Reader Mike Martin points to an initiative called the Copenhangen Consensus being promoted by The Economist and Bjorn Lomborg’s Environmental Assessment Institute in which nine economists, including four Nobel prizewinners, are supposed to set priorities for global challenges, notably including global warming and sanitation and water. As regular readers will know, one of Lomborg’s favorite arguments is that money spent on mitigating global warming would be better allocated to clean water, a point on which I’ve repeatedly challenged his consistency and sincerity. (Start here and work back).
So who’s on the panel. The list is (with Nobel prizewinners indicated by asterisks)
1. Jagdish Bhagwati
2. Robert Fogel*
3. Bruno Frey
4. James Heckman*
5. Justin Yifu Lin
6. Douglass North*
7. Thomas Schelling
8. Vernon L. Smith*
9. Nancy Stokey
What can we say about this list? The Nobel prizewinners are obviously eminent, but they’re not the names that spring to the front of my mind when I think about a question like setting global priorities for development and the environment. Heckman is a micro-econometrician, Smith is an experimenter, focusing on micro issues, and Fogel and North are economic historians (North’s ideas are relevant to the big-picture issues of growth and development, so he’s a partial exception, but only a partial one).
The problem becomes clearer when I consider the names of those Nobelists who would be obvious candidates, including Kenneth Arrow, Joseph Stiglitz, James Mirrlees, Robert Solow and Amartya Sen. All of these economists have made extensive contributions to the theory of economic growth and development, and all have been keenly interested in environmental issues. Unfortunately for Lomborg, though, all except Mirrlees[1] are strong supporters of action to mitigate global warming. Having looked at the absentees, I look back at the list of inclusions and note that the one thing they have in common is that they are all generally regarded as right-wing.
It might be argued that Arrow and the others, having already expressed a viewpoint, have been excluded for that reason. But Schelling and Bhagwati have been equally active in the debate, Schelling arguing that global warming is not a big problem and Bhagwati on the free-trade side of the trade and environment debate.
Of the remaining panellists, Frey is a public choice theorists whose views are consistent with those I’ve mentioned above. I’ve only seen one paper by Lin (on reform in China) but that also seemed consistent. I’ve only ever read technical papers by Stokey (very good ones, I should say) so I can’t comment on her views.
All things considered, I will be very surprised if this panel comes up with the conclusion that mitigating global warming should be a high priority for the world.
Update: As several commentators have noted, we have yet to see what conclusion the panel reaches. If, contrary to my expectation, the panel correctly concludes that a global emissions trading system for greenhouse gases would both contribute to the mitigation of global warming and, by transferring tens of billions of dollars to poor countries, facilitate meeting the other challenges, I’ll happily, if a bit shamefacedly, take back everything I’ve said in criticism of Lomborg.
fn1. Mirrlees was very critical of the Club of Rome as I recall, and this might lead to the supposition that he would support Lomborg’s viewpoint. But it was pretty hard for an economist not to be criticial of the Club of Rome. Perhaps readers can advise if Mirrlees has taken a public position on the issue of global warming.
John Quiggin 
John – I’m surprised that Douglass North is regarded as right-wing (I note you include him as a partial exception on the big picture growth and development thinking). I’ve been using a lot of North’s writing in support of some work I’ve been doing on institutions and I must say it does not lead to right-wing sorts of conclusions. Perhaps I’m only aware of a partial sample of his work? Interested in your comments.
North’s ideas can be carried in a number of different directions, and he’s not a simpleminded free-market ideologue by any means. Still, I’d stand by the view that he’s generally regarded as right-wing.
Here, for example is a very favourable assessment by Wolfgang Kasper. And here’s an Austrian economics research program for which North is listed as a program advisor along with James Buchanan.
Playing the man and not the ball hey John? Sir Humphrey would have been proud of you.
SW:
Since there is no ‘ball’ at this moment, the ‘man’ is the only thing anyone can critique. No doubt when the ball rolls out we’ll see comdenation of that as well, if the group is as ideologically biased as Prof Q. makes out.
