Lance Jerome Taylor is a well known structuralist macroeconomist, working to understand the macroeconomy through “its major institutions and distributive relationships across productive sectors and social groups." He is the Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development and director of the at the New School for Social Research, where he has taught and worked since 1993. As a professor, he teaches students who come in with "a critical attitude about economics," aiming to encourage that "progressive perspective" while providing them "the standard technical tools of economics." He has served as a visiting scholar or policy advisor in over 25 countries, including Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, Egypt, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Pakistan, India, and Thailand. Taylor was previously Associate Professor of Economics at Harvard and Professor of Economics at MIT, year-long visiting professorships at U. Minnesota, Univesidade de Brasilia, Delhi School of Economics, and Stockholm School of Economics. He received a B.S. degree with honors in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1962 and, after study at Lund University and a Fulbright Fellowship in mathematics and economics, he received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1968.
Work in macroeconomics
Taylor has published extensively in the fields of macroeconomics and development economics, focusing on the interaction of growth, stability and income distribution under different social relations. He contributed to the development of modern Computable General Equilibrium models. Using social accounting matrices of national economies, he has worked to identify conditions that support healthy economics as opposed to those that yield economic crises, concluding in part that the conditions of each are complex and the particular sets of outcomes are often unanticipated. In the case of the recent economic crises, Taylor highlights the conditions of financial deregulation and worsening income inequality. Recently, Taylor has taken up environmental macroeconomics, under standard and demand-driven growth models. In this work, he analyzes the short- and long-term social cost of greenhouse gasses and climate change, emission control legislation, and the role of green enterprise in economic recovery and sustainability, GDP and employment growth, and service-based economies.
"Lance Taylor " in P. Arestis and M. Sawyer, 2000, A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, Hants, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.
Amitava Krishna Dutt and Jaime Ros Hants, 2003, Development Economics and Structuralist Macroeconomics: Essays in Honor of Lance Taylor UK: Edward Elgar
