Paul Jorion is a Columnist in the economy section of the French daily Le Monde, also for BFM Radio. He is a Doctor in the Social Sciences from the Free University Brussels and holds MAs in sociology and social anthropology. He’s lectured at the universities of Brussels, Cambridge (Department of Social Anthropology), Paris VIII (Department of Psychoanalysis) and at the University of California at Irvine (Regents’ Lectureship). He was one time a United Nations Officer (FAO), working on development projects in Africa.

Paul Jorion is a one-man band of the Cognitive Sciences, a well–respected expert in Artificial Intelligence and an expert on the current crisis in finance and in the economy. Heir of (among others) Luc de Heusch, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sir Edmund Leach, Jacques Lacan and Georges-Théodule Guilbaud, his training in social anthropology has led him on various field trips, be it on the Island of Houat in Brittany or in West Africa. He is the author of several books, among which Les pêcheurs de Houat (Hermann: 1983), La transmission des savoirs (with Geneviève Delbos, Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme: 1984) and Principes des systèmes intelligents (Paris: Masson, 1990), as well as of many papers, published in particular in L'Homme. He’s also an Associate of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) and one of the editors of Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory.

In 1993, being invited by the head of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, Maurice Aymard, he founded a think-tank named Théorie et Clinique des Pathologies de la Pensée, which would become STP : Sujet, Théorie et Praxis.

From 1998 to 2007 Paul Jorion was working in the American finance world as a pricing specialist. Prior to this he was at one time a trader on the futures markets in a French investment bank. He wrote a book on the consequences for the stock market of the bankruptcy of Enron: Investing in a Post-Enron World (McGraw-Hill: 2003) as well as four books relative to the current crisis : La crise du capitalisme américain (La Découverte 2007; Le Croquant 2009), L'implosion (Fayard 2008), La crise (Fayard 2008) and L'argent mode d'emploi (Fayard 2009). He has also published an anthropology of knowledge book entiled: Comment la vérité et la réalité furent inventées (Bibliothèque des sciences humaines, Gallimard 2009). 

On September 4th, 2007, in an op-ed for the French daily Le Monde, he proposes that, as is the case for the political sphere, the economy is given a proper constitution (L’économie a besoin d’une authentique constitution).


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