I returned from a long trip and an arduous conference last week to learn that two important economists had passed away, Bill Nordhaus, who won a Nobel, and Jim Andreoni, who could have.
Nordhaus' work on climate change was prescient, and is well known. Here's the Nordhaus obit from Yale:
William Nordhaus, Nobel laureate who integrated economics and climate change, devoted Yale citizen Oct 31, 2026 By Penelope Laurans
"William Nordhaus ‘63, Sterling Professor of Economics who won a Nobel Prize in 2018 for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis, died Oct. 30 at age 85.
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Jim Andreoni was a multi-talented scholar of public goods, well known in the experimental economics community. The work that in my mind made him a Nobel candidate was his work on different forms that altruism can take.
Two of his papers that I really like are
Andreoni, James. "Impure altruism and donations to public goods: A theory of warm-glow giving." The economic journal 100, no. 401 (1990): 464-477.
and
James Andreoni, Justin M. Rao, and Hannah Trachtman, Avoiding the Ask: A Field Experiment on Altruism, Empathy, and Charitable Giving. Journal of Political Economy 2017 125:625-653.
The first of those, a theory paper, I think of as one of the foundational papers about effective altruism, but from the point of view that much altruism is not primarily of the effective sort.
The second paper is an experiment that I'll present to my class today, in Jim's memory.
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Vigorous, personal disagreement about what constitutes altruism in organ donation and transplantation was what made my Geneva conference so arduous (and what makes the kinds of controversial markets I discuss in Moral Economics so controversial:).
Monday, October 26, 2026 Brocher conference on boundaries for incentives in organ donation Oct 27-29 in Geneva
(No description of the conference has been posted yet, but it was hot and heavy, and everyone was an altruist...)
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