out that Botul was the fake, an invention of a French reporter.
Just as the students wrote a quick and dirty program to churn out nonsense papers, so Labbé has written one to spot the papers. He has made it freely available, so publishers and conference organisers have no excuse for accepting nonsense work in future.
Krohn, who has now founded a startup called Keybase.io in New York that provides encryption to programmers, said Labbé's detective work revealed how deep the problem ran. Academics are under intense pressure to publish, conferences and journals want to turn their papers into profits, and universities want them published. "This ought to be a shock to people," Krohn said. "There's this whole academic underground where everyone seems to benefit, but they are wasting time and money and adding nothing to science. The institutions are being ripped off, because they pay publishers huge subscriptions for this stuff."
Krohn sees an arms race brewing, in which computers churn out ever more convincing papers, while other programs are designed to sniff them out. Does he regret the beast he helped unleash, or is he proud that it is still exposing weaknesses in the world of science? "I'm psyched, it's so great. These papers are so funny, you read them and can't help but laugh. They are total bullshit. And I don't see this going away."
• This article was amended on 27 February 2014, to cite Nature as the source of the story
How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia | Science | The Guardian
samedi 1 février 2014
We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer - NYTimes.com
We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer
Ben Jones
DESPITE great strides in prevention and treatment, cancer rates remain stubbornly high and may soon surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. Increasingly, we and many other experts believe that an important culprit may be our own medical practices: We are silently irradiating ourselves to death.
The use of medical imaging with high-dose radiation — CT scans in particular — has soared in the last 20 years. Our resulting exposure to medical radiation has increased more than sixfold between the 1980s and 2006, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements. The radiation doses of CT scans (a series of X-ray images from multiple angles) are 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional X-rays.
Of course, early diagnosis thanks to medical imaging can be lifesaving. But there is distressingly little evidence of better health outcomes associated with the current high rate of scans. There is, however, evidence of its harms.
The relationship between radiation and the development of cancer is well understood: A single CT scan exposes a patient to the amount of radiation that epidemiologic evidence shows can be cancer-causing. The risks have been demonstrated directly in two large clinical studies in Britain and Australia. In the British study, children exposed to multiple CT scans were found to be three times more likely to develop leukemia and brain cancer. In a 2011 report sponsored by Susan G. Komen, the Institute of Medicine concluded that radiation from medical imaging, and hormone therapy, the use of which has substantially declined in the last decade, were the leading environmental causes of breast cancer, and advised that women reduce their exposure to unnecessary CT scans.
CTs, once rare, are now routine. One in 10 Americans undergo a CT scan every year, and many of them get more than one. This growth is a result of multiple factors, including a desire for early diagnoses, higher quality imaging technology, direct-to-consumer advertising and the financial interests of doctors and imaging centers. CT scanners cost millions of dollars; having made that investment, purchasers are strongly incentivized to use them.
While it is difficult to know how many cancers will result from medical imaging, a 2009 study from the National Cancer Institute estimates that CT scans conducted in 2007 will cause a projected 29,000 excess cancer cases and 14,500 excess deaths over the lifetime of those exposed. Given the many scans performed over the last several years, a reasonable estimate of excess lifetime cancers would be in the hundreds of thousands. According to our calculations, unless we change our current practices, 3 percent to 5 percent of all future cancers may result from exposure to medical imaging.
We know that these tests are overused. But even when they are appropriately used, they are not always done in the safest ways possible. The rule is that doses for medical imaging should be as low as reasonably achievable. But there are no specific guidelines for what these doses are, and thus there is considerable variation within and between institutions. The dose at one hospital can be as much as 50 times stronger than at another.
A recent study at one New York hospital found that nearly a third of its patients undergoing multiple cardiac imaging tests were getting a cumulative effective dose of more than 100 millisieverts of radiation — equivalent to 5,000 chest X-rays. And last year, a survey of nuclear cardiologists found that only 7 percent of stress tests were done using a “stress first” protocol (examining an image of the heart after exercise before deciding whether it was necessary to take one of it at rest), which can decrease radiation exposure by up to 75 percent.
In recent years, the medical profession has made some progress on these issues. The American College of Radiology and the American College of Cardiology have issued “appropriateness criteria” to help doctors consider the risks and benefits before ordering a test. And the insurance industry has started using radiology benefit managers, who investigate whether an imaging test is necessary before authorizing payment for it. Some studies have shown that the use of medical imaging has begun to slow.
But we still have a long way to go. Fortunately, we can reduce the rate of medical imaging by simply avoiding unnecessary scans and minimizing the radiation from appropriate ones. For example, emergency room physicians routinely order multiple CT scans even before meeting a patient. Such practices, for which there is little or no evidence of benefit, should be eliminated.
Better monitoring and guidelines would also help. The Food and Drug Administration oversees the approval of scanners, but does not have regulatory oversight for how they are used. We need clear standards, published by professional radiology societies or organizations like the Joint Commission or the F.D.A. In order to be accredited for CT scans, hospitals and imaging clinics should be required to track the doses they use and ensure that they are truly as low as possible by comparing them to published guidelines.
Patients have a part to play as well. Consumers can go to the Choosing Wisely website to learn about the most commonly overused tests. Before agreeing to a CT scan, they should ask: Will it lead to a better treatment and outcome? Would they get that therapy without the test? Are there alternatives that don’t involve radiation, like ultrasound or M.R.I.? When a CT scan is necessary, how can radiation exposure be minimized?
Neither doctors nor patients want to return to the days before CT scans. But we need to find ways to use them without killing people in the process.
We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/opinion/we-are-giving-ourselves-cancer.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140131&_r=0
Ben Jones
DESPITE great strides in prevention and treatment, cancer rates remain stubbornly high and may soon surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. Increasingly, we and many other experts believe that an important culprit may be our own medical practices: We are silently irradiating ourselves to death.
The use of medical imaging with high-dose radiation — CT scans in particular — has soared in the last 20 years. Our resulting exposure to medical radiation has increased more than sixfold between the 1980s and 2006, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements. The radiation doses of CT scans (a series of X-ray images from multiple angles) are 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional X-rays.
Of course, early diagnosis thanks to medical imaging can be lifesaving. But there is distressingly little evidence of better health outcomes associated with the current high rate of scans. There is, however, evidence of its harms.
The relationship between radiation and the development of cancer is well understood: A single CT scan exposes a patient to the amount of radiation that epidemiologic evidence shows can be cancer-causing. The risks have been demonstrated directly in two large clinical studies in Britain and Australia. In the British study, children exposed to multiple CT scans were found to be three times more likely to develop leukemia and brain cancer. In a 2011 report sponsored by Susan G. Komen, the Institute of Medicine concluded that radiation from medical imaging, and hormone therapy, the use of which has substantially declined in the last decade, were the leading environmental causes of breast cancer, and advised that women reduce their exposure to unnecessary CT scans.
CTs, once rare, are now routine. One in 10 Americans undergo a CT scan every year, and many of them get more than one. This growth is a result of multiple factors, including a desire for early diagnoses, higher quality imaging technology, direct-to-consumer advertising and the financial interests of doctors and imaging centers. CT scanners cost millions of dollars; having made that investment, purchasers are strongly incentivized to use them.
While it is difficult to know how many cancers will result from medical imaging, a 2009 study from the National Cancer Institute estimates that CT scans conducted in 2007 will cause a projected 29,000 excess cancer cases and 14,500 excess deaths over the lifetime of those exposed. Given the many scans performed over the last several years, a reasonable estimate of excess lifetime cancers would be in the hundreds of thousands. According to our calculations, unless we change our current practices, 3 percent to 5 percent of all future cancers may result from exposure to medical imaging.
We know that these tests are overused. But even when they are appropriately used, they are not always done in the safest ways possible. The rule is that doses for medical imaging should be as low as reasonably achievable. But there are no specific guidelines for what these doses are, and thus there is considerable variation within and between institutions. The dose at one hospital can be as much as 50 times stronger than at another.
A recent study at one New York hospital found that nearly a third of its patients undergoing multiple cardiac imaging tests were getting a cumulative effective dose of more than 100 millisieverts of radiation — equivalent to 5,000 chest X-rays. And last year, a survey of nuclear cardiologists found that only 7 percent of stress tests were done using a “stress first” protocol (examining an image of the heart after exercise before deciding whether it was necessary to take one of it at rest), which can decrease radiation exposure by up to 75 percent.
In recent years, the medical profession has made some progress on these issues. The American College of Radiology and the American College of Cardiology have issued “appropriateness criteria” to help doctors consider the risks and benefits before ordering a test. And the insurance industry has started using radiology benefit managers, who investigate whether an imaging test is necessary before authorizing payment for it. Some studies have shown that the use of medical imaging has begun to slow.
