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.
Nordhaus co-wrote the standard economics textbook taught globally, endogenous technological change is an exemplary growth theory that (with Paul Romer) was deserving of the Nobel, and was an early proponent of carbon taxes and created many of the tools used in environmental economics.
I mean, he's absolutely deserving of critique, even harsh critique, but you're going to have try harder than "his analysis is awful" and he caused "immeasurable damage" when he co-created the movement.
"Nordhaus co-wrote the standard economics textbook taught globally"
Which is tragic because it is a neoclassical fiction book misleading millions of students. Anyone who is really interested in the history of economic thought will avoid that book for anything other than being a reference of the theoretical position of the neoclassical synthesis.
This is entirely wrong. It is crucial to teach students the foundations of the academic discipline they're about to study, which is currently the neoclassical Keynesian synthesis.
Every economic model is fiction to some degree, what matters is the usefulness of the models to make policy decisions or predict outcomes. One can branch off into heterodox schools of thought like Austrian, Marxism, Chicago, or Behavioral... but students need to be grounded in the field's consensus to be able to know how to speak intelligibly across these areas if they're to have any effectiveness.
Carbon taxes are your typical neoliberal economic non solution. Incoherent policy designed to create as much political blowback against the do gooders as possible.
The “damage” is that he showed with reasonable assumptions that climate change might not be as damaging as some claim? And the research was good enough to win the Nobel prize? That’s why it is damaging?
Do the "reasonable assumptions" include stating that indoor economic activity is unaffected by climate change? Or that the US economy won't be affected because agriculture represents only 3% of GDP?
If that is the standard of argument good enough to win the economics "Nobel" prize all we can draw from this is how much of a politically motivated farce that prize is.
No, Nordhaus was never the problem and policymakers have not been anywhere near as aggressive about climate change as he thought they should be. If everyone had listened to him, we'd be in much better shape. The climate movement's antipathy towards him is a narcissism-of-small-differences thing. The actual problem is that voters only want to address climate change if it can be done without inconveniencing them in any way, which it can't.
Nordhaus' riksbank price winning work justifies global temperature rise to +4°C as optimal. At that point the vast majority of humanity is going to die out with just some pockets surviving.
The reason is quite basic. Global temperature includes the oceans which make up 70% of earth's surface and have a higher storage capacity for heat. So a 4°C global temperature rise might be closer to an 8°C increase to your current local average temperatures and that's the normal days. If you have heat waves those might be +15°C or more.
At those temperatures, Americans and Europeans might need air conditioned buildings just to survive. Other places will require people to wear portable air conditioners.
Obviously you'll also need to move all agriculture indoors.
Is it? Every time Russia hits civilian infrastructure, it strengthens Ukrainian's resolve. You don't think the same thing will happen in Russia? Nationalism increases in times of war. Did the Iranians revolt against Iran when US hit the school full of children? No, it strengthened people's resolve. The movement Iran had before the war died down and people unified.
We should never celebrate hitting civilian infrastructure. Russia right now is bombing bridges in Kyiv, it's awful.
All wars end with diplomacy or when one side is dead or completely out of resources
The difference is Ukraine is defending against an unjust invasion, the Russians are being dragged kicking and screaming to attack another country for no reason by their dictator.
We are in the 6th mass extinction event. Want to feel bad? Look at the numbers of decline in the last 40 years, it's dramatic. Even in my lifetime it's been dramatic.
I dont think its a big loss to the universe if humans go extinct. Humans didnt engineer the biochemistry of life or produce the atmosphere or the over rated buggy brain.
Welcome to nihilism, where nothing matters. On a grand enough scale, is there a difference between our universe existing and our universe not existing?
On a cosmic scale independent of human activity, sure. But things do matter to us every day. And things matter to other life forms we share the planet with.
How many people died in Iraq? The country is completely broken. Look what's happening in the latest Iran war.
Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
That was 2023: Iraq hosted the 25th Arabian Gulf Cup, and won the tournament.
I think if you're going to claim that something bad happened to Iraq post-2023, attributing that to the 2003 US invasion is a little dubious. Iraq was also in bad shape before the US invaded! It's a mistake to assume that if any foreign power has had any level of involvement, every bad thing that subsequently happens is therefore the fault of the foreign power.
>The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
Another possibility is that viral news stories are not always a good way to get a representative picture of how life has changed for civilians on the ground.
>Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
If Israel had genocidal intent -- in the sense of attempting extermination of Palestine's civilian population -- what fraction of Palestine's civilian population would you expect to be dead by now?
