They thrive on manure of painful mutations

Economists have in common with the novelists: they are better in the crisis. They thrive on manure of painful mutations. It is this complexity that they derive their best material. They seized the disorder and combine it in carrier account of meaning. If they have the chance and there are enough subjective attention, their fiction - for some - their theoretical models - the other - will give the reader or listener the feeling of better understanding the world.

It is no doubt the success of the books of Daniel Cohen, richness of the world, poverty of nations (1997), his book the most famous in which he explains the inequalities by the evolution of production techniques and not globalization. Globalization and its enemies (2004) trying to a distinction between real and virtual globalization or, more recently, the prosperity of the best (2009)-100,000 defect in the meter-, test of comprehensive history on the anglo-saxon model which brilliantly tells the human saga by economics, from the Neolithic to the 20th century, and Chinese emperors to the Spanish empire.

It is also what strikes home when it is found: more than his intelligence or his alertness, it is the verbal imagination with which he draws from his erudition and what make a compelling story. But the teaching is something other than a good way to tell "It is when I came to teach economics at the Ecole normale that I started to take seriously my role as teacher, says Daniel Cohen." Previously, I did had taught that briefly, after the AGG and only maths. But there, in normal and with the economy, it has become very complicated, because I had before me torn students between several disciplines. Some were reluctant even between economics and philosophy, what. So I had to make great efforts to make me understand, it took me find stories to tell. This is what made me want to write books. The first was really the stories I kidding in the introduction to each course. Then, I have taken taste to write independently. "

At the bar of the Lutetia, Daniel Cohen intensely listens to the questions that were asked and then, whether it is the crisis of the 1930s (history, he said, "a worn capitalist hit by a new species of capitalism and the new paradigm that is born in the 20th century this shock with the regulatory State, first in the United States, with the New Deal of Roosevelt, then"), postwar, Europe, with the generalization of social protection, what ");" whether it is of the current financial turmoil ("there, I hope it is safe but I think it is the first of a series of crises that will hit the capitalism of the 21st century, which is characterized by its dematerialisation and its relocation, i.e. by its great capacity of the old barriers of developed in place in the 20th century - such as the regulation precisely"); that it is, again, predictions for the coming decades ("today, the casualization of the world is the result of a new relationship between the heart of these networks and affiliates where everything is outsourced.") In view of this, even if the authorities will draw lessons from what happened in 2007, this type of capitalism will continue, we are beginning a new era "), Daniel Cohen replied almost immediately each time, is, is more lively in the flow that hunting little by little the commas and one well say that he believes in speaking or that he thinks because he speaks." He improvises on the canvas of his great erudition. The mystery is that there is still always understandable for the neophyte.

Born in 1953 in Tunis to a doctor father and a mother pharmacist, not intended to become a brilliant Economist, Vice-President of the Board of Directors of the school of economy of Paris, consultant to the United Nations, the World Bank, the Bank of France with the Bolivian Government, the Union European on the Russia, winner in economic Science Association, 1987Winner 2000 price Léon Faucher of the Academy of moral and political sciences Advisor Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Matthieu Pigasse - among many other titles...

Already, he recounted how, in 1973, while he incorporated the Ecole normale supérieure to study mathematics, these are seizures in the world who have pushed him to the economy. In the Middle East, especially the Yom Kippur war and the oil shock that follows. "We saw with the naked eye it came into crisis, reflects." I was very unhappy with the idea to stop the maths but the climate was such that I wanted to understand what was going on around me. "In 1977, he became chargé de mission to the Ministry of finance, then discovered in the United States the liveliness of the intellectual debate between monetarists and Keynesians, follows the course of Paul Krugman, 2008 economics Nobel Prize at Harvard."

A reflection, perhaps this particular timing that makes it so sensitive at the time current and if relevant in its analysis. Contemporary of the very beginning of the crisis, Cohen has not seen switch from middle-class world of the post-war period "It is passed, if you want, capitalism of the 20th century obeying a structuralist paradigm to capitalism in the 21st which paradigm is network." In the 20th century, it criticized the alienation, the standardization of industrial work, but this work nevertheless provided some form of social cohesion. It is the great paradox that it was not at the time and which feeds a kind of nostalgia for, roughly, the capitalism of the 1950s - the factories Renault, Fordism and Taylorism - because all the floors of the society were nested organically. Workers, engineers, patterns were in the same boat, it sank all flowed, and wage were homogeneous: once and for all, it was understood that the boss earned twenty times more than its employees if although if he wanted if increase everyone followed. It was the parties. The other reason for this nostalgia is the autonomy of the innovation. A new aristocracy formed in Silicon Valley, that of whether producers, it is in the intangible economy and all the rest. It is a class by itself. Thus, innovation is more integrated in the production process. The intelligence autonomisée. "

This evolution weighs not heavily, in particular, on the political left that claims Daniel Cohen - and the contradictions it such that they appeared in the heyday of the consumer society of the 1970s deceased "Yes." At the time, the left has changed its cursor. She thought that she could no longer defend workers but employees, because labour tended to substitute for the working class as figure collective which left was the incarnation. Today, because of the disintegration of this labour, the left struggling to understand who she is. What is a social class today What do people understand still only through social membership Moreover, the social democratic left is thought as the intermediary between capital and labour. Or capital, is dématérialisant, not play anymore. Finally, the aspirations are contradictory between a huge mass of people facing the question of the purpose of months and an elite of the modern left wondered about the purpose of the growth. It's very complicated. "

In contradiction, is it not one between develop these analyses or maintain a long friendship with the American economist Jeffrey Sachs - the designer of the neoliberal shock imposed on the former Communist countries - therapy and membership left that Daniel Cohen claimed, at the now chair the Scientific Council of the Foundation Jean-Jaurès, the circle of reflection of the PS-where he is however not inserted

"Finally, he typically says, it's very complicated when stated like that but once you look at in detail, eh..." It is still manageable level of complexity. It is true that he must think twice. "