alt Hacker NewsWilliam Nordhaus has died
Comments
This audience might appreciate his “Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing”
This is a guy who claimed that 3.5 degrees of global warming was "optimal". He was absolutely delusional and built his models on preposterous assumptions. He did a vast amount of damage to the world by providing false justifications for climate denial and inaction on climate change. The fossil fuel companies must have loved him.
"when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6 C warming, he did not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st century. Writing in the Economic Journal, Stern set Nordhaus straight in the harshest terms: “We could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world,” he wrote. “It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe that 6 C of warming could cause.”"
It says a lot about economics that he received accolades.
https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-winning-economics-of...
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-high-priest-of-ecomoderni...
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-linden-nobel-eco...
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/misguided-nordh...
good riddance...
This man has done significant damage to the climate movement. His economic analysis is awful yet very influential because policy makers read it and thought "you know what, it's ok, not so bad, lets keep going".
It's immeasurable how much damage his "research" has caused.
One of the absolute best. Many climate change activists were critical of his work, but don't really understand it (you can see examples of that in this thread).
His paper "SCHUMPETERIAN PROFITS IN THE AMERICAN ECONOMY: THEORY AND MEASUREMENT" is profoundly underappreciated and deeply relevant to the tech community.[1]
[1]: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w10433/w104...
[dead]
For those unfamiliar with the Nordhaus approach to climate change:
>Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 per cent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.”
https://theecologist.org/2023/nov/01/when-idiot-savants-do-c...