Martin Weitzman

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Martin Lawrence Weitzman (born April 1, 1942 in New York City , † August 27, 2019 in Newton (Massachusetts) ) was an American economist and most recently a professor at Harvard University .

Life

Weitzman was born as Meyer Levinger. His birth mother died before his first birthday, and his father gave him to an orphanage. He was adopted by Samuel and Fannie Weitzman and given the new name Martin Lawrence Weitzman.

Weitzman received a BA in Mathematics and Physics from Swarthmore College in 1963 and an M.Sc. in Statistics and Operations Research from Stanford University . He received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967 . Weitzman then taught economics at Yale University . From 1974 to 1989 he was a professor at MIT, since 1989 professor at Harvard University. In 2018 he officially retired.

Weitzman committed suicide on August 27, 2019.

research

In his scientific career Weitzman was active in numerous research fields; he usually worked alone. He was best known for his numerous contributions to environmental economics , in particular to the economic consequences of global warming . He also coined the term share economy , by which he meant a participation of the workforce in the profits of a company. In 2018 he was traded as a possible winner of the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for economics , which William Nordhaus ultimately received in the field of climate economics .

Environmental Economics and Policy

At the beginning of his career Weitzman dealt with the centrally planned economy and the comparison of economic systems. His well-known and groundbreaking contribution Prices vs. Quantities for comparing price- and volume-based instruments of environmental policy was a by-product of this early work. With this article, published in 1974, he founded the comparative analysis of market-oriented instruments for reducing emissions in environmental economics .

In the 1990s, Weitzman turned again increasingly to environmental economics. His work during this period initially dealt with the question of how “ diversity ” can be quantified and assessed, and with the present value of future environmental damage (→ social discount rate ). He showed that the uncertainty about future environmental damage (or more generally about future consumption options) means that the social discount rate should decrease hyperbolically.

Weitzman plan

The Weitzman Plan is a plan to combat unemployment . The starting point here is insufficient wage flexibility . The core of the concept is the division of the employees' income into a fixed ( collective bargaining ) and a variable part ( profit-related ). The publication of the book Share Economy (1986), in which Weitzman presented his idea, sparked a lively debate in which Lawrence Summers , William Nordhaus and James Tobin participated.

Climate economics

In the course of the scientific debate about the Stern Report from 2006, Weitzman developed a novel concept that he called The Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change . He built on the findings of climate research concerning the climate sensitivity , a critical variable in the modeling of climate change , and argued that the risk of catastrophic climate change, albeit small, can not be assumed to be negligible. In a model developed by Weitzman, this leads to the realization that a cost-benefit analysis will always turn out to be in favor of rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of the other parameters, solely due to the possibility of a climate catastrophe ( Dismal theorem ).

Awards

Works

Articles (selection)

  • Martin L. Weitzman: Prices vs. Quantities . In: The Review of Economic Studies . tape 41 , no. 4 , October 1974, p. 477-491 , doi : 10.2307 / 2296698 .
  • Martin L. Weitzman: On Diversity . In: Quarterly Journal of Economics . May 1992, doi : 10.2307 / 2118476 .
  • Martin L. Weitzman: On the 'Environmental' Discount Rate . In: Journal of Environmental Economics and Management . March 1994, doi : 10.1006 / jeem.1994.1012 .
  • Martin L. Weitzman: The Noah's Ark Problem . In: Econometrica . November 1998, doi : 10.2307 / 2999617 .
  • Martin L. Weitzman: Gamma Discounting . In: American Economic Review . March 2001, doi : 10.1257 / aer.91.1.260 .
  • Martin L. Weitzman: On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change . In: Review of Economics and Statistics . February 2009, doi : 10.1162 / rest.91.1.1 .
  • Martin L. Weitzman: Fat Tails and the Social Cost of Carbon . In: American Economic Review . May 2014, doi : 10.1257 / aer.104.5.544 .

Monographs

  • Martin Weitzman: The share economy. Conquering stagflation . Harvard University Press, Cambridge / Massachusetts 1984, ISBN 0-674-80582-8 ; German translation: The participation model. Full employment through flexible wages . Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1987, ISBN 3-593-33847-5 .
  • Martin Weitzman: Income, wealth, and the maximum principle . Harvard University Press, Cambridge / Massachusetts 2003, ISBN 0-674-01044-2 .
  • Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman: Climate Shock - The Extreme Economic Consequences of Climate Change . Ueberreuter, Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-8000-7649-9 (English: Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet . Princeton 2015. Austrian Science Book of the Year 2017).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Sam Roberts: Martin Weitzman, Virtuoso Climate Change Economist, Dies at 77th New York Times , September 4, 2019, accessed September 5, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c Robert Stavins: A poison did keeps on giving: The contributions of Martin Weitzman to environmental economics. In: VOX CEPR Policy Portal. September 9, 2019, accessed September 18, 2019 .
  3. ^ A b c Christian Gollier: A Personal Biography of Marty Weitzman . In: Environmental and Resource Economics . tape 74 , p. 943-947 , doi : 10.1007 / s10640-019-00378-z .
  4. ↑ Martin L. Weitzman: Prices vs. Quantities . In: The Review of Economic Studies . tape 41 , no. 4 , October 1974, p. 477-491 , doi : 10.2307 / 2296698 .
  5. ^ Xiang-Yu Wang and Bao-Jun Tang: Review of comparative studies on market mechanisms for carbon emission reduction: a bibliometric analysis . In: Natural Hazards . 2018, doi : 10.1007 / s11069-018-3445-2 .
  6. ^ Olaf Hübler: The Weitzman Plan ( Memento from August 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) . In: Wirtschaftswwissenschaftliches Studium (WiSt), Volume 18, Issue 4 (April 1999), p. 189.
  7. ^ Martin Weitzman: On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change . In: The Review of Economics and Statistics . XCI, no. 1 , 2009, p. 1–19 ( available online [PDF]).
  8. ↑ 2011 Awards Program. (PDF) Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2012, archived from the original on May 18, 2015 ; accessed on May 12, 2015 .
  9. ^ Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. ase.tufts.edu, accessed October 12, 2015 .
  10. ^ Review: William D. Nordhaus : A New Solution: The Climate Club . In: The New York Review of Books . June 4, 2015 ( html ).
personal data
SURNAME Weitzman, Martin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weitzman, Martin Lawrence (full name); Weitzman, Martin Levinger
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist
DATE OF BIRTH April 1, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH 27th August 2019
Place of death Newton (Massachusetts)