George de Menil

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 and monetary policy; 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, Professor de Menil emigrated with his family at the age of six months by boat from Bilbao to New York and then on 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.
At Harvard University, he trained as a historian, graduating in 1962. Shortly thereafter, he and others co-authored a historical study edited by sociologist Laurence Wiley, Chanzeaux, a village in Anjou. 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 Professor 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. Professor 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." It employed an economic model cited by Solow in a later work . From MIT, Professor de Menil went on to teach economics for four years at Princeton University.
On August 3, 1968, George de Menil married Lois Pattison de Menil, then a PhD student in History at Harvard, with whom he subsequently had four children.
An American economist in Paris
In 1975, George de Menil moved to Paris as the first step in a series of actions aimed at bringing American economic methods to France. For three years, he worked for 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, used for budget forecasting.
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), France’s leading center for research and training in the social sciences. He would remain affiliated with the Ecole des Hautes Etudes for over thirty years. With the aim of transforming the French study of economics, then largely theory-driven, in 1978 George de Menil founded the Center for Quantitative and Comparative Economics, later rebranded as DELTA (Département et Laboratoire d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée). DELTA became the launching-board for a PhD program he jointly created in Economic Theory and Policy, for which Professor de Menil supervised a numerous PhD students.
In 1981, George de Menil returned to the United States, but he remained concerned with the application of American experiences onto the landscape of France. In 1985, Professor 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 a well-informed American viewpoint on French economic questions.
The Eastern European Years
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 and quickly over-turned. The ensuing book, Economic Reform in Ukraine: The Unfinished Agenda, jointly edited with Anders Aslund, vividly describes the challenges of enacting economic reform. In 2004, when Kuchma was replaced by Victor Yushchenko, he returned to the subject, jointly publishing the report “The Second Wave of Reforms,” presented to the new administration.
George de Menil seized on a second opportunity for Eastern European reform in Romania. 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. In recognition of his service, he was awarded a Legion of Honor by the Romanian government.
Efforts to reform the Ukraine and Romania - and later the Yugoslav banking system - fit within a context of Professor de Menil’s high aspirations for an expanding European Union. Avidly pro-Europe, 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?" A commitment to training the next generation of European economists led Professor de Menil to become involved with the Central European University in Budapest, where he serves on the International Council.
His expertise in European economic policy earned Professor de Menil 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 his attentions to France, Professor de Menil became in 2007 a founding member of the governing board and board of directors of the Paris School of Economics.
The same year as the launch of PSE saw Professor de Menil publish a book written for a lay-audience looking at French social problems from the angle of American experiences with the same: inner-city ghettos, unemployment, immigration, educational failings. The book, Common Sense: Pour débloquer la société française, 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. His message earned him recognition by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences at the Institut de France, who awarded him in 2007 a prize for an outstanding publication in the social sciences.
In January 2015, George 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.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu