Daniel Cohen, a professor and Lazard adviser who led the Paris School of Economics, died Sunday, AFP reported. He was 70.
(Bloomberg) — Daniel Cohen, a professor and Lazard adviser who led the Paris School of Economics, died Sunday, AFP reported. He was 70.
Tributes poured in, including from Allianz SE chief economic adviser Mohamed El-Erian and French President Emmanuel Macron. “We lost a great intellectual,” Macron said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire called Cohen a towering economist and praised his advice to the government during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said his views will be missed in the public debate.
AFP, which cited Cohen’s publisher Albin Michel, said the economist had been seriously ill. No cause of death was reported. The publisher couldn’t be reached for comment outside regular business hours on Sunday.
Cohen was a senior adviser on Lazard’s sovereign advisory team. He also was chairman of the Finance for Development Lab, a Paris-based think tank supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
A prolific author, he wrote award-winning books including Homo Economicus: The (Lost) Prophet of Modern Times, which argued that the modern world has defined happiness mostly in terms of material achievement.
Former French President Francois Hollande, a Socialist whom Cohen endorsed in 2012, cited Cohen’s warnings on the risks of big tech and said his death was “a huge loss” for economic research.
(Updates with Hollande comments in last paragraph. An earlier version corrected Cohen’s status with Lazard.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.