But we still have a long way to go. Fortunately, we can reduce the rate of medical imaging by simply avoiding unnecessary scans and minimizing the radiation from appropriate ones. For example, emergency room physicians routinely order multiple CT scans even before meeting a patient. Such practices, for which there is little or no evidence of benefit, should be eliminated.
Better monitoring and guidelines would also help. The Food and Drug Administration oversees the approval of scanners, but does not have regulatory oversight for how they are used. We need clear standards, published by professional radiology societies or organizations like the Joint Commission or the F.D.A. In order to be accredited for CT scans, hospitals and imaging clinics should be required to track the doses they use and ensure that they are truly as low as possible by comparing them to published guidelines.
Patients have a part to play as well. Consumers can go to the Choosing Wisely website to learn about the most commonly overused tests. Before agreeing to a CT scan, they should ask: Will it lead to a better treatment and outcome? Would they get that therapy without the test? Are there alternatives that don’t involve radiation, like ultrasound or M.R.I.? When a CT scan is necessary, how can radiation exposure be minimized?
Neither doctors nor patients want to return to the days before CT scans. But we need to find ways to use them without killing people in the process.
We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/opinion/we-are-giving-ourselves-cancer.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140131&_r=0
jeudi 28 novembre 2013
Where Is the Love?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/opinion/kristof-where-is-the-love.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
John Rawls, the brilliant 20th-century philosopher, argued for a society that seems fair if we consider it from behind a “veil of ignorance” — meaning we don’t know whether we’ll be born to an investment banker or a teenage mom, in a leafy suburb or a gang-ridden inner city, healthy or disabled, smart or struggling, privileged or disadvantaged. That’s a shrewd analytical tool — and who among us would argue for food stamp cuts if we thought we might be among the hungry children?
As we celebrate Thanksgiving, let’s remember that the difference between being surrounded by a loving family or being homeless on the street is determined not just by our own level of virtue or self-discipline, but also by an inextricable mix of luck, biography, brain chemistry and genetics.
For those who are well-off, it may be easier to castigate the irresponsibility of the poor than to recognize that success in life is a reflection not only of enterprise and willpower, but also of random chance and early upbringing.
Low-income Americans, who actually encounter the needy in daily life, understand this complexity and respond with empathy. Researchers say that’s why the poorest 20 percent of Americans donate more to charity, as a fraction of their incomes, than the richest 20 percent. Meet those who need help, especially children, and you become less judgmental and more compassionate.
And compassion isn’t a sign of weakness, but a mark of civilization.
samedi 9 novembre 2013
Under Strain, France Examine.textClipping
Under Strain, France Examines Its Safety Net
ST.-ÉTIENNE, France — Patrick Jouve, the owner of a game store on the Rue Louis Braille here, assails the government regulations that limit the size of the bright chess set and bouncing balls he has painted on his storefront. If the painting covers more than 36 feet, it constitutes advertising and he has to pay a fee of $1,350.
At 57, Mr. Jouve, is, however, looking forward to the generous government pension that will help pay for his planned retirement in the countryside at 62.
Down the street, Virginie Chargros, a baker’s wife, depends on the $404 monthly “family subsidy” she gets from the government to help raise the couple’s three children. She and her husband work six days a week and bring in about $2,200 a month, but without the subsidy, they would have trouble providing the family with “small pleasures,” she said.
The pervasive presence of government in French life, from workplace rules to health and education benefits, is now the subject of a great debate as the nation grapples with whether it can sustain the post-World War II model of social democracy.
The spiraling costs of cradle-to-grave social welfare programs have all but exhausted the French government’s ability to raise the taxes necessary to pay for it all, creating growing political problems for President François Hollande, a Socialist. The nation’s capability to innovate and compete globally is being called into question, and investors are shying away from the layers of government regulation and high taxes.
But on the streets of this midsize city 325 miles southeast of Paris, the discussion is not abstract or even overtly political. Conversations here bring to life how many people, almost unconsciously, tailor their education, work habits and aspirations to benefits they see as intrinsic elements of their lives.
“You cannot take away guns from Americans, and in the same way you cannot take away social benefits from French people,” said Louis Paris, the 25-year-old son of a couple who live on the Rue Louis Braille, a typical neighborhood in St.-Étienne, which has deep working-class roots and historically has leaned Socialist.
