2023-10-02 04:19:08
The amphitheater of the Paris School of Economics (PSE) was packed this Friday, September 29. Thirty-two generations of students, friends, brothers and relatives came together to pay tribute to the memory of their teacher, friend, inspiration, Daniel Cohen, who died on August 20 at the age of 70 years.
Nearly fifty of them testified, little by little drawing the portrait of the man who accompanied them, and the mark that the French economist best known to the general public and most respected by his peers will leave in history.
Moreover, it was not so much the content of his thought that was in question but rather his method. Philippe Aghion, professor at the Collège de France, saluting the humanist and the teacher, questioned his choice to abandon academic research, where he nevertheless excelled, to devote himself to his books and his students.
” To find one’s way “
His student Esther Duflo, Nobel Prize winner in economics in 2019 and professor at the Collège de France and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), wanted to defend this singular choice. Writing successful books while maintaining a dialogue with research is, in his eyes, as legitimate as writing in scholarly journals. For the sociologist Pierre Rosanvallon, his academic knowledge allowed him to “put the work of researchers in a general perspective”revealing everyone to themselves.
He practiced the same with his students: “He did not seek to form people in his image by imposing his ideas and his methodagrees Esther Duflo, but to push everyone to find their way. » This is why his students are found everywhere, in finance, in social, development, macroeconomics, and have given him as much as he has given them whatever their opinions.
Like the dismayed economist Philippe Askenazy, one of his first students, who greatly influenced his teacher through his work on the evolution of work. He continued the dialogue with him, as with Olivier Blanchard, the former economist of the International Monetary Fund, professor at the very liberal MIT, or Thomas Piketty, with whom he created the Paris School of Economics.
Twenty years of efforts to bring together the major Parisian economic research institutions, that of the Ecole Normale, the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and the Sorbonne. His activism, his pragmatism and his talent for persuasion, particularly with politicians, came to fruition in 2006. “He took economics out of the paradigm of a science in the clouds and brought it closer to the social sciences”adds Thomas Piketty.
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