Manfei He, MEM’19
Many of us have chosen an interdisciplinary program embedding technological education in different market and policy contexts, with the hope to forge a career that can help optimize the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of cool technologies, and achieve their full potential.
This year’s Nobel prize has presented its recognition to the studies of the causes and consequences of economic growth in which technology the social cost of carbon played the central roles in the economic growth models. Their brilliant works on combining extremely complex systems in a simple and explanatory ways has enlightened decades of researches and pioneered the new thinking of growth.
For Paul Romer, the growth theorist who raised the questions and opened the black box on how market generates new ideas and how these new ideas could be translated into growth, knowledge per se cannot lead to sustainable progress. To fully exploit the economic value of technology, and ease the burdens of inequality on our social system, a sharing mindset in economic policy making is the key. (Read: Escape from the great distress the role of rules: technological innovation alone will not revive the U.S. economy. We must also update some of the underlying rules that govern the ways that we make economic decisions)
From Nordhaus, how nature serves as both a constraint and a resource for growth is quantifiable and hence we are able to translate the relationships to actionable policies. Nordhaus managed to integrate the carbon cycle module, the climate system module, and the economic growth module in an interactive way to present us a different view of the global societies. Although there are fundamental uncertainties that beyond the functionality of the model, the different scenarios generated from it are informative pricing the carbon on a global scale. (Read: Revisiting the social cost of carbon)