How much are we willing to pay to save the little girl on the train tracks?
Economist Partha Dasgupta tackled that question in a recent lecture, part of the Economics of Climate Policy Workshop Series, hosted by APS, ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability, and the W. P. Carey School of Business. Sir Dasgupta is the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics and fellow of Kings College at the University of Oxford. Dasgupta framed his analysis of the issue in the context of three seminal books on the economics of climate change: “Managing the Global Commons: The Economics of Climate Change,” written in 1994 by William Nordhaus; “The Economics of Global Warming,” written in 1992 by William Cline; and “The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change,” written in 2006 by Sir Nicholas Stern. In each book, the author makes a policy recommendation on how we should approach climate change issues. Cline and Stern come to similar conclusions, that we should take immediate, strong global action to combat climate change. The most recent of the two — the Stern report — sug
