lit a candle 4h agoMy econ professor at community college used to put Nordhaus's carbon tax slides up every single week, I can still hear him saying price the externality. Found out tonight while scrolling before bed and just sat there for a minute.
Their story
William Dawbney Nordhaus, known to colleagues and students as Bill, was the Yale economist who taught the world to think about climate change as an economic problem. He died on October 30, 2026, at the age of 85, following a battle with an aggressive brain cancer. In 2018 he shared…
William Dawbney Nordhaus, known to colleagues and students as Bill, was the Yale economist who taught the world to think about climate change as an economic problem. He died on October 30, 2026, at the age of 85, following a battle with an aggressive brain cancer. In 2018 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Paul Romer, honoured "for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis."
He was born on May 31, 1941, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, into a family with deep roots in the American Southwest. His grandfather Max Nordhaus had emigrated from Paderborn, Germany, in 1883 and became a leading merchant in New Mexico. His father, Robert J. Nordhaus, served in the Tenth Mountain Division during the Second World War, practised law in Albuquerque with a focus on American Indian law, and was a founder of the Sandia Peak ski area and tramway. His mother was Virginia Riggs Nordhaus. Growing up among mountains, Bill became a lifelong skier and trout fisherman, and as a boy he once tried to predict snowfall with what he later called "quixotic mathematics," because the difference between snow and drought was the difference between happiness and boredom.
He attended Phillips Academy Andover and then Yale, where he studied in the Directed Studies programme and spent his junior year in Paris, earning a certificate from Sciences Po in 1962. He graduated from Yale in 1963 and went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on endogenous technological change under Robert Solow and was mentored by Paul Samuelson. He received his PhD in 1967 and returned to Yale that same year, beginning a career on its faculty that would last more than half a century.
Nordhaus's work ranged unusually widely. With James Tobin he wrote "Is Growth Obsolete?" (1972), which proposed a Measure of Economic Welfare that adjusted national output for leisure, household work and environmental harm. His 1975 paper on the political business cycle examined how elections shape economic policy. He studied the economics of energy and natural resources, built new measures of technological progress, and in a celebrated 1996 study traced the true price of light from ancient oil lamps to modern bulbs, showing how conventional statistics understated gains in living standards.
His most lasting achievement began in the mid-1970s, when, working at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, he built one of the first models linking the economy and the climate. That work grew into the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model, published in Science in 1992, and its regional cousin RICE. DICE allowed policymakers to weigh the damages of warming, such as crop losses and rising seas, against the costs of cutting emissions, and it gave economists a framework for estimating the social cost of carbon. Nordhaus used it to argue that a carbon tax was the most efficient remedy. In later years he championed "climate clubs," groups of nations that would agree on carbon pricing and penalise free riders, the subject of his 2015 presidential address to the American Economic Association.
He also served his country and his university. He was a member of President Jimmy Carter's Council of Economic Advisers from 1977 to 1979. At Yale he served as provost from 1986 to 1988 and as vice president for finance and administration from 1992 to 1993, later helping to design the university's internal carbon charge and serving as an inaugural member and chair of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate. He chaired the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and served as president of the American Economic Association.
For generations of students around the world he was also a co-author, with Paul Samuelson, of the textbook "Economics," beginning with its twelfth edition in 1985. His books included "Managing the Global Commons," "Warming the World," "The Climate Casino" and "The Spirit of Green."
His approach drew criticism as well as praise. Some economists and climate scientists, including Nicholas Stern and Martin Weitzman, argued that the discount rates and damage estimates in DICE understated the risks of severe warming, a debate that sharpened after he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
On the morning his Nobel Prize was announced in October 2018, Nordhaus taught his intermediate macroeconomics class at Yale as scheduled, and his press conference was postponed until he finished. "The most important job I do is teaching," he said. He retired in 2024 as Sterling Professor of Economics, Emeritus.
He lived in downtown New Haven with his wife of more than six decades, Barbara, a clinical social worker and psychoanalyst who worked at the Yale Child Study Center. They had met as students in Paris. He is survived by Barbara, their three children, Jeff, Monica and Rebecca, and three grandchildren, Annabel, Margot and Alexandra. Funeral arrangements are private, and a memorial service will be held in the future.
As he wrote in his Nobel autobiography, "Our futures are not in the stars but in ourselves."
Biography adapted from https://news.yale.edu/2026/10/31/william-nordhaus-nobel-laureate-who-integrated-economics-and-climate-change-devoted-yale.
In their own words
“The signal contribution of economics is to recognize that climate change is a harmful unintended side effect of economic growth. The best remedy for such externalities is a pollution charge or what is now known as a carbon tax.”
Nobel speech, 2018
“Our futures are not in the stars but in ourselves.”
Nobel autobiography
“The most important job I do is teaching.”
On teaching his Yale class the morning of his Nobel announcement, 2018
“As a boy, I once tried to predict future snowfall using some quixotic mathematics because I knew that the difference between snow and drought was between happiness and boredom.”
Nobel autobiography
“As an economist and as a university citizen, Bill Nordhaus pursued the truth with rigor and purpose.”
Richard Levin, former Yale president, 2026
Photos
1William Nordhaus in Stockholm, December 2018
Dec 2018 · by People Forever
that class stuck with you, clearly