Notes on Nordhaus and Romer

They are the newest Nobel laureates in economics.

1. They had very different career trajectories. Nordhaus, who is 13 years older, started out as a mediocre empirical macroeconomist, known for working on “the investment function.” His creativity emerged much later in his career. Those of us who are on the heterodox right tend to praise most his papers showing the tremendous drop in the cost of light over the centuries and the low percentage of value of innovation captured by innovators. But he will end up best known for his combination macro-econometric/climate model, which to me is multiplying two instances of faux science together.

Romer produced his most important research much earlier in his career. He detoured into creating Aplia, one of the first computer-based tools for economics teaching. He also detoured into a charter cities project, which fell apart amidst what I call corporate soap opera. He did a brief stint (although longer than I would have predicted) as chief economist for the World Bank.

2. David Warsh, in Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, focused on Romer and Krugman. Warsh saw them as likely Nobel laureates, and he has now been proven correct.

3. Nick Schulz interviewed Romer for our book From Poverty to Prosperity (re-issued as Invisible Wealth. It was one of the best of the interviews.

4. I have never encountered Nordhaus. To me, Romer comes across as prickly, if not outright bitter. He and I have clashed in writing a few times in recent years. Just a week ago, I disagreed with him. I think of him as sharing Krugman’s tendency to impugn the motives of those with whom he disagrees.

11 thoughts on “Notes on Nordhaus and Romer

  1. Nordhaus once said “Climate sceptics are like the people who refused to accept that smoking causes cancer” which pretty much tells you all you need to know about him.

    • The great statistician RA Fisher writing in Nature in 1958: “If, for example, it were possible to infer that smoking cigarettes is a cause of this disease, it would equally be possible to infer on exactly similar grounds that inhaling cigarette smoke was a practice of considerable prophylactic value in preventing the disease, for the practice of inhaling is rarer among patients with cancer of the lung than with others.”

  2. Romer says:
    “Women respond differently to questions about sexual harassment and assault because they have a better grasp on the facts. ”

    His arrogance is subtle, but the possibility that “harassment”, or not, is a subjective judgement seems to elude him. Some women claim that wolf whistles are harassment, in fact any noticing that a woman is sexually attractive is harassment — unless it’s desired by the woman. If two men act exactly the same way to the same woman, but she claims one harassed her yet the other didn’t, that’s a clear case where “harassment” is not a fact.

    In sad fact harassment is very often a subjective feeling, and many (most?) men are unaware how often they do it to women. On the other hand, there’s something a bit hypocritical when some woman takes a lot of effort to be a more sexually attractive object, but then is upset if less attractive people treat her like an object. (I’m very glad my wife likes to be, and is, attractive. Yet I’m aware of the objectification aspects.)

    So I both agree with Romer that women have more experience with harassment, yet feel he’s missing the significant feeling-over-fact combinations.

    The Nobel committee is doubling down on climate change; and implicit anti-Trump position. Yet increasing temps of 3 degrees Cent. in 300 years is a lot less of a crisis than 3 degrees in 100 years.

    Until I see regulations requiring reduced air travel for UN officials and US gov’t and non-profits, I won’t take climate change as serious enough to raise taxes over. As long as most CC alarmists fail to support nuclear power, it’s not a crisis.

    Romer does have a new post about gradually introducing a carbon tax at a very low level, with idea of it increasing over time. This is sort of reasonable.

    Had he added a tax rebate to all adult citizens, to make it revenue neutral, he might have become a leader in getting it passed.

    So I propose it: Trump should give every adult a tax rebate check, first — to be paid by a carbon/gas tax, later. With both set to automatically increase, but slowly.

  3. seems the quality of Nobel Recipients is at best mixed. some are for huge achievements with quantifiable applications and results that spawn a huge body of follow-up research (such as the 1997 price for the black scholes formula), and a lot of others are more like ‘meh’ or ambiguous.

    • Politics corrupts everything. Every prize purportedly about objective achievement in any fields tend to elevate the status of some people and the work they do and beliefs that they have. That fact give rise to a corrupting temptation which distorts the way decisions are made. In short order, that wart on the hog grows until the hog is on the wart, and the elevation of status of what is socially or ideologically desirable overwhelms the objective consideration of the worthiness of the accomplishments and recipients. Right-thinking people with the right demographic characteristics and opinions get prizes, while crime-thinking people with the wrong ideas and identities don’t.

      Eventually everyone starts to recognize the prize as being hopelessly ‘politicizes’ or biased in this sense, and the whole institution loses trust, respect, and legitimacy. This is burning up social capital built up over the long term for short term gains.

      The temptation to do this to every institution everywhere, no matter what it is supposed to be about, is just irresistible and will happen in short order unless the susceptibility is consciously recognized and explicitly fought against in favor of a conception of excellence and merit that can be separated from politics (which is often very difficult to do).

      This is what we’re seeing happen with everything now. There are ways to stop it, but few are genuinely willing to do what it takes, so we’ll probably just lament ourselves into the abyss until eventually a rival power takes advantage of the chaos and decadence and establishes a new order.

      • I agree, and suggest that these biases manifest themselves across a spectrum of “intellectual rot inducement”: with the Oscars, Emmy’s, even Pulitzers being at the low-impact side, and the Nobel Price at the high-impact. The biases associated with the former will routinely result in celebrating obviously mediocre work, so that many if not most can begin to see that the author’s political alignment was all that was being evaluated and rewarded. The Nobel Prize in Economics seems to reward the author’s political alignment as the tie-breaker — gamed to break the same way. This allows sensible people like Tyler Cowen to (credibly) celebrate the (“real”) reasons why (people like) Romer win such awards. (See latest MR post on the subject.) Repeated and unchallenged, this process is likely to produce academics who “may want” to align their political identity the correct way; and a population that intelligence is mostly found among the holders of such political views. (By the way, the Nobel Peace Prize is in the same category as the Oscars.)

  4. “I think of him as sharing Krugman’s tendency to impugn the motives of those with whom he disagrees.”

    I wonder if this reflects the fact that Romer grew up in a political family. His father was the governor of Colorado and his brother was a state Senator.

  5. I’ve long admired Romer’s advocacy of charter cities and economic development zones even if the Honduras venture seems to have gotten tangled up in the courts. In a little bit of appropriate synchronicity, Russ Roberts interviewed the author of a biography on John Cowperthwaite, an individual who was hugely influential in Hong Kong’s rise to prosperity. Cowperthwaite certainly deserves more appreciation. Some of his better quotes:

    – I do not think that when one is speaking of hardships or benefits one can reasonably speak in terms of classes or social groups but only in terms of individuals.

    – One trouble is that when Government gets into a business it tends to make it uneconomic for anyone else.

    – An infant industry, if coddled, tends to remain an infant industry and never grows up or expands.

    – In the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a Government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.

    – We suffer a great deal today from the bogus certainties and precisions of the pseudo-sciences which include all the social sciences including economics.

    Hong Kong was truly blessed to have the benefit of his influence. Given that Milton Friedman spoke a fair amount of about Hong Kong over the years, I can’t help but wonder if Romer was in some way influenced by Cowperthwaite’s success story.

  6. I went to the library yesterday and skimmed through Nordhaus’ climate change book.
    His arguments looked pretty reasonable.

    Does the Nobel committee dislike Robert Barro?

    • Barro is a great economist, but I don’t think he has a “signature” work. He’s made important contributions in many areas, but he’s not “the guy” for a particular field. It’s as if Nobel prizes in economics are awarded for grand slams, not WAR.

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