Once you've got that fraction in your head, try prompting your favorite LLM with something like the following:
"Please estimate the fraction of Iraq's population which died due to the 2003 US invasion, and the fraction of Gaza's population which died due to the 2023 Israeli invasion. Please provide an estimated breakdown of deaths based on whether they were due to invader military activity, destruction of civilian infrastructure, internal conflict, or other causes."
(you won't be able to paste the reply here due to HN rules against AI-generated content)
Another interesting prompt template: "Give me a sense of how civilian deaths happened in [Iraq/Gaza] due to [US/Israeli] military activity. Tell me a few representative vignettes which show various typical ways in which this occurred."
Interesting how you think Iraqs invasion of Iran was justified but not Kuwait. Or did you forget who started the Iran/Iraq war and deleted your comment out of embarrassment?
I didn't claim that Iraq's invasion of Iran was justified.
But I notice that you don't seem upset with the idea that Iran would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Iran (including direct attacks on civilian targets, not just dual-use infrastructure!), yet you do see upset that the US would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Kuwait. That seems like the sort of double standard I was talking about.
I deleted my comment because I thought it would be fairly tedious to litigate this. I agree the US has done some dubious things, but I don't think they are a distinctively bad actor relative to other players in the region. I'm also not sure you are telling the truth, e.g. I haven't been able to find a source for your claim that the US targeted hospitals during the Gulf War.
No but the way you wrote it you seemed to be okay with US supporting Iraqs invasion of Iran but totally against it when it came to Kuwait. So your opinion and morality is not consistent. I can say that Both wars were bad and unnecessary and that Saddam was a dictator supported by the US when it was convenient for them, like they've done many times before.
I can also say that the current Iran regime should not be in power or even exist. But I also know why they are in power and it is yet again because of US direct meddling in the region as them helping with the coup in 53 and installing a western aligned leader lead directly to the religious fanatics taking power as that regime had suppressed all other viable options with the support of the US to keep power.
The US is a lot more than a distinctively bad actor, even compared to their enemies, who are only their enemies because of US meddling in the region. I hope you can straighten out your moral compass at some point.
More distortions on your part. (I notice you said nothing about the hospital point.) The US supported Iraq when Iran's counterattack was going too well, to prevent Iraq from being conquered by Iran, a regime you yourself say "should not be in power".
>Saddam was a dictator supported by the US when it was convenient for them, like they've done many times before.
I don't think this is intrinsically bad. The US also supported Stalin during WW2. Our rapprochement with China helped lift millions out of poverty. Were those mistakes?
>But I also know why they are in power and it is yet again because of US direct meddling in the region as them helping with the coup in 53 and installing a western aligned leader lead directly to the religious fanatics taking power as that regime had suppressed all other viable options with the support of the US to keep power.
This is some serious mental gymnastics to blame the US for a rebellion motivated in part by anti-Americanism. By your own logic, maybe the US is actually in the wrong for not giving the Shah even more support in order to crush the rebels.
If anti-Americanism caused a rebellion that you acknowledge as destructive, why do you lend support to anti-Americanism as an ideology?
You've created a catch-22 where the US can be the bad guy even if it supports a leader that's better than the plausible alternative for the country in question. What if the USSR had turned Iran into another satellite like in Eastern Europe? Ask the Poles how they feel about life under the Soviets.
I think these questions are simply not as obvious as you're making them out to be.
>The US is a lot more than a distinctively bad actor
We haven't initiated a war of conquest since the late 1800s. Even being a superpower after WW2, our territory actually shrunk when we gave the Philippines their independence "for free".
How many historic great powers can you name which were so restrained when it comes to territorial conquest? Considering the great powers during WW2: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, British Empire, French Empire, Italian Empire, USSR, PRC, USA. Who among those is the angel that you would've liked to see crowned global leader?
The world has generally become a much better place while the US has been hegemonic:
Iraq was in a bad state because of the previous war where US intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure like power, industry, hospitals and such. They wanted to create a failed state. This was after supporting Saddam in the Iran war and selling him chemical weapon precursors while knowing what he would use them for.
An ethnostate generally is a bad, illiberal idea, but concerning Israel, the ideas that are good in terms of ideology would have been, and possibly still would be, worse in practice.
The existence of Israel as an ethnostate is more down to the ethnic preferences of others in Russia¹, Germany, multiple middle eastern countries², and elsewhere³, than the ethnic preferences of jews.
Most of the jews I have known in my life are liberals who see Israel as a refuge against illiberals, not supremacist weirdos that get attention on the internet.
