George de Menil

George de Menil
At CASE, Centre for Social and Economic Research
Born	(1940-12-04) December 4, 1940 Clairac, Normandy
Occupation	policy advisor, political commentator, economics professor
Years active	1962-present

George de Menil (born December 4, 1940) is a macroeconomics policy advisor, European political commentator, and professor emeritus of economics in France and the United States. He specializes in pension reform^[1] and monetary policy;^[2] and his policy positions reflect a liberal stance on economics, grounded in a mastery of quantitative analysis and a commitment to empirical research.

Early Years

Born in Clairac, Normandy, third of five children and first son of John de Menil and Dominique de Menil, de Menil emigrated with his family at the age of six months by boat from Bilbao to New York and then to Houston, Texas. At the age of 12, he moved to Manhattan with his sister and enrolled at Saint Bernard’s School for boys. He attended school in Exeter, New Hampshire, where he was a member of the chess and Latin clubs.

He received a BA from Harvard University in history in 1962. Shortly thereafter, he was one of the four co-authors of a historical study edited by sociologist Laurence Wiley, Chanzeaux, a village in Anjou. ^[3] The book, which grew out of a period living in the French village of Chanzeaux, looks at economic drivers of the war in the Vendée from 1793 to 1796 (a royalist revolt against the French Revolution.)

From economic history de Menil side-stepped to more quantitative economics by means of a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Robert Solow. de Menil’s PhD thesis focused on how wage rates are determined, and was published by MIT Press as "Bargaining: Monopoly Power vs. Union Power."^[4] It employed an economic model cited by Solow in a later work.^[5] From MIT, de Menil went on to teach economics for four years at Princeton University.

On August 3, 1968, he married Lois de Menil, (born Lois Ames Pattison, 15 May 1938) then a PhD student in History at Harvard, with whom he subsequently had four children.

An s

In 1975, they moved to Paris, and he worked for three years at the Ministry of Economics, under the government of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, culminating in the construction of METRIC, a quarterly model of the French economy, for budget forecasting.^[6]

From the Ministry, he went on to become a teacher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). He remained affiliated with the Ecole des Hautes Etudes for over thirty years. In 1978 George de Menil founded the Center for Quantitative and Comparative EconomicsIt was later renamed DELTA (Département et Laboratoire d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée), and became the launching-board for a PhD program he jointly created in Economic Theory and Policy, for which de Menil supervised a numerous PhD students.

In 1981, he returned to the United States, but remained concerned with the application of American experiences to France. In 1985, de Menil co-founded the review Economic Policy, a collaboration between institutes in London, Munich and Paris, dedicated to providing readable, English-language studies with relevance to current policy debate. During this time, he also served as an editor for Commentaire, a French-language journal comparable in scope to Economic Policy. In later years, he became a regular commentator on the French radio station France Culture, called on to represent an American viewpoint on French economic questions.

Eastern Europe

In 1995, at the invitation of George Soros, he took on a position in Kiev co-directing the Soros International Economic Advisory Group for Ukraine. Three years of policy negotiations under the government of Leonid Kuchma, amounted to an economic reform that was briefly voted in but quickly over-turned. The ensuing book, Economic Reform in Ukraine: The Unfinished Agenda,^[7] jointly edited with Anders Aslund, describes the challenges of enacting economic reform. In 2004, when Kuchma was replaced by Victor Yushchenko, de Menil returned to the subject, jointly publishing the report “The Second Wave of Reforms,” presented to the new administration.

In 1997, he left Kyiv to become economic advisor to the Prime Minister of Romania, Victor Ciorbea, again with the financial involvement of Soros, together with the World Bank and the Swiss Foundation Pro Democratia. In Romania, the focus of his reforms were on turning the pension system from a pay-as-you-go structure to a national system of privately managed pension funds. He was awarded a Legion of Honor by the Romanian government.

Efforts to reform the Ukraine and Romania^[8]– and later the Yugoslav banking system^[9] – fit within a context of de Menil’s high aspirations for an expanding European Union. In 2004 he defended the idea of a European constitution, but called into question enshrining social rights within it, a position he put forth in a book written for a Euro-sceptic French audience "Quelle Constitution pour l’Europe?" ^[10] A commitment to training the next generation of European economists led de Menil to become involved with the Central European University in Budapest, where he serves on the International Council.

He has held visiting professorships at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (2001-2003) and the New York University Stern School of Business (2003-2006). Returning to France, he became in 2007 a founding member of the governing board and board of directors of the Paris School of Economics and later president of the American Foundation for PSE.^[11]

subsequent career

In 2007 he published a book written for a lay audience looking at French social problems from the angle of American experiences: inner-city ghettos, unemployment, immigration, educational failings. The book, Common Sense: Pour débloquer la société française,^[12] makes an unpopular case (in France) in favor of affirmative action, lowering the minimum wage (known in French as the SMIC), and charging sliding-scale fees for university education.^[13] On the basis of this book, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences at the Institut de France awarded him in 2007 a prize for an outstanding publication in the social sciences.^[14]

In January 2015, de Menil was awarded a prize from France’s Société d’Economie Politique for an article in the journal Commentaire querying the role of economists in causing the 2008 global economic crisis and urging greater prudence and humility across the social sciences.^[15] In April 2015, he was appointed one of ten external members to the division of Political Economy, Statistics and Finance of the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.^[16] In 2008, he contributed to a report published by that academy on the topic of teaching methods for economics ^[17]

References

External links

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