2023-08-20 18:40:59
Daniel Cohen, during a symposium at the Ministry of Finance, in Paris, January 23, 2015. CHARLES PLATIAU / AFP
The economist specializing in sovereign debt, professor at the École Normale Supérieure and adviser to the Lazard bank, died at the age of 70.
He will have been one of the most outstanding economists of his generation. Aged 70, Daniel Cohen died on Sunday August 20 in Paris, according to his publisher Albin Michel, confirming information from the newspaper The world. A specialist in sovereign debt, he was a professor at the École Normale Supérieure and at the Paris School of Economics, an institution he had chaired since 2021.
A prolific career as an economist
Former student of the rue d’Ulm, Daniel Cohen became known for his work Wealth of the world, poverty of nations, published in 1997. In it, he describes the rise of inequalities, exacerbated by what he calls “theselective pairings“. Subsequently, throughout the 2000s, he became interested in the changes in post-industrial society, whether in the field of work (our modern times, 2000) or international exchanges (Globalization and its enemies, 2004).
His next works – Three lessons on post-industrial society (2006) et The Prosperity of Vice, A (worried) introduction to economics (2009) – are similar to historical frescoes describing the transformation of capitalism, from its birth to the present day. In his latest published essay, Homo Economicus (2012), he offered a reflection on the Easterlin paradox, according to which the pursuit of gross domestic product per capita does not necessarily translate into an increase in the level of individual happiness.
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Sovereign debt specialist
In parallel with his university work, Daniel Cohen was an advisor at the Lazard bank. In this capacity, he helped several statesmen (Greek Prime Minister Geórgios Papandreou, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa…) to renegotiate their countries’ debt. His expertise also led him to participate, in partnership with the World Bank, in the “Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative(HIPC initiative).
Daniel Cohen has also made a name for himself in the media industry, becoming a columnist at The Obs and columnist at Mondea daily of which he was, until his death, a member of the supervisory board.
A committed economist, he made several forays into the political world, joining Martine Aubry’s campaign team for the 2012 presidential election in July 2011, then supporting, during the 2017 presidential election, the socialist candidate Benoît Hamon.
«A great French economist has left us. Daniel Cohen combined rigor and a sense of pedagogy, two qualities that do not always go together, and which made his public interventions valuable.“, greeted the Minister Delegate for Industry Roland Lescure on Twitter.
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