2015 Chapters (Layout Features)

The planet won’t notice you recycle, and your vote doesn’t count

Wagner, Gernot; Weitzman, Martin L.

Put a group of economists in a room to debate the wisdom and virtue of individual action, and soon they’ll be debating the value of casting one’s vote: zero—in some strict, narrow, “economic” sense of the world.

We can’t leave things there. It would be both rather depressing and also rather narrow-minded. Maybe statistics and economics alone aren’t the right tools with which to analyze one’s personal action. Ethics, for one, plays an important role.

Excerpted from “Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet” by Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman.