Professor William Nordhaus awarded 2018 Nobel in Economics
Professor William Nordhaus has received the highest recognition and honor for his work to develop a model of how climate
change impacts the global economy. For decades Nordhaus has worked on broad issues related to economic growth, showing that
traditional measurements of growth understated improvements in the quality of life.
The Nobel committee cited Professor Nordhaus for showing "the most efficient remedy for problems caused by greenhouse gases
is a global scheme of universally imposed carbon taxes." Over the past decade
Glaser Progress Foundation has contributed over $2.7 million to Professor Nordhaus' work.
Program on Nonmarket Accounts
As the centerpiece of a vast and elaborate accounting
system, our country's National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) represent one of the most
important ways we track our nation's economy. These accounts are used by government and
business to judge our nation's economic performance over time, to compare the economies of
different nations, to measure the nation's saving and investment and to track the business cycle.
The most well-known account is the GDP.
But the NIPA measure only market activity — goods and services bought and sold in market
transactions — which distorts the measurement of environmental health and social well-being.
Divorce, disease, pollution and crime make the country appear better off because they drive the
GDP up through increased market activity. Conversely, many valuable services and goods such as
recreation and leisure activities, volunteer work, household labor and parental child care and
investments in human capital generate little or no market activity so they are excluded from the GDP.
In order to improve and modernize our national accounting system, The Glaser Progress Foundation and Yale
economist William Nordhaus developed a ten-year program aimed at building a comprehensive set of nonmarket
satellite accounts for the United States. The Program on Nonmarket Accounts (PNA) helped create
environmental nonmarket accounts in the areas of forestry and pollution, developed a blueprint for constructing
a set of social nonmarket accounts and developed better population time-use data for the United States.
The Glaser Progress Foundation has contributed over $2.7 million to this program initiative.