William Nordhaus and Paul Romer won the 2018 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday.
Americans William Nordhaus and Paul Romer have won the 2018 Nobel Economics Prize, as their work was helping to answer basic questions over how to promote long-term, sustainable prosperity.
The joint award turned the spotlight on a rapidly shifting global debate over the impact of climate change, as the United Nations panel on climate change said society would have to radically alter the way it consumes energy, travels and builds to avoid the worst effects of global warming hours before the award.
Nordhaus, a professor of economics at Yale University, was the first person to create a quantitative model that described the interplay between the economy and the climate, the Swedish academy said.
As for Paul Romer, is best known for his work on endogenous growth, a theory rooted in investing in knowledge and human capital. He said he had been taken by surprise by the award, but offered a positive message: “I think one of the problems with the current situation is that many people think that protecting (the) environment will be so costly and so hard that they just want to ignore them,”
In the past, U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax, announcing last years the withdraw of the United States from a global pact to combat it reached in 2015, calling the deal’s demands for emissions cuts too costly.
A word form the Nobel committee
Nobel committee chair Per Stromberg told Reuters that the award was honoring research into “two big global questions”: how to deal with the negative effects of growth on the climate and “to make sure that this economic growth leaves prosperity for everyone.”
Monday’s award of the last of the 2018 Nobels took place less than a month after the 10th anniversary of the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers, which triggered an economic crisis from which the world’s financial system is arguably still recovering from.
The economics prize was established in 1968, and worth 9 million Swedish crowns ($1 million).
It was not part of the original group of five awards set out in Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will.
