Spirit of green: the economics of collisions and contagions in a crowded world
Rebecca Peters
Abstract
Economics offers an enticing promise: to apply rationality and efficiency to the study of topics including human behaviour and the environment. Considering economists' wide remit, John Maynard Keynes commented in 1935 that their ideas ‘are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else’. Yet the underpinning assumption of mainstream economics—that resources may be tidily divided and privately owned—does not map neatly onto the wild contours of the natural world, dooming elegant solutions to failure when they inevitably clash with the realities of power relations imbued in policy processes. In Spirit of green, William D. Nordhaus contributes a timely account of the application of economic thought to environmental topics. As the author or editor of more than 20 books, Nordhaus has an indisputable credibility—as confirmed by the award of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis. This new...