“They won’t stand for it,” said Mr. Paris, who is unemployed and has been searching since leaving college for a full-time job that offers benefits.
This reality on the Rue Louis Braille, named for the Frenchman who invented the system of raised lettering for the blind, helps explain why successive French leaders have made only modest changes in social benefits.
One of the largest buildings on the relatively prosperous-looking first block of the street is the local office for state-financed health benefits. The second block has eight empty storefronts, testimony to the last four years of economic downturn.
The median household income in the city is $25,000, about half the national figure for the United States and slightly lower than the average for France. But that figure does not capture how many things the government pays for here.
In France, most child care and higher education are paid for by the government, and are universally available, as is health care, three of the most costly elements in the budgets of most American families.
The cost of health care in France is embedded in the taxes imposed on workers and employers; workers make mandatory contributions worth about 10 percent of their paycheck to cover health insurance and a total of about 22 percent to pay for all their benefits.
The payroll tax for employers can amount to as much as 48 percent, meaning that for an employee paid $1,000 a month, the cost to the employer would be $1,480, according to French government figures.
For that, the employee gets up to two years of government-paid unemployment insurance. Parents get a monthly payment for each child after the first, starting at $176 for their second child, and most salaried workers are required to take five weeks of vacation, although professionals and those who own businesses, as do many on the Rue Louis Braille, take far less.
The political opposition to even modest cuts in social programs has been intense. Mr. Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative, reduced some social security payments, narrowed the criteria for obtaining unemployment and minimum income benefits and made other proposals he was unable to implement in the face of protests that sometimes drew hundreds of thousands of people into the streets.
Mr. Hollande is facing stiff opposition for a proposal that would require people to work 18 months longer before qualifying for retirement benefits.
The tension between the pressure for budget cuts and the deeply embedded nature of government programs is playing out in individual lives.
Sarah Revet, 31, who lives on Rue Louis Braille, was able to go back to work in a local government office after having children because of a public program that allowed her get a degree that she could use to work in local government. She also had government-subsidized preschool for her 3-year-old and received the government’s family payments, which helped her to afford a babysitter for her 1-year-old.
But when she was laid off because of budget cuts, she did not qualify for unemployment benefits because her job had been part time and temporary.
Yet, she still believes in a government system that ensures that the poor, especially, have an ample safety net.
“I would absolutely make the choice to continue this,” Ms. Revet said.
Just down the street, Mr. Jouve, the owner of the game store Tapis Vert, or Green Carpet, believes that the reason the government is in such dire straits is that there are too many civil servants. Government spending accounts for about 56 percent of France’s gross domestic product, in contrast to 44 percent in Germany and 40 percent in the United States, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics arm.
“There are too many government functionaries,” Mr. Jouve said as he demonstrated magic tricks to a customer. Referring to the city officials who come to measure the dimensions of his storefront painting, he said, “They make up jobs for themselves.”
The mayor, Maurice Vincent, said that there were only 3,500 city employees, but acknowledged that the number did not include the police, the hospital staff, the university’s professors and staff members, and the civil servants who work for the greater metropolitan area. Add those, and the government-paid workers top 25,000.
Mr. Vincent’s office also has several thousand workers on “temporary” contracts of less than three years; the positions were created when unemployment in St.-Étienne reached 17 percent, he said.
Yet small business owners here, along with many employers large and small across the country, say they cannot afford to hire more workers because of the mandatory 48 percent in payroll taxes on top of wages.
Mireille Rogers, who lives on the Rue Louis Braille, runs the Babet Center, a nonprofit social service organization supported by the government that serves one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Since most of the center’s clients live in an area where at least one in four young people are jobless, they see government aid as a necessity.
“I would be glad to pay more in payroll taxes so that there would be more for others,” Ms. Rogers said.
Some people at the center receive an income supplement from the government to ensure that they have a minimum amount to live on. In September, that was $1,664 for a single person and about $3,100 for a family of four with children over the age of 3. Some people also qualify for a housing subsidy and other benefits.
“The state has put in place a system,” said Salvatore Garaffa-Botta, a butcher and the deputy secretary of the largest union in St.-Étienne, the C.G.T. “But we are also slaves to this system.”
<img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>
Maïa de la Baume contributed reporting.
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