I don’t think that you can easily characterise Bhagwati as right-wing either. True, he’s a bosster for free trade (though not free capital movement). But if that makes you right wing then so was Marx and so are Krugman and Sen. And of course Bhagwati is one of the regular short-price favourites for the Nobel.
Are we talking about the same Bruno Frey – the one who’s into happiness research? His “money isn’t everything – localised democracy is” line is surely closer to people like “small is beautiful” Schumacher than the Virginia school. And he could also get the big gong one day too.
Also, if they’ve left the left-wing (by economist standards) Nobelists out (Solow, Sen), they’ve also left out the hard right ones (Friedman, Becker, Mundell, Baumol etc).
Baumol (a) hasn’t won the Nobel prize and (b) is not a right winger, by any standards.
Mundell fell in with rightwingers (the supply side side cranks) about 25 years ago but was back in the mainstream by the early 90s.
DD, if you reread the post you’ll see that I was careful not to describe either Bhagwati or Schelling as a rightwinger. They are, however, people whose views on the issue in question are well-known.
Oh, well, at least it’s nice to see that everybody implicitly recognises that you can find an economist to support just about any policy proposition from far-“left” to far-“right” if you look hard enough, and that with the right publicity you can score valuable PR points by forming the selected people into a chorus line. If the cast for this new performance realised how jaded the audience has become, maybe they would think twice.
The biggest imbalance displayed by this panel is surely that it is full of economists. Where are the hydrogeologists, climatologists, ecologists, agricultural scientists, epidemiologists etc who would be required to produce a decision based on informed evaluation of the real data with minimal skew from economic ideology?
For more info about the speakers, see some of the biographies I’ve been collecting, linked to from http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Copenhagen_Consensus. And add to them if you have time!
We have decided that this exercise is important enough – and could eventually be misleading enough – to warrant independent coverage and discussions in The Commons Sustainability Agenda at http://ecoplan.org. You are welcome to check it out and join in with your critical comments and observations in the Discussion Forum which you will find on the site
We would also like to see if there might be any interest here for us to organize an “Always On” Poster Session to cover some of the goings on in Copenhagen. Let us know via postmaster@ecoplan.org if you might be interested in taking part in such an open exchange (you will need a broadband connection and a good quality web cam… details on how this works can be had from our colleagues from SUNET – (Swedish University Computer Network) at http://www.meetings.sunet.se/index.html)
Lomborg recently announced the “opponents” for his experiment, though I’m not quite clear what they’re in opposition to; see halfway down the History section for a paragraph about the climate change experts. They may have some qualified support for emmissions trading, etc, but are still anti-kyoto.
Attempts to classify the participating economists in terms of left and right may not be very helpful and risks to put too much stress on the perception of the Copenhagen Concensus initiative as a kind of right wing coup d’etat of the research world.
More to the point is that a good part of the participants can be regarded as true and unconditional believers of as much market liberalisation as possible. No wonder that far reaching world wide liberalisation of markets is perceived as an almost heavenly state for mankind.
It is astonishing that the abundant evidence of the risks of mismanagement of market liberalisation is ignored.
On the other hand climate and its change, being in fact an international public good, constitute a profound problem for the unconditional market believers. An international public good requires public intervention at an international level, which is extremely difficult to organise. To dispose of the Kyoto Protocol, is to dispose of very precious international social capital, notwithstanding the weaknesses in it.
In the used assessment models taxes or tradable permits, representing in fact publicly defined scarcity, cause always extra cost while the dynamic effects of speeding up sustainable transformation are usually left out (the static effects are there of course). In the very long run these dynamic effects get really substantial.
Another point is that many of the discussed issues are interlinked. There is a growing body of literature pointing at the fact that integrated climate policy would address many of these other issues or at least attenuate them. In general it seems that the ranking by the expert group does not account for interaction effects. No doubt that The Economist will be extremely happy with the no.1 ranking of ‘world wide liberalisation of markets’.
Copenhagen Con ?
I’ve written a couple of posts critical of the Copenhagen Consensus exercise being run by Bjorn Lomborg”s Environmental Assessment Institute and The Economist. The stated objective is to take a range of problems facing developing countries,…