Georges Menahem

Georges Menahem is a French sociologist and economist whose work employs methods drawn from economics, sociology and statistics. He is a Research Director in the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Previously, he had been a senior research fellow in the Institute for Research and Information in Health Economics (IRDES), a French research institute specializing in health economics and health statistics.

Scientific biography

Georges Menahem began his university training at Grenoble University (France) where he graduated in mathematics and physics. After having performed his first experiments in the field of astrophysics (in Jodrell Bank Observatory and Nançay Decimetric Radio Telescope) and solid-state physics (in Grenoble University), his observations in social sciences led him to write his first book (1976) on the relationships between science and the military.[1] In a subsequent shift in intellectual pursuits toward the social sciences, his research focused on the sociology of the labour knowledge and of the division of labour,[2] on the sociology of the family, with the creation of a new typology of family organisation[3] and an analysis of The Economic Rationales Within the Family, a topic which became the title of his PhD in Economics.[4]

In the 1990s, as a sociologist searching for root causes of family behaviours, he discovered significant correlation between risky behaviours, vulnerability to illness and grave childhood traumatic events, findings that he explored in greater depth, first with data from INSEE,[5] then with IRDES data.[6] As an economist, he tried also to explain these findings with concepts from health economics and risk economics.[7] Since 2003 he has focused on measuring social well-being by building economic security indices.[8][9]

Activities

Since 1999 Menahem has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of ATTAC.[10] Recently he published an analysis of the European process of militarization through its relationships with European foreign policy.[11] In August 2008 and in August 2011, Menahem directed workshops on the European militarization: first, in the Attac European Summer University of Saarbrücken.[12] and second in the Attac European Network Academy in Fribourg.[13]

Since 2008, Menahem has also participated in the “Forum for Alternative Indicators of Riches” (FAIR more known according its French acronym[14]) which was founded in order to monitor the activities of the “Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” chaired by Joseph Stiglitz. Following this path, he has contributed to elaborate the critical analysis of the final report of this commission.[15] In 2011, he published on the web-site of the UNCSD "Rio + 20 Conférence" a paper[16] arguing to enlarge well-being indicators that the United Nations general secretary will have to implement after the Rio+20 Conference. In June 2012, he participated in the Rio+20 Summit, holding a side-event and two self-organized activities in the World People Summit with two other members of FAIR, the Belgium professor Isabelle Cassiers and the French-Indian accountant Muttiah Yogananthan. Their critics were mainly devoted to criticize on environmental grounds the monetization of the sustainability approach by the World Bank and the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep). According Georges Menahem, “the Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI), a measure introduced by the UNEP and the UN University, would make the world's environmental situation worse: if it is adopted and widely used, it could be very dangerous. It underestimates the depletion of natural resources and overestimates the monetized outcome of GDP, such as GDP and human capital".[17]

Works

Recent works

Other works

References

  1. ↑ La science et le militaire, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1976
  2. ↑ Les savoirs ouvriers, With Yves Lescot et Patrick Pharo, Éditions ACT, 1980, Paris
  3. ↑ "Les mutations de la famille et les modes de reproduction de la force de travail", L'homme et la société, 1979, n° 51, Paris
  4. ↑ Paris X University, 1982
  5. ↑ "Incidents de paiement et trajectoires personnelles des débiteurs", Revue d'économie financière, n° 4, 1990, Paris and "Troubles de santé à l'âge adulte et difficultés familiales durant l'enfance", Population, 4, 1992, INED, Paris
  6. ↑ Problèmes de l'enfance, statut social et santé des adultes, IRDES, 1994, Paris
  7. ↑ "Recours aux soins des adultes et mode de gestion du risque", Économie et Prévision, N°129-130 (3-4), 1997, Paris
  8. ↑ « The decommodified security ratio: A tool for assessing European social protection systems »
  9. ↑ International Social Security Review, Volume 60, Issue 4, page 69-103, Genève, October–December 2007
  10. ↑ "ATTAC Scientific Advisory Board" (in French). Retrieved 2012-05-21.
  11. ↑ cf. “A militarized European Union” in Europe in the world, book edited by Trevor Evans
  12. ↑ See European Summer University ”The workshop proposes some materials in order to analyse the present European defence policy. The analysis of the implications of the Treaty of Lisbon for the militarization of the European Union is done with reference to the story of Europe's militarization and to an analysis of the European Union’s aim: to play a larger role on the international stage”.
  13. ↑ Voir « Europe Militarization ».
  14. ↑ See some French and English papers of this NGO on its web-site.
  15. ↑ Cf. See the French and English summary of this report on the FAIR web-site.
  16. ↑ See INDICATORS FOR A MORE SUSTAINABLE AND INCLUSIVE WORLD, text signed by two French and Italian associations, FAIR and Sbilanciamoci!.
  17. ↑ The Guardian, in its article of the 21 June 2012
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