Addressing climate change with meaningful policy action will be neither cheap nor easy, but presently the greatest barrier to action in the United States is not technological, nor perhaps even economic, but fundamentally political. This becomes a theme in my latest podcast, where I engage in a wide-ranging conversation about economics, politics, and climate change with Gernot Wagner, Clinical Associate Professor at New York University, and former staff economist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
You can hear our complete conversation in the podcast here.
Wagner, whose career also includes time spent as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and a journalist at the Financial Times, brings to his thinking about the economics of climate change policy a rich and varied set of perspectives gained through his years of multi-sectoral experience.
He is a graduate of Harvard College, where he took my environmental economics course as a freshman (and then proceeded to receive the highest grade in the class). In addition, I had the privilege of serving as chair of Gernot’s dissertation committee when he received his Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard in 2007.
“I went to meet Marty on a Thursday that week,” Wagner recalls in our podcast conversation. “I remember Marty sitting me down and first of all, taking me seriously…much like you did. You did try to dissuade me from taking your class, but then I ended up taking it later that year. But Marty sat me down and guided me through, maybe in an attempt at dissuading me frankly of wanting to become an environmental economist or academic.”
In my podcast conversation with Gernot, we turn to the topic of current-day climate policy, and Wagner sounds cautiously optimistic about the chances that the United States will meet the Biden Administration’s recently announced commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by 50-to-52 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030, saying that it would be technically and economically feasible, although politically difficult.
“I’d like to think I can make a cogent argument for why it will happen, and this administration is uniquely positioned to make it happen. And the approach it is taking seems to be on the right path,” Wagner says, while also admitting that it will be a challenge for the administration to get any meaningful climate policy through a divided Congress.
Wagner also expresses his hope for establishing a carbon price of between 60 and 300 dollars per ton to provide incentives for companies and industries to reduce CO2 emissions. Exxon, he notes, has recently come out in support of a carbon price of 50 dollars per ton, but Democrats in Washington are not satisfied with that proposal.
“The progressives in the House wants something that has a higher price equivalent. The Biden Administration might be slightly less ambitious on that front,” he says. “All of it is still much more ambitious than the…simple 50 dollar per ton of CO2 carbon tax.”
At the end of our conversation, I ask Wagner for his thoughts on the youth climate movements that became prominent in 2019.
“What we do see is amazing action in the right direction, on a whole lot of different dimensions,” Gernot remarks. “Now we are back to – what should this movement push for? And frankly, now we are back to the raw politics of it all. It’s very, very difficult to see – the one simple approach that will just solve it all. That basically doesn’t exist. It exists in theory, maybe. Not in practice.”
David Keith, professor at Harvard and a leading authority on geoengineering
Joe Aldy, professor of the practice of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, with considerable experience working on climate change policy issues in the U.S. government
Scott Barrett, professor of natural resource economics at Columbia University, and an authority on infectious disease policy
Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University, and founding co-director of the Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School.
Sue Biniaz, who was the lead climate lawyer and a lead climate negotiator for the United States from 1989 until early 2017.
The world lost a remarkable scholar, a great economist, and a gentle soul on August 27th of this year, when Martin Weitzman sadly passed away. In my previous post at this blog (A Gift that Keeps on Giving: The Contributions of Martin Weitzman to Environmental Economics), I described in detail how Marty’s contributions advanced the thinking of environmental and other economists, as well as the thoughts and actions of policymakers on many fundamental issues, including policy instrument choice, discounting, species diversity, and environmental catastrophes.
Today I wish to follow up on that essay to inform readers of my blog that on Saturday, October 26th, at 1:00 pm, a Memorial Service for Marty Weitzman will be held at Harvard’s Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a reception following at the Harvard Faculty Club.
Marty Weitzman was a real treasure – a ‘gift that kept on giving’ – for both the research and policy worlds. His work changed the way economists and others think about the environment and policies to protect it. Marty was – and is – a gift that keeps on giving.
The world lost a remarkable scholar, a great economist, and a gentle soul on August 27th, when Martin Weitzman sadly passed away.
