As a professor, he taught 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."[3] According to Taylor, structuralist economics sought to understand the macroeconomy through “its major institutions and distributive relationships across productive sectors and social groups."[4]
He was 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.[5]
He taught and worked at the New School for Social Research since 1993.[6][7] 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 (Sweden) and a Fulbright Fellowship in mathematics and economics, he received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1968.[8][9]
Taylor published extensively in the fields of macroeconomics and development economics, focusing on the interaction of growth, stability and income distribution under different social relations.[10] He contributed to the development of modern Computable General Equilibrium models.[11] Using social accounting matrices of national economies, he 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 highlighted the conditions of financial deregulation and worsening income inequality.[12]
More recently Taylor took up environmental macroeconomics, under standard and demand-driven growth models. In this work, he analyzed 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.[13][14]
Amitava Krishna Dutt and Jaime Ros Hants (eds.), 2003, Development Economics and Structuralist Macroeconomics: Essays in Honor of Lance Taylor UK: Edward Elgar[17]
Who's Who in America[18] and The International Who's Who[19]
W. Arthur Lewis Lecturer, American Social Science Association meetings, 1985[20]
Marshall Lecturer, University of Cambridge, 1986-87[21]
V.K. Ramaswami Lecturer, Delhi School of Economics, 1988[22]
^Dutt, Amitava Krishna, and Jaime Ros, eds. (2003) Development economics and structuralist macroeconomics: essays in honor of Lance Taylor. Edward Elgar Publishing
