---
id: people/william-nordhaus
about:
  label: William Nordhaus
  depiction: people/william-nordhaus.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'Bengt Nyman, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.'
  description: >-
    American economist at Yale (1941 to 2026) who built the DICE and RICE models
    of climate and the economy and shared the 2018 Nobel prize in economics.
  tags:
    - integrated assessment
    - climate economics
person:
  affiliation: Yale University
  role: economist
  homepage: 'https://economics.yale.edu/people/william-nordhaus'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: William Nordhaus (Yale Department of Economics)
      url: 'https://economics.yale.edu/people/william-nordhaus'
    - title: William Nordhaus (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Nordhaus'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
William D. Nordhaus was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 31 May 1941 and died on 30 October 2026, aged 85.[^1,2] Yale had him on its faculty from 1967, a professor of economics from 1973 and also a professor at the Yale School of the Environment.[^1] He served on President Carter's Council of Economic Advisers from 1977 to 1979 and as Provost of Yale from 1986 to 1988.[^1] He shared the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis".[^2]

From the 1970s he built the [DICE](/engines/dice-model/) and RICE models, which put the economy and the climate in one model to find an efficient path for dealing with climate change.[^1,2] His books on the subject include Managing the Global Commons in 1994, Warming the World with Joseph Boyer in 2000, A Question of Balance in 2008, and The Climate Casino.[^1,2] With James Tobin he wrote "Is Growth Obsolete?" (1972), which proposed a Measure of Economic Welfare, and he chaired the National Academy of Sciences panel whose report Nature's Numbers set out ways to bring environmental and other non-market activity into the national accounts.[^1,2] He co-wrote the textbook Economics with Paul Samuelson from its 12th edition to its 19th.[^2]