Paul Jean Maurice Jorion

Born on July 22d 1946 at Ixelles (Brussels), of Belgian nationality

Paul Jorion is, since March 1, 2016, Associate Professor of the Faculties of the Catholic University of Lille. He is President of pribor, an artificial intelligence start-up developing SAM (Self-Aware Machine). He is also a columnist for the literary magazine Quinzaines.

Paul Jorion was once a member of the High Committee for the Future of the Belgian Financial Sector and of the Reflection Group on the Positive Economy led by Jacques Attali. He was the first holder of the “Stewardship of Finance” special chair at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2012/15).

Jorion graduated in sociology and social anthropology (PhD in Social Sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles): he was the student in Paris of Claude Lévi-Strauss (Collège de France) and the mathematician Georges-Théodule Guilbaud (École Pratique des Hautes Études) and in Cambridge of Meyer Fortes and Sir Edmund Leach, both students of Bronislaw Malinowski, the founding father of British social anthropology. He also trained as a psychoanalyst with the Jesuit psychoanalyst and philosopher Philippe Julien.

Jorion taught social anthropology at the universities of Brussels (1977/79), Cambridge (1979/84) where he wrote his doctoral dissertation about his fieldwork as a sea fisherman, at the University of California at Irvine where he was Regents Lecturer (1997), also at the Université Catholique de Lille (2019-current). At Paris VIII University (1985/86) he taught psychoanalysis. He solved during his time in Cambridge, in collaboration with Sir Edmund Leach and two mathematicians (Elaine Lally and Gisèle De Meur), two enigmas in kinship algebra: the cases of the Pende of Kasai (DRC) and of the Australian Murngin. He was a member of the Human Complex Systems research unit at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) from 2004 to 2009.

Jorion was also a United Nations (FAO) officer involved in development projects in Africa (1984/87). He was a researcher and developer (Academic Fellow) in Artificial Intelligence as a member of the British Telecom Connex project (1987/90), during which he developed the ANELLA piece of software (Associative Network with Emergent Logical and Learning Abilities) whose original feature resided in a memory model acted by an emotional dynamics operating on a universe of lexicon words, having adopted an approach inspired by his psychoanalytical training.

Jorion worked (1998/2007) as a pricing specialist, at Freud Lemos and at American Management Systems in London, and in California at top lenders IndyMac, Wells Fargo (San Francisco headquarters), Westlake Financial, finally as a risk manager at Countrywide where he forecast the brewing subprime crisis as far back as 2005. He had previously traded futures in a French bank (1990/91). He has published a book in English on the impact of the Enron bankruptcy on the stock markets: Investing in a Post-Enron World (McGraw-Hill 2003). He played a pioneering role in the development of high frequency trading (at the Bank of the European Union in Paris, then at Frontier & Cos with Ed Bosarge in Houston, Texas), as well as the development of the e-MITS software, a fully automated home loan allocation system for IndyMac in Pasadena (1998/2002).

Books

• • • • • Les pêcheurs de Houat: anthropologie économique, Collection Savoir, Hermann, Paris, 1983
        • La transmission des savoirs (with Geneviève Delbos), Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, 1984, ISBN 2-7351-0113-4
        • Principes des systèmes intelligents, Dunod, Paris, 1997, ISBN 2-225-81938-6 (original ed. Masson, 1990).
        • Investing in a Post-Enron World, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2003, ISBN 0-07-140938-6.
        • Vers la crise du capitalisme américain?, La Découverte, Paris, 2007, ISBN 978-2-7071-5092-9; reprint: Éditions du Croquant, Broissieux, 2009, ISBN 978-2-914968-62-1 (English title: Are we Heading for a Crisis of American Capitalism?)
        • L’implosion. La finance contre l’économie: ce qu’annonce et révèle la crise des subprimes, Fayard, Paris, 2008, ISBN 978-2-213-63741-9 (English title: The Implosion. Finance against the Economy: what the Subprime Crisis Foretells and Reveals)
        • La crise. Des subprimes au séisme financier planétaire, Fayard, Paris, 2008, ISBN 978-2-213-63860-7 (English title: The Crisis. From Subprimes to Planetary Seism)
        • L’argent, mode d’emploi, Fayard, Paris, 2009, ISBN 978-2-213-64404-2 (English title: Money, A Handbook)
        • Comment la vérité et la réalité furent inventées, Gallimard, Paris 2009, ISBN 978-2-07-012600-2 (English title: How Truth and Reality Were Invented)
        • Le prix, Éditions du Croquant, Broissieux, 2010, ISBN 978-2-914968-78-2 (English title: Price)
        • Le capitalisme à l’agonie, Fayard, Paris, 2011, ISBN 978-2-213-65488-1 (English title: The Promised Death of Capitalism).
        • La guerre civile numérique, Textuel, Paris, 2011, ISBN 978-2-84597-420-3.
        • Misère de la pensée économique, Paris, Fayard, 360 p., 2012 ISBN 978-2-213-66631-0
        • La survie de l’espèce (avec Grégory Maklès), Paris, Futuropolis, 2012 ISBN 978-2754807258
          • Deutsch: Das Überleben der Spezies. Eine kritische, aber nicht ganz hoffnungslose Betrachtung des Kapitalismus (Egmont Graphic Novel, Köln, 2014)
        • Comprendre les temps qui sont les nôtres, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2014 ISBN 978-2738130891
        • Penser l’économie autrement (with Bruno Colmant), Paris, Fayard, 2014 ISBN 2213682267
        • Penser tout haut l’économie avec Keynes, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2015 ISBN 2738133088
        • Le dernier qui s’en va éteint la lumière, Paris, Fayard, 2016 ISBN 9782213699035
          • Deutsch: Der Letzte macht das Licht aus. Ein Essay über die Auslöschung der menschlichen Spezies (Zweitausendeins, Leipzig, 2018)
        • Se débarrasser du capitalisme est une question de survie, Paris, Fayard, 2017 ISBN 9782213706429
        • À quoi bon penser à l’heure du grand collapse ?, Paris, Fayard, collection « Documents », 2017 ISBN 2213705518
          • Deutsch: Nur Mut! Kritisches Denken im Angesicht der Katastrophe (Zweitausendeins, Leipzig, 2019)
        • Vers un nouveau monde, Waterloo, Renaissance du livre, 2017 ISBN 2507055251
        • Défense et illustration du genre humain, Paris, Fayard, collection « Documents », 2018 ISBN 978-2-213-70189-9
          • Deutsch: Im Zweifel für die Menschheit. Verteidigung einer Spezies am Abgrund (Zweitausendeins, Leipzig, 2019) ISBN 978-3-96318-039-
        • Comment sauver le genre humain, (with Vincent Burnand-Galpin), Paris, Fayard, 2020 ISBN 978-2213716848
        • (Editor): Humanism and its Discontents. The Rise of Transhumanism and Posthumanism, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022 (ISBN 978-3-030-67003-0).
        • L’avènement de la singularité. L’humain ébranlé par l’intelligence artificielle, Paris, Textuel, Collection « Petite Encyclopédie Critique », 2024 (ISBN 978-2-38629-000-8).