A Nobel Prize in Honor of Economic Growth
William Nordhaus and Paul Romer have spent their careers studying ways to make and keep economies strong.
Two deserving laureates.
Photographer: Henrik Montgomery/AFP/Getty Images
This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics went to William Nordhaus and Paul Romer, both very deserving and indeed anticipated picks. Nordhaus is best known for his models of the cost of climate change, and Romer for his work on the dynamics of ideas and economic growth. These might seem like disparate contributions, but there are common strands in their work.
Both Nordhaus and Romer are doers, not just thinkers. Nordhaus hasn’t restricted his activities to academia, but rather has spent most of his career pushing for better environmental policy. He was an early promoter of the carbon tax, and he built models to estimate the cost of climate change. He constructed those models so they could be used by actual policymakers, not to impress his fellow academicians with his technical prowess.