I’m an actuary not an economist, but when economists produce garbage, it’s usually easy for me to spot. That William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel for his modeling, so full of bad-faith assumptions, seems unbelievable.
If you have any interest in the debacle of climate change economics, have a close read of Noah Smith’s brilliant article “Why has climate economics failed us?” In it, he eviscerates the field, ascribing its uselessness to four factors:
- “Simply not publishing enough research
- Putting out models that are frankly just bad
- Ignoring tail risks
- Obsessively focusing on carbon taxes”
At the end of the article, Smith stresses that “the failures of the past cannot be allowed to persist into the future,” and he provides seven suggestions. A lengthy sequence of comments also holds some interest, though inevitably some of it is in bad faith.
If I were younger, I’d pitch in and assemble some good-faith economists and put together some models that can properly contribute to our deliberations of the climate emergency. As it is, I seethe.