William Nordhaus

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 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