The Problem with Nordhaus?

Time to stop bashing those who are nominally on my side, and bash people on the other side, errm, well sort of. The offender today is David R. Henderson of Econlib, although really at Hoover. DH isn't one of the better Econlib folk, though he's generally sensible on economic matters (I've reffed him e.g. here, tangentially) but on GW he goes a bit mad; perhaps this is a good place to drag out my newly-discovered Proverbs 21:16: The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead.

Let's begin by establishing to our own satisfaction that DH is on the clueless-septic fringe: he says Nordhaus challenged a Wall Street Journal article by sixteen scientists who were/are global warming skeptics. There's an arch of the WSJ thing here; it features the usual suspects like Happer and Lindzen, as well as somewhat more surprising nutters like Armstrong, who knows fuck all about GW. DH's problem of course is that he too knows so little about GW that he takes their self-description as sixteen scientists who, implicitly, has some clue as to what they're talking about at face value. He is also so bad at updating that he even approvingly quotes their dumb Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over ten years now. FFS, I thought everyone had given up on the "hiatus" ages ago. I don't think I bothered talk about the WSJ drivel at the time; if you want more detail, try RC.

OTOH, back on the basic econ, he makes several (ex?-)commentators here look like nutters: "innovation generally has contributed to economic growth and economic well-being. But how is the growth from innovation split between the innovators and the consumers who benefit from innovation? In a 2004 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Nordhaus wrote: Only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers. How minuscule? Nordhaus estimated the innovators’ gain to be only 2.2 percent of the overall value they create. The rest is competed away". It is so hard to find people competent at both GW and Econ.

And in other places DH is simply mixed: [Nordhaus] claims that the company suppressed the science of climate change and funded “climate deniers.”. So the suppression claim is of course nonsense (and remains nonsense, even when people who should know better like Rahmstorf twit it), but the funding of denial is I think true.

Incidentally, DH is kicked off by Nordhaus's The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World. And he sez in a 355-page book, Nordhaus hardly discusses the science at all, apparently expecting that an argument from authority is sufficient. Which is to misunderstand; more, I think, signs that DH hasn't been keeping up to date. The point is that the science is now generally agreed (see, e.g., the Alsup case; even the oil companies agreed to take the IPCC as given); why would Nordhaus discuss it, other than to give the general conclusions?

What should DH do? The obvious: write about things he understands: economics, and perhaps the related governance issues. And where he wants to talk about things whose science he doesn't understand, like GW, he should accept authority (which in this case is obviously the IPCC), because this is the only thing you can plausibly do. His mistake is to cherry pick some "experts" with opinions that suit his leanings; per Feynmann, the easiest person to fool is yourself.