Steve Keen wrote an excellent article in The Mint recently. It began with these paragraphs:
One of the provisions of the Nobel Prize is that once awarded, it can never be revoked. This has led to some embarrassing gaffes with perhaps the worst to date being the award of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918. That went to Fritz Haber, who, as well as inventing what became an essential process in the manufacturing of fertilizer, had personally “supervised the first major chlorine gas attack at Ypres, Belgium, in 1915, which killed thousands of Allied troops,” (Karl Ritter, 2016 Five decisions that made the Nobel Prizes look bad).
Writing for news agency AFP in 2015, journalist, Hugues Honore, reported a comment from Swedish chemist, Inger Ingmanson, who wrote a book about Haber's prize: “After Germany's defeat in the war, he didn't expect to win a prize. He was more afraid of a court martial.”
So William Nordhaus's Nobel Prize in Economics“for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis” is safe. But the world isn't. When future generations look back to try to determine why humanity delayed taking action against climate change for so long, Nordhaus's Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE) model will be regarded as one of the prime suspects.
I recommend the rest.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
The argument doesn’t make sense.
The chemistry of the Haber process works despite what you might think about the inventor, and the chemistry is widely applied.
The Nordhaus model of carbon taxation is not being widely applied. But in the local spaces where it has been CO2 emissions have reduced.
Finally it’s a model – an approximation of the world intended as a useful description of it. Keen’s objection to it is that it doesn’t incorporate the speculative possibility of there being tipping points in the range of temperatures that the earth has already experienced. Over to Keen to write a Nobel winning paper on that and include an explanation as to why it doesn’t apply to the last 200 years, why we are here at all given that the earth has been through the range he mentions many times before, and then how we can do a darned thing about it.
Assymetric carbon taxes are the way to go. An all out lecture tour assault on our developing world cousins saying ‘look at us, we’ve got an authoritarian non-market system now, follow our example’ is not.
John
Wow: you’re at the stage of chemistry that says wat5er can never become a gas because the temperature hasn’t got to 100 degrees yet
Whilst if you think the market will solve the climate crisis you belong on ano9ther planet
Sorry – but you’re just so far wrong it’s really quite scary
Richard
“Finally it’s a model — an approximation of the world intended as a useful description of it.”
The problem is precisely here. Why are they giving Nobel Science Awards to a “science” that does not – as a matter of strict course and expectation – make watertight “useful” predictions (the gold-standard is physics – the science to which economics implausibly aspires to comparison), but instead uses “models” that create ‘usable’ forecasts (forecasts that are actually “used” but frequently fail and are typically useless)? Presumably the economists hope that the word “useful” provides sufficient wriggle room for their feeble econometrics, incapacity to experiment and loose methodology to pass a lower test of success than we might be entitled to expect from a rigorous science. The problem is that economics is better at doing propaganda than delivering utility.
I do not know, with any usable precision, what the expression “approximation of the world” is supposed to mean here. I suppose I could make a case for Peter Pan as an ‘approximation of the world’; but a less convincing case perhaps for Boris Johnson as an ‘approximation of the world’; and he has the advantage of actually existing.
I gather the intention of suggesting the Fauxbel is for the economic sciences is to mislead by suggesting economics is a science when it isn’t. It can’t be either as the construction of proofs and control groups are by definition impossible. It’s an attempt to dignify false and erroneous conclusions and practices a la TINA by associating them with the stature of the Nobel and the integrity, little in evidence these days I know, of science.
The worst aspect for me is Nordhaus’ view that he – one man – can predict or describe how change in nature happens (smooth/gradual vs. tipping point). It is pure arrogance. But also purely Neo-liberal in outlook.
It reminds me of how the Neo-libs over simplify (say) graphs about supply and demand in the economy – they ‘smooth’ over all of the different S & D graphs of all the sectors into one graph and then tell us ‘that is the economy’ and base their policies on that with sometimes disastrous results. It’s complete bollocks – there are many ‘economies’ in the economy just like in Nature there are many and varied dependencies and relationships that create natural phenomena.
Nordhaus created nothing but a theory of convenience for those who want to make money at any cost.
One day, in more enlightened times he will be called a villain, mark my words. As will a certain Mr Freidman, von Hayek etc.
Supply and demand curves can also slope in the directions economists ignore….and change direction too
But no one mentions that in the materials anyone remembers
Absolutely, absolutely ……………….Keen mentions this in his book ‘Debunking Economics’ and points out that such graphical representation is only really a point in time. By the time the politician or economists considers the graph in terms of policy, they are actually looking at static information when in fact the economy has moved on and is – as you say – actually much harder to pin down because it is dynamic in nature – not static.
Nordheim gave the ‘solution’ that suited the politicians of that period; the Nobel Prize followed.
That he was wrong was obvious to anyone with a reasonable understanding of climate and a minimal knowledge of Chaos Theory. My Geography degree, although fifty years old, gave me the first; my husband is a Mathematics graduate, with some knowledge of Physics. So neither of us was surprised by the faulty ‘scientific’ climate part of his argument. Equally, neither of us had, nor has, the academic standing to challenge his propositions in a paper for a scientific journal. I suspect that many others were in a similar position.
The political and economic worlds aren’t constructed around the many, but around the few who have influence. And while it is so, these errors of judgement will continue to proliferate.
Agreed
Let us not forget, when dscussing matters related to the “Nobel Prize for Economics”, that there isn’t one. A Fauxbel Prize then. More here in the recent publication “The Nobel Factor” https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nobel-Factor-Economics-Social-Democracy/dp/069116603X/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=nobel+prize+economics&qid=1564318988&s=books&sr=1-6
“The Nobel Factor tells how the prize, created by the Swedish central bank, emerged from a conflict between central bank orthodoxy and social democracy. The aim was to use the halo of the Nobel brand to enhance central bank authority and the prestige of market-friendly economics, in order to influence the future of Sweden and the rest of the developed world. And this strategy has worked, with sometimes disastrous results for societies striving to cope with the requirements of economic theory and deregulated markets. Drawing on previously untapped Swedish national bank archives and providing a unique analysis of the sway of prizewinners, The Nobel Factor offers an unprecedented account of the real-world consequences”
Thanks Bill
Too true
Many thanks for drawing my (our ?) attention to this article. Have passed it on to my daughter (studying ecology and human interaction), hope she finds it useful.