He was previously a special adviser to former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Co-Editor of The Political Quarterly,[1] 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'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.
[13] After leaving government in May 2010, Jacobs was made a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy at University College London.
He advised the French and UK governments, the UN Secretary-General's office and a network of non-governmental and business organisations on strategy for the UN climate conference in Paris which took place in December 2015.
Michael Jacobs' book Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth,[2] co-edited with Mariana Mazzucato, was published in August 2016.
Jacobs' and Mazzucato's introductory essay[24] sets out the book's core thesis that to address the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary western capitalism a more pluralist approach to economic theory and policy is required, drawing on evolutionary, institutional and post-Keynesian traditions.
After a short period as visiting fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, in October 2016 Jacobs was appointed director of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice,[25] a two-year programme to examine the challenges facing the UK economy and make recommendations for its reform.