Exactly! I have the same experience. Most jews I know are not Zionists and are amazing people. Israel is not about religion, but about ideology as you point out and is deeply illiberal.
Didn't downvote but I'll bite: Haven't states largely always been ethno-states, and isn't "ethno-state bad" a relatively modern and potentially as-yet unproven argument in the big scheme of things?
It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?
What is modern are states like we have now. Passports didn't exist before WW1 for example. The idea that people can't freely move across land and imaginary lines we call borders is a modern idea.
The history section has an example of a passport in the Old Testament and a lot of other examples where people needed travel documents and were limited in their travels way before the First World War.
Wow, has reading comprehension escaped the world? What is different about the passport system compared to the examples you gave? Just think about it for a while.
The distinction is a world wide system of borders we call countries where you need passports to cross. That is distinctly a modern thing. The way countries work now is a distinctly modern thing. Yes, there were always some places that had walls and borders, but never as a world-wide system.
The way boats and airplanes work is also a distinctly modern thing, with those technologies curiously advancing around the time you claim passports were invented.
And ironically the average person travels less than 500 years ago. Shocking but true. Evem though technology made traveling easier. The reason is money and urbanization. You now need money to travel when I'm the past you didn't.
Yes, there are some Arab Israelis but the vast majority of Arabs under Israeli governance would never be suffered to assimilate, specifically because it would change the ethnic character of the state.
Ok, totally true but faith and race are conflated for jews, much more so than muslims or christians. Mizrahi jews aren't called Arab jews, judaism is not a proselitizing religion in general for 5,000 years so of course it has bloodlines rather than converts.
Israel is an ethnostate apartheid system on that conflated definition. After all, religion is almost as hereditary as race.
I guess I don't see the distinction as all that important? Aside from the fact that it would be an all-time troll if 2 million people in Gaza declared that they're Jewish now and applied for aliyah.
I don't know man, Musk doing Nazi salutes doesn't seem that superficial. He did help get Trump in power and also killed a lot of aid to children that need it.
What's superficial about refusing to use a product from someone like that? Or are you one of those 'technology isn't about politics' people? That's a superficial take if you ask me.
All technology is political, and understanding that is a deep, not superficial take. It requires systems thinking which unfortunately many people building technology seem to lack, despite software being a sophisticated complex system.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. Until Musk owns up to his Nazi salute, I won't have anything to do with Grok, no matter how good or cheap it is. And yes, we need to keep talking about this because it's absurd.
If you watch the actual video, you’ll see Musk saying “my heart goes out to you all” as he waves his arm in the air. The Left would love us to imagine he’s saying “sieg heil” or “exterminate the j3ws” or some such, but that’s far from the truth. The media hoopla around a freeze frame of someone raising their arm is a desperate partisan attempt to smear a political rival.
If Elon hadn’t worked with Orange Man Bad, then the Left would still be in love with him for his massive former donations to the Democrat political machine, and his work against climate change.
The whole “he’s a nazi” accusation is banal, and people are seeing through it now. That’s why we’ve moved on.
People continually fall into the trap of pushing a false narrative because they are so blinded by their own agenda.
Like the whole pizza parlor pedo basement thing, people will death grip stupid stuff because they are so desperate to manifest the worst possible image of those unaligned with them.
The problem is that it blows up in their face and just makes them look unreliable, dumb, and lost.
Musk has done so many objectively bad things that there is no need for people to dilute their reputation on fringe theories and interpretations. Pushing the nazi thing just gives Musk ammo that his detractors are so desperate that they need freeze frames and hidden context to make him look bad.
The Democrats are not a left-wing party, I'm not sure why you think "the Left" would be in love with him after all the other horrible things he's done if he just gave money to a political party that is at best centrist.
If you want him to get the benefit of the doubt about his "hand gesture" then it would help if he wasn't promoting far-right parties all over Europe.
Poor Elon put in so much effort into his Nazi Salute, he'd be pretty upset about you downplaying his best attempt, if he could read what you wrote here about him.
It wasn't an accident. He did it deliberately. Twice. He enjoyed himself doing it.
There's no value in the mental gymnastics to invent excuses for his fascist salutes. The rational thing to do is to accept the objective reality of it.
If he wasn't supporting far right parties, including Trump's all over the world, you would have an argument. But you don't. It's not like he is going around supporting left leaning parties or centrists. It's all far-right for him.
What's silly is people like you defending the richest man in the world who cares nothing about you and your family. Why spend the effort? I don't think he needs your help. And you aren't even getting paid to do it. Sad.
It's immeasurable how much damage his "research" has caused.
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