William Nordhaus

William Dawbney "Bill" Nordhaus (May 31, 1941, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA) is the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. Nordhaus lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife Barbara.

Education and career

Nordhaus received his B.A. and M.A from Yale in 1963 and 1973 respectively where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He also holds a Certificat from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (1962) and a Ph.D. from MIT (1967). He has been a member of the faculty at Yale since 1967 and has also served as its Provost from 1986–1988 and its Vice President for Finance and Administration from 1992-1993. His tenure as provost was among the shortest in the university's history. Among many honors, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has been on the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity since 1972. During the Carter administration, from 1977–1979, Nordhaus was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. He has been a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences since 1999.

Writing

Nordhaus is the author of many books. He is the co-author of the textbook Economics, the original editions of which were written by Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson. The book is currently in its 19th edition and has been translated into at least 17 other languages. He has also written several books on global warming and climate change, one of his primary areas of research, including Managing the Global Commons: The Economics of Climate Change and Warming the World: Economic Models of Global Warming (with Joseph Boyer). In 1972 Nordhaus, along with fellow Yale economics professor James Tobin, published Is Growth Obsolete?, an article that introduced the Measure of Economic Welfare as the first model for economic sustainability assessment.

His A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies ISBN 978-0-300-13748-4 was published by Yale University Press June 24, 2008.

Contribution on Economics of Climate Change

Nordhaus has written on the economics of climate change. He states: "Mankind is playing dice with the natural environment through a multitude of interventions – injecting into the atmosphere trace gases like the greenhouse gases or ozone-depleting chemicals, engineering massive land-use changes such as deforestation, depleting multitudes of species in their natural habitats even while creating transgenic ones in the laboratory, and accumulating sufficient nuclear weapons to destroy human civilizations." Under the climate change models he has developed, in general those sectors of the economy that depend heavily on unmanaged ecosystems – that is, are heavily dependent upon naturally occurring rainfall, runoff, or temperatures – will be most sensitive to climate change. Agriculture, forestry, outdoor recreation, and coastal activities fall in this category." Nordhaus takes seriously the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Nordhaus, who has done several studies on the economics of global warming, criticised the Stern Review for its use of a low discount rate:

The Review’s unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of discounting assumptions that are consistent with today’s market place. So the central questions about global-warming policy – how much, how fast, and how costly – remain open. The Review informs but does not answer these fundamental questions.

Response to The Wall Street Journal

A January 2012 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal made a number of attacks on the science and credibility of global warming, including quoting Nordhaus' research, to argue that economics does not support policies to slow climate change in the next half-century. Nordhaus rebutted the contentions in the op-ed in an article published in The New York Review of Books in March 2012, drawing an analogy to the well-documented use of public relations by the tobacco industry, in the face of financially disastrous scientific findings, to manufacture doubt about the facts. He quoted their stated aim of fostering confusion: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public." Three signatories of the original piece, Richard Lindzen, William Happer and ex-ExxonMobil manager of Strategic Planning & Programs Roger W. Cohen, responded to Nordhaus's comments, and Nordhaus replied to their response in The New York Review of Books in April 2012 and to S. Fred Singer's defense of them in a follow-up.

Recognitions

In 2004, Nordhaus was designated a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association (AEA), along with George P. Shultz and William A. Brock. The accompanying AEA statement referred to his "knack for asking large questions about the measurement of economic growth and well-being, and addressing them with simple but creative insights," among them, his pioneering work on the political business cycle, ways of using national income accounts data to devise economic measures reflecting better health, increases in leisure and life expectancy, and "constructing integrated economic and scientific models to determine the efficient path for coping with climate change".

In 2013, Nordhaus became president-elect of the AEA.

External links

• William Nordhaus (Yale Home Page)
• The Question of Global Warming Nordhaus exchange with Freeman Dyson and others from The New York Review of Books
• Energy: Friend or Enemy? 27.October.2012 in The New York Review of Books