The Institute for New Economic Thinking, in collaboration with Cambridge University Press, launches a new book series edited by INET­­­­­­­, Director of Research Thomas Ferguson.

This book is a tour de force. Combining deep theoretical insights with thorough empirical work, the authors explain the causes and consequences of major recent episodes in the advanced capitalist world. Over the decades, Taylor has built up a convincing, original, and thoroughly researched theoretical structure of his own. The end results illuminate understanding about the provision of humane and realistic policies. These findings operate as characteristics of this new volume, the first in an important new series. Macroeconomic Inequality from Reagan to Trump is certain to be a jewel in its crown.

- Geoff Harcourt, Jesus College, Cambridge

For five decades, rising US income and wealth inequality has been driven by wage repression and production realignments benefitting the top one percent of households. In this inaugural book for the book series Studies in New Economic Thinking, Professor Lance Taylor takes an innovative approach to measuring inequality, providing the first and only full integration of distributional and macro level data for the US. While work by Thomas Piketty and colleagues pursues integration from the income side, Professor Taylor uses data of distributions by size of income and wealth combined with the cost and demand sides, flows of funds, and full balance sheet accounting of real capital and financial claims. This blends measures of inequality with national income and product accounts to show the relationship between productivity and wages at the industry sector level. Taylor assesses the scope and nature of various interventions to reduce income and wealth inequalities using his simulation model, disentangling wage growth and productivity while challenging mainstream models.

The book’s authors will be joined by a panel of discussants

Lance Taylor is the Arnhold Professor Emeritus of International Cooperation and Development and was Director of the Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research, New York.

Özlem Ömer is an assistant professor at Haci Bektas Veli University in Turkey. Her research interests include growth and inequality, distributive impacts of economic policies, forces and dynamics of structural change in developed and developing countries, financial crises and information theoretic approaches to modeling political economy. Her work combines theoretical, methodological, historical, structural and policy oriented aspects of macroeconomic issues by employing modern modeling techniques in her research.

Thomas Ferguson is the Director of Research at INET and Editor of the new INET/Cambridge University Press book series.

Duncan Foley is the Leo Model Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research.

Pia Malaney is INET Senior Economist and Director of INET’s Center for Innovation, Growth, and Society.

Introduction by The President of INET: Rob Johnson