William Nordhaus

William Nordhaus did the thing economists almost never do: he counted what the market refuses to count. His 2001 paper on the history of computational costs documented a trillion-fold decline in the price of arithmetic, not estimated but measured, from the mechanical calculators of the 1850s to the microprocessors of 2000. His DICE model connected the global economy to the global climate in a single integrated framework and produced the social cost of carbon—a number that earned him the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics and forced the world to confront, in dollars and cents, the cost of two centuries of unpriced emissions. Both achievements rested on the same conviction: that the most consequential costs are the ones no market spontaneously measures, and that getting the price right is not a technicality but a moral obligation. In the [YOU] on AI Field Guide he stands as the analyst whose framework exposes the same error being made in the