William Nordhaus

Sterling Professor of Economics and Professor of Environment 

Bill Nordhaus, B.A. Yale University, Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faculty member at Yale since 1967: You are a world-renowned economist whose influential work has ranged widely, from the economics of climate change to the economics of energy, and from the measurement of technological change to the interaction between the business cycle and the election cycle. 

Bringing the highest honor to your university, you were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2018 for your pioneering work studying the interaction between the macroeconomy and the climate, embodied most prominently in the influential DICE model. This model provided the intellectual foundation for the idea of a tax on emissions of greenhouse gases and for quantifying the optimal size of this tax. 

When you began thinking about the economics of climate change in the 1970s, few economists—or others—were thinking deeply about it or studying it. The DICE model, together with your dozens of articles, worldwide lectures, and numerous books, paved the way for a vast array of research which continues to frame the ongoing debate on how best to address climate change. Along the way, you have served your field and the nation: editing scientific journals, as a member of the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Experts, as the first chairman of the Advisory Committee for the Bureau of Economic Analysis, on committees of the National Academy of Sciences, and as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. 

You are a Yale legacy, a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where your family is prominent for its many contributions. Your father, a Yale College and Yale Law School graduate, made his law firm one of the nation’s most prominent advocates of Indian law, and in 1984 his firm won a landmark water case for the Jicarilla Apaches. You arrived here as an undergraduate in 1962, something you have called “one of the great windfalls of my life,” a “paradise for minds coming to the age of abstract reason.” You took Directed Studies (DS) and were taught by Vincent Scully, Leonard Krieger, Victor Brombert, and Richard Bernstein. You have said that these scholar-teachers “were role models for my future academic life.” 

Their influence indeed has been evident in how you yourself have lived your Yale life. You did not restrict yourself to teaching small seminars. For years, you taught large introductory or intermediate lecture courses in macroeconomics. An iconic photo captured you receiving flowers from students in the class you taught on the day you received your Nobel Prize. In teaching that day, you made your point: teaching matters. Perhaps the intellectual and cultural influence of your former teachers also has something to do with why you and your wife Barbara, for many years a clinical social worker at the Yale Child Study Center, are such devoted patrons of the arts in New Haven, New York, and abroad. 

Your influence on campus has been profound. You served a term as provost, you have counseled many university leaders, and you have authored numerous studies and reports, not all publicly known. You and another distinguished Bill in your department of your generation, Bill Brainard, also a former provost, have been known familiarly around campus as “The Bills.”  When people have wanted to make a point about a campus issue, they might invoke “The Bills,” knowing their agreement on an issue would help make any case, as everyone knew they represented brains, integrity, and care for the community. 

You could have left at any time for other universities, but as your teaching and service demonstrate, you have always had a love and loyalty for Yale. It has always been important to this community that such a distinguished scholar took so much care and gave so much attention to matters not directly related to his discipline. 

You have said: “Universities have their own culture, they are ancient institutions, they have long horizons that invest in students when they are young, who will live and be productive as citizens of their country and the world for decades to come.” In your pathbreaking scholarship, teaching, and influence you have made your own important contribution to the future, and in your own words have encouraged many to begin to “overcome the obstacles and take the steps necessary to preserve our unique and beautiful planet.”