Georges Menahem

Georges Menahem is a French sociologist and economist whose work employs methods drawn from economics, sociology and statistics. He is a Research Director in the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Previously, he had been a senior research fellow in the Institute for Research and Information in Health Economics (IRDES), a French research institute specializing in health economics and health statistics. Georges Menahem began his university training at Grenoble University (France) where he graduated in mathematics and physics. After having performed his first experiments in the field of astrophysics (in Jodrell Bank Observatory and Nançay Decimetric Radio Telescope) and solid-state physics (in Grenoble University), his observations in social sciences led him to write his first book (1976) on the relationships between science and the military. In a subsequent shift in intellectual pursuits toward the social sciences, his research focused on the sociology of the labour knowledge and of the division of labour, on the sociology of the family, with the creation of a new typology of family organisation and an analysis of The Economic Rationales Within the Family, a topic which became the title of his PhD in Economics. In the 1990s, as a sociologist searching for root causes of family behaviours, he discovered significant correlation between risky behaviours, vulnerability to illness and grave childhood traumatic events, findings that he explored in greater depth, first with data from INSEE, then with IRDES data. As an economist, he tried also to explain these findings with concepts from health economics and risk economics. Since 2003 he has focused on measuring social well-being by building economic security indices. Since 1999, Menahem has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of ATTAC. Recently he published an analysis of the European process of militarization through its relationships with European foreign policy.