「Nobel Prizes in Economics, Awarded and Withheld」と題されたEconospeakエントリでピーター・ドーマンが、今年度のノーベル経済学賞は誰が受賞したかよりも誰が受賞しなかったかに注目すべき、と書いている。以下はその末尾。
The reality is this is a nonprize for Weitzman, an attempt to dismiss his approach to combating climate change, even though his position is far closer to the scientific mainstream than Nordhaus’. An example of the enlistment of the uncritical media in this enterprise is today’s New York Times, where Binyamin Appelbaum writes:
Mr. Nordhaus also was honored for his role in developing a model that allows economists to analyze the costs of climate change. His work undergirds a new United Nations report on the dangers of climate change, released Monday in South Korea.
Wrong. The work Nordhaus pioneered in the social cost of carbon is mentioned only twice in the IPCC report, a box in Chapter 2 and another in Chapter 3. The reason it appears only in boxes is that, while the authors of the report wanted to include this work in the interest of being comprehensive, it plays no role in any of their substantive conclusions. And how could it? The report is about the dangers of even just 1.5o of warming, less than the conventional 2o target, and far less than the 3+o Nordhaus is comfortable with. Damages are expressed primarily in terms of uninhabitable land and climate refugees, agricultural failure and food security, and similarly nonmonetary outcomes, not the utility-from-consumption metric on which Nordhaus’ work rests.
The Nordhaus/Romer combo is so artificial and unconvincing it’s hard to avoid the impression that the prize not given to Weitzman is as important as the one given to Nordhaus. This is a clear political statement about how to deal with climate change and how not to deal with it. The Riksbank has spoken: it wants a gradual approach to carbon, one that makes as few economic demands as possible.
