Jose Tapia, PhD
Professor
Department of Politics
Education:
- MBBCh, Medicine & Surgery, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 1981
- MPH, Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 1992
- PhD, Economics, New School for Social Research, New York, 2002
Bio:
I joined Drexel after spending eleven years as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Prior to that, I lived and worked in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and Madrid, Spain, where I worked briefly as a primary care doctor. I was born in a Spanish colony in Africa. A job at the World Health Organization headquarters in Washington, D.C. brought me to the United States, where I have been living since 1989.
My research and teaching has focused on the intersection of public health, economic issues and social science. One of my primary areas of interest has been the crises and fluctuations of the economy and the relation between these fluctuations and health conditions. My research on issues of political economy has appeared in the book "La Gran Recesión y el capitalismo del siglo XXI" (coauthored with Rolando Astarita, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires), as well as in publications on the dynamics of capital accumulation, the causes of the Great Recession and other topics. I also have a strong interest in environmental issues, as reflected in book chapters and papers on the economic aspects of climate change and several articles in the journals Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and Environmental Science and Policy.
Besides research articles, I sometimes write journalistic pieces, generally on economic or political issues, though I also like to produce ramblings on music. I have often translated technical texts and sometimes poetry from other languages into Spanish. Three authors I have particularly enjoyed translating into Spanish are Primo Levi, Stephan Brecht and Ondra Lysohorsky.
I consider myself a social researcher and believe that social knowledge is at a level of development where disciplinary boundaries are quite irrelevant for scientific purposes. It seems to me present day social science disciplines are related to scientific social knowledge in a similar way as alchemy was related to modern chemistry.
Selected Publications:
- Regidor E, Vallejo F, Tapia JA, et al. Faster mortality decline in low socioeconomic groups during the economic crisis in Spain: a cohort study of 36 million people. The Lancet, forthcoming.
- Tapia JA. Toward a new global recession? Economic perspectives for 2016 and beyond. Brooklyn Rail, February 2016.
- Tapia JA, Rodríguez JM. Health, economic crisis, and austerity: A comparison of Greece, Finland, and Iceland. Health Policy 119 (7):941-953, 2015.
- Tapia JA. Money and Say’s law: on the macroeconomic models of Kalecki, Keen, and Marx. Real-World Economics Review 70:110-120, 2015.
- Tapia JA. From the Oil Crisis to the Great Recession: Five crises of the world economy. Paper presented at the 2014 ASSA-AEA Meeting in Philadelphia.
- J. A. Tapia et al. 2014. Individual Joblessness, Contextual Unemployment, and Mortality Risk. American Journal of Epidemiology 180(3):280-7.
- Health and Economic Crises. José Tapia in conversation with Paul Mattick. The Brooklyn Rail, October 2014.
- Tapia Granados JA. 2013. Does investment call the tune? Empirical evidence and endogenous theories of the business cycle. Research in Political Economy 28:229-259.
- Ionides EL, Wang Z, Tapia Granados JA. 2013. Macroeconomic effects on mortality revealed by panel analysis with nonlinear trends. Annals of Applied Statistics 7:1362-1385.
- Tapia Granados JA. 2013. A Flawed Diagnosis—Book review of The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills
. Science 341:1176-1177.
- Tapia Granados JA. 2013. On the cost of catastrophes: Are recessions as bad as wars, famines and pogroms? CNS—Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 24(2):102-115.
- Tapia Granados JA. 2012. Economic growth and health progress in England and Wales: 160 years of a changing relation. Social Science & Medicine 74(5):688-695.
- Tapia Granados JA, Ionides EL, Carpintero O. 2012. Climate change and the world economy: Short-run determinants of atmospheric CO2. Environmental Science & Policy 21:50-62.
- Tapia Granados JA. 2012. Statistical evidence of falling profits as a cause of recessions. Review of Radical Political Economics 44(4): 484–493.
- Tapia JA, Astarita R. 2011. La Gran Recesión y el capitalismo del siglo XXI (Madrid, Catarata).
- Tapia Granados JA, Ionides EL. 2011. Mortality and macroeconomic fluctuations in contemporary Sweden. European Journal of Population 27:157–184.
- J. A. Tapia 2010. Economists, Recessions, and Profits. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 21(1), 2010.
- Tapia Granados JA, Diez Roux AV. 2009. Life and death during the Great Depression. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 106:17290-17295.
- Tapia Granados JA, Ionides EL. 2008. The reversal of the relation between economic growth and health progress: Sweden in the 19th and 20th centuries. Journal of Health Economics 27:544-563.
- Tapia Granados JA. 2008. Macroeconomic fluctuations and mortality in postwar Japan. Demography 45(2):323-343.
- Franco M, Orduñez P, Caballero B, Tapia Granados JA. et al. 2007. Impact of energy intake, physical activity and population-wide weight loss on cardiovascular disease and diabetes mortality in Cuba, 1980-2005. American Journal of Epidemiology 166 (12): 1374-1380.
- Tapia Granados JA. 2005. Increasing mortality during the expansions of the US economy, 1900-1996. International Journal of Epidemiology 34:1194-1202
- Tapia Granados JA. 2006. Cien años de Shostakovich. MundoClasico Abril.