A rather long thread about newly minted Nobel laureate Bill Nordhaus’s “debate” with Nicholas Stern over the vexed issue of discounting. tl;dr: Though very different from one another, I don’t think their views on discounting are inconsistent.
As Robert Nozick wrote of his rival John Rawls's landmark book _A Theory of Justice_, "Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls' theory or explain why not." The same goes for Nordhaus and his pioneering work in climate economics.
For example, Nicholas Stern & Simon Dietz wrote in 2015: "‘To slow or not to slow’ by Nordhaus is a landmark in econ research. As the first analysis of the costs and benefits of policies to abate greenhouse gas emissions, it opened the profession to a new field of application.”
Stern & Nordhaus are standardly treated as rivals, in the way Nozick & Rawls definitely were. The key issue that is supposed to divide them is discounting, which concerns the relative weight economic models give to future costs & benefits, compared to equivalent c’s and b’s today
Both Nordhaus & Stern work within the framework pioneered 90 years ago this year by Frank Ramsey (whom the Nobel committee bizarrely mis-cites as “A.S. Ramsey” in its Nordhaus background document). Their disagreement is about how to calibrate of a famous equation named for Ramsey
