Lloyd J Dumas

Biography

Lloyd "Jeff" Dumas was born in Yonkers, New York on May 18, 1945. He studied at Lincoln High School in Yonkers and received his undergraduate degree and both graduate degrees from Columbia University. He received a B.A. in Mathematics in 1967, an M.S. in Industrial Engineering in 1968 and a Ph.D. in Economics in 1972. He taught economics at the City University of New York and industrial and management engineering at Columbia University prior to moving to Dallas, Texas where he is on the faculty in the School of Economics, Political and Policy Science at UT-Dallas.

Like his mentor, Seymour Melman, Professor Dumas has committed his career to studying the effects of military/defense spending on the economy. He has served on the boards of SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and Economists for Peace and Security.

Books

His books include Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies (New York: St. Martin's Press/Palgrave Macmillan, December 1999); The Socio-Economics of Conversion: From War to Peace (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1995); Making Peace Possible: The Promise of Economic Conversion (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989); and The Overburdened Economy: Uncovering the Causes of Chronic Unemployment,Inflation and National Decline (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Forthcoming books include The Peacekeeping Economy scheduled to be released in Winter of 2011 by Yale University Press.

Public speaking

Dumas has spoken at more than 250 conferences and special lectures since 1980, including symposia sponsored by the Sandia National Laboratories, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of State, the United Nations, the World Bank and the Russian Academy of Sciences (at that time, the "Soviet Academy of Sciences"), as well as professional meetings of economists, sociologists, political scientists, physicists, engineers, historians, physicians, management scientists, teachers, labor unions and members of Congress. He has addressed the United Nations, testified at city, state and federal government hearings, and discussed the policy implications of his work on more than 300 TV and radio programs in the U.S., former Soviet Union, Canada, Europe and the Pacific. From 1991-93, he was Vice Chair of the Governor's Taskforce on Economic Transition of the State of Texas.

Economic Impacts of the Department of Energy on the State of New Mexico

He has analyzed the effects of federal government spending for "a Nuclear Watch of New Mexico project to evaluate the Department of Energy's (DOE) economic impact on the state of New Mexico" (pg. 1).

University of New Mexico

While on a one-semester sabbatical from UT-Dallas in Fall 1997, he held the Garrey Carruthers Distinguished Chair in the Honors Program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. While at UNM-Albuquerque, he gave numerous public talks and seminars for faculty.

Other work

Other areas of his work include accountability issues pertaining to the behavior of economic advisors in the arena of international economic development. Together with Janine Wedel, he organized and chaired the conference and working group "Building Accountability into International Economic Development Advising" in Pułtusk, Poland (September 21–24, 2003). A related monograph, co-authored by Janine Wedel and Greg Callman, titled "Confronting Corruption, Building Accountability: Lessons From the World of International Development Advising" will be published by Palgrave in 2010.

Organizations with which Dumas has collaborated or for which he has made contributions include the Swedish Chapter of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Swedish: Svenska Lakäre mot Kernvapen (SLMK)), Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Nuclear Watch of New Mexico. On more than one occasion Professor Dumas spoke at meetings organized by SLMK, for example, at meetings held in Moscow with the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Rosatom (Russian: Росатом)—at that time, the Ministry for Atomic Energy of the Russian Federation (Russian: Министерство по атомной энергии Российской Федерации), or MinAtom (МинАтом), and the Russian Duma (Russian Parliament).

His work has received noteworthy attention from notable persons such as Amitai Etzioni, Professor Kosta Tsipis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the late Kenneth Boulding, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jan Tinbergen (Nobel Laureate in Economics), and Retired USN Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr. Etzioni was the Series Editor for the series "Studies in Socio-Economics", a culmination of research presented at the International Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. An edited book by Dumas, The Socio-Economics of Conversion from War to Peace was included in the series. (See Publications for a full citation for this book.) Of Dumas' contribution to macroeconomic theory, Kenneth Boulding wrote in the preface to Dumas' book, The Overburdened Economy, "This is a very important book. . . . Lloyd Dumas has challenged one of the implicit assumptions of the Keynesian Revolution ... the assumption that all activity which is paid for must be productive. His questioning of this assumption may well set off a reorganization of the economic information system ... Dumas's work is a very valuable contribution to the coming transformation of economic thought" (pg. xi). In praise of the same book (see blurbs or dust jacket), Galbraith wrote "This is a book of real substance by a scholar of high competence. ... I urge for it and for Professor Dumas the attention they both deserve." and Jan Tinbergen wrote "[The Overburdened Economy] throws much light on the problem of the deceleration of economic growth of both the USA and the Soviet Union."

Publications