PERSON
William Nordhaus
The Nobel Prize–winning economist who quantified a trillion-fold decline in the cost of computation and built the integrated assessment model that connects climate to economics—and whose framework for pricing invisible externalities is the most rigorous available tool for asking what AI truly costs.
William Nordhaus counts things other economists overlook. In 2001 he published a paper that measured the cost of performing a single standardized computation across every major computing technology from the 1850s to the present and found that the cost had declined by a factor of approximately one trillion—five entirely distinct technological paradigms, two world wars, a Great Depression, and the slope never wavered. In 2018 he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for building the DICE model, the first integrated assessment framework connecting the global economy to the global climate and making the social cost of carbon a number governments could use. Both achievements share a method: make the invisible visible, put a price on the unpriced, and force the market to account for what it has been ignoring. The AI moment presents precisely the problem Nordhaus has spent his career solving. The private cost of AI-generated output is collapsing toward zero. The
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