Tom’s early teaching and research focused on issues of third world development and underdevelopment, with particular attention to India. In the late 1970s, his interests shifted to the macroeconomic problems of advanced capitalist economies; he co-authored a book about democratizing the U.S. economy and he undertook studies of trends in productivity growth and profitability from a neo-Marxian political-economic perspective. In the 1990s he worked primarily on problems of economic transition and institutional development in the formerly socialist economies of the East, concentrating especially on the interaction between political and economic change in Russia.Over the past 10 years he has been working on affirmative action in higher education in the comparative context of the United States and India. In recent years he has also done some work on globalization and its effects on social welfare, both in advanced and in developing economies.
Recent Courses
- First-year Seminars on “Perspectives on Affirmative Action” and on “The Evolution of American Politics since the 1960s
- RC Social Science 302: Contemporary Social and Cultural Theory
- RC Social Science 345: Community Strategies against Poverty
Selected Articles
“Left Perspectives on Long-Term Trends in Capitalism,” in Robert Pollin (ed.), Capitalism, Socialism and Radical Political Economy: Essays in Honor of Howard J. Sherman, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham (U.K.), 2000, pp. 30-47.
“Globalization and Affirmative Action,” Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay, India), Vol. 38, No. 27, July 5, 2003, pp. 2818-2819; reprinted in Sukhadeo Thorat et al., “Reservation and Private Sector, Indian Institute of Dalit Studies & Rawat Publications, New Delhi (India), 2005, pp. 263-266.
“Is Positive Discrimination a Good Way to Aid Disadvantaged Communities?,” Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay, India), Vol. 41, No. 8, February 25, 2006, pp. 717-726.
“Reflections on Globalization, Discrimination and Affirmative Action,” paper presented to a conference on “Global Studies of Discrimination,” sponsored by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, at Princeton University, May 18-19, 2007; forthcoming.
“Rethinking Affirmative Action in Admissions to Higher Educational Institutions,” paper presented to a conference on “Affirmative Action in Higher Education in India, the United States and South Africa” organized by the Programme for the Study of Discrimination and Exclusion, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Centre for Comparative Constitutionalism, University of Chicago, in New Delhi, March 19-21, 2008; forthcoming.
Books Published
- Edited with Arthur MacEwan, PERSPECTIVES ON THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: A Book of Readings in Political Economy, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1st Edition 1970; 2nd Edition 1973.
- Edited with Hollis Chenery et al., STUDIES IN DEVELOPMENT PLANNING, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
- With Bagicha Singh Minhas et al., SCHEDULING THE OPERATIONS OF THE BHAKRA SYSTEM: Studies in Technical and Economic Evaluation, The Statistical Publishing Society, Calcutta (India), 1972.
- With Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM: A Radical Analysis of Contemporary American Society, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1st edition 1972; 2nd edition 1978; 3rd edition 1986.
- With Samuel Bowles and David M. Gordon, BEYOND THE WASTE LAND: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline, Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, N.Y., 1983; paperback edition 1984; British edition, published by Verso Press (London), 1985; French edition, L’Economie du Gaspillage: La Crise Americaine et les Politiques Reaganiennes, published by Editions La Decouverte (Paris), 1986; Japanese edition, published by Toyo Kezai Shiposha (Tokyo), 1986; Spanish edition, published by Alianza Editorial, S,A. (Madrid), 1989. # With Samuel Bowles and David M. Gordon, AFTER THE WASTE LAND: A Democratic Economics for the Year 2000, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, N.Y., 1991; Spanish edition, published by Alianza Editorial, S.A. (Madrid), 1992.
- Edited with Samuel Bowles, ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: Essays on Power, Labor and Institutional Change (a posthumous collection of the works of David M. Gordon), Edward Elgar, Cheltenham (U.K.), 1998.
- With Neva R. Goodwin, Frank Ackerman and Oleg I. Ananyin, MICROECONOMICS IN CONTEXT (in Russian), The Russian State University of the Humanities Press, Moscow, 2002.
- With Neva R. Goodwin, Frank Ackerman and Julie A. Nelson, MICROECONOMICS IN CONTEXT, Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, 1st edition 2003; 2nd edition 2005.
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AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN THE UNITED STATES AND INDIA: A Comparative Perspective, Routledge, London, 2004; South Asian edition, published by Foundation Books (the Indian Associate of Cambridge University Press), 2005; paperback edition, distributed by Routledge Press via their “Paperbacks Direct” program, 2006.
