Nordhaus began contemplating the economics of climate change in the 1970s, when few economists — or anyone else — were thinking about or studying it. The DICE model that he developed — together with his dozens of articles, worldwide lectures, and numerous books — paved the way for a vast body of research which continues to frame the ongoing debate on how best to address the threat of climate change.
Along the way, Nordhaus served his field and the nation: as an editor of scientific journals, a member of the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Experts, the first chairman of the Advisory Committee for the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a chairman of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a distinguished fellow and president of the American Economic Association.
Not to be ignored among his extraordinary accomplishments is his co-authorship of multiple edits of the textbook “Economics.” The textbook, first published in 1948 by economist Paul Samuelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics, remains the standard-bearer for the principles of economics courses nationwide. Nordhaus became co-author in 1985 and continued as the primary author, revising and updating it after Samuelson’s 2009 death, and maintaining it through its most recent 19th edition. In recent years he was working on a project through Lighthouse Books to make an economics textbook freely available to all learners.
William Nordhaus was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his family gained prominence for its many civic contributions. His father, a Yale College and Yale Law School graduate, made his law firm one of the nation’s most prominent advocates of Indian law, focusing on the representation of American Indian tribes, tribal corporations, and Native American organizations; in 1984 his firm won a landmark water case for the Jicarilla Apache Nation. He also pioneered skiing in New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains and founded what became the Sandia Peak Ski Area, located in the Cibola National Forest. The younger Nordhaus remained a skier all his life.
Nordhaus arrived at Yale as an undergraduate in 1959, an event that he called “one of the great windfalls of my life”; he described Yale as a “paradise for minds coming to the age of abstract reason.” He took Directed Studies (DS), an intensive program for first-year students, and was taught by professors Vincent Scully, Leonard Krieger, Victor Brombert, and Richard Bernstein. These scholar-teachers, Nordhaus would say, “were role models for his future academic life.” He went on to graduate school at MIT, another place he thought of as a kind of paradise – he called it “Arcadia.” He was mentored there by Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, and his class was filled with young economists who would also become leaders of their generation.
Hired as an assistant professor at Yale right after completing graduate school, Nordhaus from the start on was involved in university affairs. The opposite of an insular scholar, he was an important figure in his department and on campus, teaching undergraduates as well as graduate students and appearing regularly at Connecticut Hall faculty meetings. When a Faculty of Arts and Sciences faculty senate was established, in 2015, he was one of its inaugural members and later its chair.