Paul Jorion

Belgian anthropologist and sociologist

Paul Jorion (born 22 July 1946 in Brussels) is by training an anthropologist, sociologist with a special interest in the cognitive sciences. He has also written seven books on capitalist economics. Paul was born and raised in Belgium, and has been a professor at the universities of Brussels, Cambridge, Paris VIII and University of California at Irvine. He was a visiting scholar of the "Human Complex Systems" Program at UCLA from 2005 to 2009. He currently lives in France, where he runs a popular blog on financial and economic matters. In 2012, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel made him holder of the newly created "Stewardship of Finance" chair.

A student of Claude Lévi Strauss and of French mathematician Georges Théodule Guilbaud in modeling kinship systems with algebraic models, Jorion has made several contributions to the field, solving in particular the marriage pattern of the Pende of the Congo (in collaboration with Gisèle de Meur and Trudeke Vuyk), reconciling also conflicting interpretations of the kinship system of the Australian Murngin (from research done jointly with Edmund Leach, his teacher at Cambridge University). Collaborating with Douglas R. White he has published several papers in the formalization of kinship algebra.

In an article published in 1999, Jorion offered a new theory of consciousness which goes beyond the Freudian notion that some of our decisions have unconscious motives by suggesting that in fact all our decision making has unconscious roots, revealing freewill to be an illusion. Consciousness is shown to be a consequence of a mechanism allowing us to perceive as simultaneous the sensations produced separately by our five senses, a necessary preliminary to creating memory traces, that is, also, the prerequisite to any learning process. Drawing the consequences of an observation made by Benjamin Libet, that intention is an artifact as it springs to consciousness half a second later than the action it is supposed to have generated, Jorion further suggested that consciousness errs when it assumes to be the cause of human actions while it is nothing more than an ancillary consequence of the registration process that allows memory to accrue. In 1981, while lecturing at Cambridge University, he devised the P Graph (a variety of a dual of a graph) which found its use in the analysis of networks, of genealogies in particular.

In 1989, Jorion participated in the work of the artificial intelligence unit of British Telecom. There he developed "ANELLA" (Associative Network with Emerging Logical and Learning Abilities) whose "intelligence" is guided by a dynamics of affect – acting at the same time as a dynamics of relevance. In his book entitled "Principes des systèmes intelligents" published the next year, he made a wager that psychoanalysis will turn out to offer Artificial Intelligence its genuine theoretical framework.

His interest in behavioral theory has led Jorion to work on stock market behavior as a pricing specialist and, for a period, as a trader on the futures markets in a French investment bank. Despite, or because of, his work Jorion has become a critic of the structure of financial capitalism. He has deplored in particular the shift in accounting standards from a definition of price based on "fundamentals," i. e. "value," to "just value" equating with the speculative price (Financial Accounting Standards Board 157). He has been instrumental at reviving Aristotle's theory of price, based on the power balance between buyer and seller, and has applied it to understand our current financial systems (Le prix). On 4 September 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). In an interview in L’Humanité published January 2008, Jorion contends that contrary to the title of his 2007 book Is American Capitalism Heading to Crisis? (Vers la crise du capitalisme américain? ), the distinctive form of Capitalism in the United States has already fallen into crisis. "We are experiencing the consequences of the planned disappearance of welfare by deregulation. By strengthening the law of the strongest, the United States is heading toward a disaster never seen before, which I can only compare to the one of 1929". In his 2008 book The Implosion. Finance vs. the Economy: what the subprime crisis reveals and foretells (L'implosion. La finance contre l'économie: ce qu'annonce et révèle la crise des subprimes) he emphasizes that the economy unlike the political system with democracy has not been raised to the status of a proper human institution and requires a similar self domestication. Jorion has also published in the Revue de Mauss, a French anti utilitarian journal.