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I’m reminded of this article
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/
To understand the gap between climate scientists and climate economists, one must first understand that most economists — the folks we call mainstream or neoclassical economists — have little knowledge of or interest in how things really work on planet Earth. The problem of their ecological benightedness starts as a matter of training at university, where a typical undergraduate course in economics prepares students for a lifetime of abject ignorance about the complex underpinnings of the thing called the “market.”
Any economic system that doesn’t have ecology as the base can only be rubbish
As early as 1991, a report from a commission on “graduate education in economics” warned that the university system in the United States was churning out “too many idiot savants,” economists “skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues” — unable, that is, to look into the real nature of things.
Models are useless things for economic forecasting
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” — Ezra Solomon, professor of finance, Stanford University
Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.
If you have never seen these lectures by Economist Steve Keen, they are well worth watching.
This one he delivered at Nordhaus’ home university: https://youtu.be/QGfaqALkc40
A deep dive into the shockingly bad “economics” that was used to inform policy: https://youtu.be/aoFiw2jMy-0
(He eviscerates Nordhaus starting at 25-30min continuing.)
(At, 47min, he goes over Nordhaus’ Nobel prize lecture wherehe claims 4° of warming would be “optimal”).
So, Nordhaus has to be one of the most interesting bastards of history. It seems like he came into prominance FIRST by publically attacking the Limits to Growth study.
The Limits to Growth study was the first major attempt to use a computer model to study the complex system that is the economy-environment. People had never really done computer models before this.
Nordhaus basically argued against this study and said that the market will solve the problems. But basically, if you do a deep dive on his argument, he failed to understand the computer model or the fact that it was a complex system. It kind of went over his head.
THEN, a few years later, he does his own extremely similar study using extremely similar methods and wins the Nobel Prize in Economics. Like at some point he grasped the idea of Limits to Growth, then totally rips off and plagiarizes their approach. He feeds in some junk data and makes his model prove that we live in a cornucopian economic world.
And THEN, people in policy positions listened to him.
Nordhaus is not just some economist, he’s actually evil.
