William Nordhaus

Origins and early life

William Dawbney Nordhaus was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 31 May 1941, the third of four children of Virginia Riggs and Robert Nordhaus, a lawyer and Tenth Mountain Division veteran who built a ski area on the Sandia Mountains. His father had, in his son's words, a German-Jewish background: the family's roots in the Southwest went back to nineteenth-century German Jewish immigration, and his grandfather Max Nordhaus had emigrated from Paderborn in 1883.

His place in this directory is by descent, through his father's family; his Nobel autobiography, which names that background, says nothing of a religious upbringing in his childhood, Jewish or otherwise.

Work and career

He went to Phillips Academy and to Yale, spending a year in Paris where he met his future wife, Barbara Feise, and after graduating in 1963 took his doctorate at MIT in 1967. He then joined the Yale faculty for good, and served on President Carter's Council of Economic Advisers from 1977 to 1979 and as Yale's provost from 1986 to 1988. Spending a year from 1974 in Vienna at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, he built what he describes as the first integrated assessment model of climate-change economics, and in 1977 he read the price it put on carbon dioxide as a carbon tax.

That work led to the DICE model, published in Science in 1992, which joins emissions, the carbon cycle, the climate and economic damage in one system and is used to examine policies such as carbon taxes. From 1985 he was co-author with Paul Samuelson of the textbook Economics, and he later proposed climate clubs, in which countries agree a minimum carbon price and tax imports from those that stay out.

Recognition

The 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was divided equally between him, “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis”, and Paul Romer, for doing so with technological innovation.