A week later, I was asked by the editors of the VOX CEPR Policy Portal (of the Centre for Economic Policy Research) – “research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists” – to write a brief intellectual biography and personal remembrance of Marty Weitzman, my colleague, friend, and long-time co-host of the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Economics and Policy. In the essay I wrote, I sought to describe how Marty’s contributions have advanced the thinking of environmental and other economists, as well as the thoughts and actions of policymakers on many fundamental issues, including policy instrument choice, discounting, species diversity, and environmental catastrophes. Today, I’m offering readers of this blog a slightly edited version of my Vox essay.
Photo Credit: Gernot Wagner
Martin Weitzman was a treasure – a gift that kept on giving to the research and policy worlds – for Harvard, for economists around the world, and for the global intellectual community. His work as an economic theorist who addressed a broad set of problems, and as an environmental economist who during the past decade focused on climate change, was unparalleled, and formed the basis for theoretical and empirical work carried out by legions of economists and other scholars around the world. His contributions to environmental economics in particular were unprecedented, and helped to shape the field for nearly five decades.
If economic theory is about stripping a problem down to its absolute essentials, and deriving meaningful insights from those essentials, then Weitzman was a master. Over and over again, Marty Weitzman demonstrated how careful and rigorous analysis of artfully constructed theoretical models can provide valuable and often surprising insights into difficult economic problems with real implications for the design of public policies.
Marty’s contributions have advanced the thinking of environmental economists and policymakers on policy instrument choice, discounting, species diversity, environmental catastrophes, and other fundamental issues. Across the board, the example of his rigorous and often ingenious work set high standards for theorizing in environmental economics and thereby served to elevate the entire field.
At the start of his research career, Weitzman studied centrally planned economies in a field that has all but disappeared from academic economics – comparative economic systems. It was during this early period of his career that Marty’s papers with titles such as ‘Soviet Postwar Economic Growth and Capital Labor Substitution’ (1970b) and ‘Iterative Multi-Level Planning with Production Targets’ (1970a) appeared.
A remarkable product of his interest in how to manage a centrally planned economy efficiently was Marty’s classic paper on ‘Prices vs. Quantities’ (1974). He began this work to address the question of whether prices or production quotas would lead to more efficient outcomes in a centrally planned economy (under conditions of uncertainty), but the paper and the subsequent literature evolved to address the question of whether a price instrument or a quantity instrument will be more efficient for environmental regulation.
Although Marty began his first forays into research and writing on environmental and natural resource problems in the 1970s (some of it developing Marxian views of common property problems), it was not until the 1990s that he turned with such passion and energy to this realm, and produced one important work after another that virtually span the field. That outpouring coincided with the beginning of my collaboration with Marty, co-hosting the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Economics and Policy (more on this below).
The share economy
Along the way, Weitzman carried out important research in macroeconomics and unemployment theory. One product of this – along with dozens of journal articles (inevitably in the top periodicals) – was his best-selling 1984 book, The Share Economy – which was eventually translated into seven languages. In this brief (167-page) book, Marty laid out his proposal for how the US economy could be protected from the dual threats of unemployment and inflation with a remarkably simple idea (a hallmark of many of his contributions) – namely that instead of companies paying workers in manufacturing a fixed wage, they be paid through something akin to profit sharing, in particular by paying workers a significant share of company revenue.
In short, this would provide incentives for companies to continue adding workers as long as, through their work, they added to company revenues. This ‘novel, seemingly workable plan for equipping the economy to resist the instabilities’ that had plagued it for more than a decade (Passell 1984), was labelled in the headline of a lead New York Times 1985 editorial, ‘the best idea since Keynes’.
Policy instrument choice: prices versus quantities
For environmental economists, Marty’s most prominent contribution is probably his classic 1974 article, ‘Prices vs. Quantities’, which developed the simultaneously simple and powerful insight that – under conditions of uncertainty – the expected relative efficiency of policy instruments based on prices (such as a pollution tax) versus those based on quantities (such as a cap-and-trade system) depends on the relative slopes of the expected marginal benefit and marginal cost functions.
