Michael Jacobs

Michael Jacobs (born 3 December 1960) is an English economist. He is a professorial research fellow at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield. He was previously a special adviser to former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Co-Editor of The Political Quarterly, in charge of the full-time staff of five at the Fabian Society, director of the Commission on Economic Justice at the Institute for Public Policy Research and a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy, University College London. Jacobs' published work has ranged across environmental and climate change economics, social democratic and green political thought, and a variety of issues in public policy, particularly economic policy. His books include The Green Economy (1991), The Politics of the Real World (1996), Paying for Progress (2000), and Rethinking Capitalism (co-edited with Mariana Mazzucato, 2016). Education and early career Born in London in 1960, Jacobs was educated in state schools in Barnet, North London, and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he gained a First in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. After university he became a community worker and adult educator before joining, and later becoming managing director of, CAG Consultants, an employee-owned consultancy firm specialising in local economic development. Working with central and local government in the early 1990s, Jacobs helped develop the field of local environmental auditing and management and the implementation of sustainable development principles in land use planning. Academic and political career Jacobs's book The Green Economy: Environment, Sustainable Development and the Politics of the Future, published by Pluto Press in 1991, was an attempt to synthesise the relatively new fields of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics. Rejecting both the ‘green’ argument that environmental protection requires zero growth and the neoclassical approach of pricing environmental goods, the book argued for an essentially social-democratic system of ‘sustainability planning’. In this the state would use a variety of policy instruments, including taxation and regulation, to constrain the economy within biophysically-informed and publicly-decided environmental limits.