22
When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics
(theintercept.com)
I recall hearing once that economists are people who would approach the study of horses by sitting in an office and thinking about what they would do if they were a horse.
If I needed advice about horses, I'd be more inclined to take it from a scientist who has been out in the fields and looked at horses, rather than an economist who thinks they know everything about horses because they spent an afternoon imagining what they would do if they were a horse.
Edit: I just had to share this snippet from the article. For those who don't have time to read the whole thing, this really sums up the idiocy of the economist in question.
Nordhaus calculates GDP of a particular location as fundamentally related to the temperature of that place. So, if in 2023 it’s a certain temperature in London, and the GDP in London is such-and-such, it’s reasonable to assume that when latitudes north of London rise in temperature in the future, GDP will rise to be the same as London’s today.
Edit2:
Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.