马丁.维茨曼自杀了! 诺贝尔经济学奖让其无助
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马丁·L·威茨曼（Martin Lawrence Weitzman）出生于1942年，是美国哈佛大学经济系的知名教授。IDEAS/REPEC排行榜指出，他是世界最具影响力的经济学家之一。
在1984年所著的《分享经济》一书中,提出了他的分享经济理论。威茨曼目前的研究重心放在了环境经济学上，尤其是气候变化和灾难经济学。环境经济学主要研究如何充分利用经济杠杆来解决环境污染问题，包括研究社会生产力的合理组织、评估环境治理的投入所产生的效益、制定污染者付费的制度和排污指标转让的金额等，以将环境的价值纳入到生产和生活的成本中去，使环境的价值体现得更为具体。
看这个：https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.env.html#authors
Martin Weitzman, an inventive economist who argued that governments would see climate change as a more urgent matter to address if they took more seriously the small but real risks of the most catastrophic of outcomes, died on Aug. 27 in Newton, Mass. He was 77.
On Wednesday, the Massachusetts medical examiner’s office, which had been awaiting the results of laboratory tests, ruled the death a suicide by hanging. Colleagues said Professor Weitzman had grown increasingly despondent after being passed over for the Nobel Prize in economics last year and had left a note questioning whether he any longer had the mental acuity to contribute to his field.
Most economists have relied on a cost-benefit analysis when considering how ambitiously governments might try to reduce heat-trapping carbon emissions, either by imposing caps on how much can be emitted or by taxing the polluters.
But Professor Weitzman demonstrated that such prevailing cost-benefit analyses understated the small but nevertheless credible risks that worst-case environmental damage posed to the world and its economy, from its agricultural production to its delivery of goods and services. Were governments to take these catastrophic scenarios into account more seriously, he said, they would be more vigorous in their efforts to slow or even reverse global warming.
Robert N. Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at the Harvard Kennedy School and an author of international reports on climate change, said Professor Weitzman had “developed very strong arguments of why — when analyzing the benefits and costs of proposed climate policies — it was essential, from an economic perspective, to take into account the possibility of catastrophic outcomes, despite the fact that their probability might be relatively small.”
In “Climate Shoe human adventure on this planet as we now know it — is too high. And that’s the path the planet is on at the moment.”ck: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet” (2015), Professor Weitzman and his co-author, Gernot Wagner, an economist at New York University, wrote: “One thing we know for sure is that a greater than 10 percent chance of the earth’s eventual warming of 11 degrees Fahrenheit or more — the end of the human adventure on this planet as we now know it — is too high. And that’s the path the planet is on at the moment.”
“Most everything we know tells us climate change is bad,” the authors concluded. “Most everything we don’t know tells us it’s probably much worse.”
His analysis of the economics of climate change became known as the Dismal Theorem.
In an earlier influential paper, written in 1974, Professor Weitzman questioned the conventional view among economists that taxing pollutants was a more effective way to curb them than setting limits on how much pollution could be generated.
He argued that each approach created its own ambiguities: Levying a tax makes it easy to predict the cost of the policy, but not how much companies will continue to pollute. Imposing a cap makes the amount of pollution quantifiable, but not the cost.
His analysis helped lay the groundwork for the so-called cap-and-trade alternative, which imposes a ceiling on pollutants but lets companies set the price in the marketplace by trading permits to pollute within those caps. Cap-and-trade programs have helped reduce acid rain pollution in the United States and are being used to tackle climate change in California and the European Union.
Professor Weitzman addressed another broad economic challenge in his book “The Share Economy: Conquering Stagflation” (1984), in which he proposed that the crippling nexus between unemployment and inflation could be severed by means of profit-sharing; in other words, by linking a substantial portion of workers’ income to a company’s revenue instead of paying a fixed wage.
“He thought of the question, not just the answer,” Professor Stavins said, “and that requires a real spark of brilliance combined with his desire to address pressing real-world environmental problems.”
Professor Weitzman was honored at a symposium at Harvard’s Kennedy School last October as he retired to take the title of research professor. The occasion was bittersweet: It came three days after the announcement of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he and many colleagues thought he would win.
The prize went to two other economists, Paul M. Romer, of New York University, and William D. Nordhaus, an economics professor at Yale. Professor Nordaus was cited for his own advances in environmental economics.
Professor Nordhaus delivered the keynote speech at the Harvard symposium, in which he praised Professor Weitzman for his “radically innovative spirit” in, among other things, positing his Dismal Theorem; assessing the negative impact of pollution on the gross national product; and underscoring the positive effects that gains in health care and education have on the GNP.
“Marty Weitzman was the pre-eminent environmental economist of the modern era, which is to say of all times,” Professor Nordhaus said this week.
Colleagues said that Professor Weitzman had been despondent after he did not win the Nobel, and that his emotional state worsened in the spring, when, in a rare instance in his career, a fellow economist pointed out a mistake in a completed but unpublished paper that Professor Weitzman had circulated.
In a typewritten note that was found after his death, Professor Weitzman said his capacity to solve the kinds of difficult problems to which he had devoted his career was diminishing.
Professor Weitzman taught at Yale, where he began his teaching career in 1967, and M.I.T. before joining the Harvard faculty in 1989. Since 1992, he and Professor Stavins conducted nearly 400 sessions of the Harvard Seminar in Environmental Economics and Policy.
At one point, from a barren island he bought off the coast of Gloucester, Mass., Professor Weitzman spent a year or more immersing himself in Bayesian statistics, which focuses on probability.
Comparing the approaches of Professors Weitzman and Nordhaus, Professor Wagner, of N.Y.U., said, “Bill Nordhaus’s model has famously focused on what’s known, what economists can quantify,” like the costs versus the benefits of shifting away from fossil fuels or the efficacy of taxing carbon emissions versus imposing a cap-and-trade system.
“Marty,” he said, “focused on what we don’t know, can’t quantify, and how that might change the final outcome.”
After he was told that he had won the Nobel, Professor Nordhaus said he had been surprised to learn that he would be sharing it with Professor Romer. “I figured,” he told colleagues at Yale, “it would be a former colleague here, Martin Weitzman, who is an extraordinarily brilliant guy.”
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