That work remains one of the most frequently cited articles in all of environmental economics. It stimulated a massive literature, a fact that prompted Richard Newell (Resources for the Future) to characterize the work as a ‘gift that keeps on giving’ at a symposium we held at Harvard in October 2018 to mark Marty’s retirement and celebrate his contributions, ‘Frontiers in Environmental Economics and Policy: A Symposium in Honor of Martin L Weitzman’. Even now, Marty’s 1974 paper is at the core of analysis of carbon taxes versus carbon cap-and-trade systems to address climate change (Karp and Traeger 2018; Mideksa and Weitzman 2019; Stavins 2019).
Colleagues who spoke at the celebration of Marty’s work on October 11, 2018, at the Harvard Kennedy School, “Frontiers in Environmental Economics and Policy: A Symposium in Honor of Martin L. Weitzman.” Front Row, left to right: Michael Greenstone, University of Chicago; Maureen Cropper, University of Maryland; Martin L. Weitzman, Harvard University; Robert Pindyck, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; William Nordhaus, Yale University. Back Row, left to right: James Stock, Harvard University; Charles Kolstad, Stanford University; Lawrence Goulder, Stanford University; Robert Stavins, Harvard University; Richard Newell, Resources for the Future. Photo Credit: Martha Stewart
Biodiversity
In the early 1990s, Weitzman responded to what he sensed might be the unwillingness – or the inability – of ecologists to rank ecologies in terms of their relative biodiversity, by producing a series of brilliant treatments of how these comparisons can be made quantitatively and rigorously: ‘On Diversity’ (1992); ‘What to Preserve: An Application of Diversity Theory to Crane Conservation’ (1993); ‘Patterns of Behavior in Biodiversity Preservation’ (Metrick and Weitzman 1996); and ‘The Noah’s Ark Problem’ (1998a). At the Harvard symposium, Charlie Kolstad (Stanford University) cited this body of work for its ‘significance and importance’.
Discounting
It was also in the 1990s that Marty became interested in a central issue of the economic analysis of climate change policies, namely long-term discounting. Given the long time horizons of the climate change problem, analysis of the expected net present value of alternative policies can be dominated by the choice of discount rate, which – with conventional exponential discounting – will greatly diminish the relative quantitative importance of phenomena that are decades or longer in the future.
Through careful theoretical analysis, Marty concluded that rather than a constant discount rate being employed, a rate that itself is diminishing over time is appropriate, so that benefits and costs in the near future would be subject to a typical rate, while benefits and costs further in the future would be subject to a much lower rate.
A topic that has pervaded decades of analysis and commentary in the environmental sphere is the reality that conventional measures of economic growth, such as gross domestic product, are not measures of welfare, since they do not account for externalities (among other non-market economic phenomena). In 1999, the National Research Council published Nature’s Numbers: Expanding the National Economic Accounts to Include the Environment, produced by a committee chaired by Bill Nordhaus and including Marty Weitzman (Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg 1999). That was linked with several contributions that Weitzman subsequently made to the scholarly literature, including: ‘Does NNP Growth Indicate Welfare Improvement’ (Asheim and Weitzman 2001); and ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Welfare Accounting’ (2001b).
At the Harvard symposium, Bill Nordhaus emphasized Marty’s contributions in this realm, and launched his keynote presentation, ‘The Intellectual Footprint of Martin Weitzman in Environmental Economics’, by stating that Marty ‘has changed the way we think about economics and the environment.’ He concluded that ‘those who claim that environmental regulations hurt growth are completely wrong, because they are using the wrong yardstick. Pollution should be in our measures of national output, but with a negative sign, and if we use green national output as our standard, then environmental and safety regulations have increased true economic growth substantially in recent years… For this important insight we applaud Martin Weitzman, a radically innovative spirit in economics.’
Fisheries
Some will be surprised to learn that a theorist such as Marty Weitzman was as immersed as he was in concerns about the real world of natural resource management and environmental protection. One example comes from his research and outreach in the realm of fisheries management. His modelling of Icelandic commercial fisheries affected thinking and discussion around the world regarding the use of taxes and quotas to regulate open-access fisheries.
