William Nordhaus

William D. Nordhaus (born 1941) is an American economist serving as Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, where he has been on the faculty since 1967. He is renowned for developing integrated assessment models that quantify the interactions between economic activity, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate impacts, enabling analysis of optimal policy responses such as carbon pricing. For this pioneering integration of climate change into long-run macroeconomic frameworks, Nordhaus shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Paul Romer. His seminal Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model, introduced in the mid-1990s, incorporates empirical estimates of climate damages and has informed global assessments of the social cost of carbon, revealing that efficient mitigation involves gradually increasing carbon taxes starting at modest levels. While Nordhaus's data-driven approach underscores the potential for economic growth to offset many climate costs and supports market-based solutions over stringent regulations, it has drawn criticism from environmental advocates who argue his damage functions underestimate tail risks and non-market harms, though such critiques often rely on higher uncertainty assumptions rather than conflicting empirical evidence.

William Nordhaus was born on May 31, 1941, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He grew up during World War II in the American Southwest, where his family had longstanding roots. His father, an Army captain of German-Jewish descent, instilled a sense of discipline amid the wartime environment, though Nordhaus later recalled his parents adopting a relatively detached parenting style after raising earlier sons.