Tufts Institute to award annual economics prize to
Duncan Foley & Lance Taylor
Leontief Prize recognizes work on economic implications of climate change
GDAE will award its 2015 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought to Duncan Foley and Lance Taylor. This year’s award, titled “Macroeconomics in the Age of Climate Change,” recognizes the contributions that these researchers have made to our understanding of the relationships between environmental quality and the macroeconomy.
“Our Institute’s work has been much influenced, and has greatly benefited, by the ways in which Dr. Foley and Dr. Taylor have crossed the boundaries between economics and other disciplines to produce the kind of rigorous analytical work that the Leontief Prize was created to recognize,” said GDAE Co-Director Neva Goodwin. “Dr. Taylor’s research has integrated relevant social relations into macroeconomic models and is of critical importance for understanding the present and future environmental realities and challenges. Dr. Foley’s unique approach to combining research on political economy with advances in statistics and a broad grasp of the relevant data has produced a deeper appreciation of the policy consequences of economists’ choices in theories and models.”
The ceremony and lectures by the awardees will take place in the spring of 2015 at Tufts University; further details will be forthcoming.
2015 Awardees
Dr. Duncan Foley is the Leo Model Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research. An extraordinarily productive economist, he has made seminal contributions to a wide range of topics, such as economic theory, statistical reasoning, Marxian value theory, and problems of social coordination. Recent research includes work on the economics of global warming, economics and thermodynamics, complexity theory and Classical political economy (Unholy Trinity: Labor, Capital, and Land in the New Economy, 2003). In 2006, he published Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology, which discusses the history of political economy and economics. Dr. Foley graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Mathematics in 1964 and received a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1966.
Dr. Lance Taylor is the Emeritus Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research and the former Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1968. He has been a Professor in the economics departments of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota, the Universidade da Brasilia, Delhi University, and the Stockholm School of Economics. He moved to the New School in 1993. Dr. Taylor has published widely in the areas of macroeconomics, development economics, and economic theory. His most recent book Maynard’s Revenge: The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics. 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.
About the Leontief Prize
GDAE inaugurated its economics award in 2000 in memory of Nobel Prize-winning economist and GDAE advisory board member Wassily Leontief. The Leontief Prize recognizes economists whose work, like that of the institute and Leontief himself, combines theoretical and empirical research to promote a more comprehensive understanding of social and environmental processes.
The inaugural prizes were awarded in 2000 to John Kenneth Galbraith and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. Since then, GDAE has awarded the Leontief Prize to Paul Streeten, Herman Daly, Alice Amsden, Dani Rodrik, Nancy Folbre, Robert Frank, Richard Nelson, Ha-Joon Chang, Samuel Bowles, Juliet Schor, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Stephen DeCanio, José Antonio Ocampo, Robert Wade, Bina Agarwal, Daniel Kahneman, Nicholas Stern, Martin Weitzman, C. Peter Timmer, Michael Lipton, Albert O. Hirschman (posthumous), Frances Stewart, Angus Deaton, and James K. Galbraith.