As Maureen Cropper (University of Maryland) said at the Harvard symposium, ‘this is another example of the use of a simple model and treatment of uncertainty that really did start a conversation among fisheries economists’. This application of Weitzman’s previously developed theory of instrument choice was documented in his 2002 paper ‘Landing Fees vs Harvest Quotas with Uncertain Fish Stocks’.
Fat tails
In recent years, Marty made prominent and important contributions to thinking about long-term climate change policy with his development of a theory of how positive biophysical feedback loops could lead to uncertainty about the damages of climate change that is best characterized by a probability distribution of damages with fat tails, such as a Pareto distribution, rather than a conventional Gaussian (normal) distribution. The result is greater weight being given to catastrophic (but relatively small probability) outcomes.
Speaking at the Harvard symposium, Bob Pindyck of MIT pointed to Weitzman’s prescient 2007 paper, ‘Subjective Expectations and Asset-Return Puzzles’ as having had a profound influence on Marty’s subsequent modelling of catastrophic climate change. A small subset of the papers Marty published on this topic include: ‘On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change’ (2009); ‘Fat-Tailed Uncertainty in the Economics of Climate Change’ (2011); and ‘Fat Tails and the Social Cost of Carbon’ (2014b).
Domestic and international climate change policy
Marty Weitzman always searched for topics for his research that were not only interesting, but also relevant and important for real-world applications. His recent work exploring alternative policy instruments to address climate change and his critical examinations of the form of international climate agreements provide telling examples of this. It was in this regard that Jim Stock (Harvard University) credited Weitzman for the ‘tremendous influence’ his ideas have had on the formulation of public policy around the world.
Just a few of the many papers that could be cited in this context are: ‘Can Negotiating a Uniform Carbon Price help to Internalize the Global Warming Externality’ (2014a); ‘A Voting Architecture for the Governance of Free-Driver Externalities, with Application to Geoengineering’ (2015); and ‘On a World Climate Assembly and the Social Cost of Carbon’ (2017). Also, of course, Marty and his former student, Gernot Wagner, wrote a lucid and compelling book, Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet (2015).
Theoretical foundations for empirical analyses
It should be emphasized that Marty Weitzman’s theoretical work was not only important for other theorists, but also for empirical economists. In many of the realms described above, his insights were fundamental as the foundation for sound empirical analysis. As Michael Greenstone (University of Chicago) noted at the Harvard symposium, Marty’s work ‘takes something you are kind of confused about, and then after you read it, you can’t understand how in the world you were confused beforehand. It just clarifies things in a way that is really beautiful.’
A remarkable scholar
Marty Weitzman was thus a real treasure – a ‘gift that kept on giving’ – for both the research and policy worlds. His work as a theorist on environment broadly and on climate change in particular was unparalleled, and formed the basis of much theoretical and empirical research carried out by others over several decades. His work – from examining price versus quantity instruments in the early 1970s through his examinations in the last few years of the implications of fat tails in the probability distribution of possible climate damages – have changed the way economists and others think about the environment and policies to protect it.
His contributions were well recognized. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1976; a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986; three times won the annual award for ‘Publication of Enduring Quality’ from the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists; received the 20th Anniversary Prize from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, the Leontief Prize, and the Eric Kempe Prize in 2011; and the John Kenneth Galbraith Award in 2013.
Memories
My greatest personal remembrance will be that I learned an immense amount from Marty by co-hosting with him for 26 years the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Economics and Policy. That’s 52 semesters involving more than 400 seminars, each with a distinct paper and presentation by a leading scholar from across the United States and around the world. I found that Marty’s questions and comments were often as insightful as the speaker’s presentation.
Of course, we did not always agree. I remember our spirited discussions contrasting Marty’s strong view of the superiority of carbon taxes and my view of the relative symmetry of price and quantity instruments for climate change. Also we had some long discussions about the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, which Marty saw (accurately) for what it lacks, and I saw for its improvements over the international policy architecture that had preceded it. We disagreed, but were never disagreeable (and I never succeeded in changing his mind!). All in all, for three decades, I consistently learned from this remarkable scholar. He truly was a gift that kept on giving.
Marty receiving from the author a book of testimonials by 100 scholars around the world at the celebration of Marty’s work on October 11, 2018, at the Harvard Kennedy School, “Frontiers in Environmental Economics and Policy: A Symposium in Honor of Martin L. Weitzman.” Photo Credit: Martha Stewart
REFERENCES
Asheim, Geir B, and Martin L Weitzman (2001), ‘Does NNP Growth Indicate Welfare Improvement?’ Economic Letters 73(2): 233-39.
Karp, Larry, and Christian Traeger (2018), ‘Prices versus Quantities Reassessed’, CESifo Working Paper No. 7331.
Metrick, Andrew, and Martin L Weitzman (1996), ‘Patterns of Behavior in Endangered Species Preservation’, Land Economics 72(1): 1-16.
Mideksa Torben, and Martin L Weitzman (2019), ‘Prices versus Quantities across Jurisdictions’, Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists 6(5): 883-891.
New York Times (1985), ‘Best Idea Since Keynes’, Editorial, March 28, Section A, page 30.
Nordhaus, William D, and Edward C Kokkelenberg, editors (1999), Nature’s Numbers: Expanding the National Economic Accounts to Include the Environment, Panel on Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting, National Academy Press.
Passell, Peter (1984), ‘The Editorial Notebook: The Hidden Boon in Profit-Sharing’, New York Times, November 15, Section A, Page 30.
Stavins, Robert N (2019), ‘The Future of U.S. Carbon-Pricing Policy’, NBER Working Paper No. 25912 (http://www.nber.org/papers/w25912).
Wagner, Gernot, and Martin L Weitzman (2015), Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet, Princeton University Press.
Weitzman, Martin L (1970a), ‘Iterative Multi-Level Planning with Production Targets’, Econometrica 38(1): 50-65.
Weitzman, Martin L (1970b), ‘Soviet Postwar Economic Growth and Capital Labor Substitution’, American Economic Review 60 (4): 676-92.
Weitzman, Martin L (1974), ‘Prices vs. Quantities’, Review of Economic Studies 41(4): 477-91.
Weitzman, Martin L (1984), The Share Economy, Harvard University Press.
Weitzman, Martin L (1992), ‘On Diversity’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(2): 363-405.
Weitzman, Martin L (1993), ‘What to Preserve: An Application of Diversity Theory to Crane Conservation’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 108(1): 157-83.
Weitzman, Martin L (1994), ‘On the ‘Environmental’ Discount Rate’, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 26: 200-9.
Weitzman, Martin L (1998a), ‘The Noah’s Ark Problem’, Econometrica 66(6): 1279-98.
Weitzman, Martin L (1998b), ‘Why the Far-Distant Future Should be Discounted at its Lowest Possible Rate’, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 36(3): 201-8.
Weitzman, Martin L (2001a), ‘Gamma Discounting’, American Economic Review 91(1): 260-71.
Weitzman, Martin L (2001b), ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Welfare Accounting’, Scandinavian Journal of Economics 103(1): 1-23.
Weitzman, Martin L (2002), ‘Landing Fees vs Harvest Quotas with Uncertain Fish Stocks’, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 43: 325-38.
Weitzman, Martin L (2007), ‘Subjective Expectations and Asset-Return Puzzles’, American Economic Review 97(4): 1102-30.
Weitzman, Martin L (2009), ‘On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change’, Review of Economics and Statistics 91(1): 1-19.
Weitzman, Martin L (2011), ‘Fat-Tailed Uncertainty in the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change’, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 5(2): 275-92.
Weitzman, Martin L (2014a), ‘Can Negotiating a Uniform Carbon Price Help to Internalize the Global Warming Externality?’, Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists 1(1/2): 29-49.
Weitzman, Martin L (2014b), ‘Fat Tails and the Social Cost of Carbon’, American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 104(5): 544-6.
Weitzman, Martin L (2015), ‘A Voting Architecture for the Governance of Free-Driver Externalities, with Application to Geoengineering’, Scandinavian Journal of Economics 117(4): 1049-68.
Weitzman, Martin L (2017), ‘On a World Climate Assembly and the Social Cost of Carbon’, Economica 84(336): 559-86.
