Friday
Nov122010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Advancing hard astern
Nov 12, 2010 Climate: WG3 Economics Congratulations to Nicholas Stern who has been awarded the Leontief Prize for "Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought".
Is it just me that thinks that this award is a pretty damning indictment of the corruption of academia?
Report here.
Reader Comments (31)
Is there a substance inhaled or ingested at colleges that selectively lowers the IQ of academics only? Something sprayed from low-flying planes or shipped in with textbooks or goods used by professors. Or maybe added to the coffee at the college cafeteria, or combined with ivy maintenance spray chemicals. “Egghead-B-Gone” (whatever it is) has struck once again.
Reading this makes me realise what little chance we now have to enjoy unbiased academic research into climate and climate change. All so very sad.
I see, a prize for "Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought" awarded to someone who was a career civil servant and has shown no tangible achievements until producing a widely criticised speculative projection of future economics which kow-towed to the worst case establishment alarmist expectations, and then joined a company trading in Carbon offsets.
They may have picked a winner though. Now with this additional prestige of the Leontief Prize (what?), we may now have to believe Sterns recommendations and start de-carbonising now!
I don't know anything about the Leontief Prize, is it like the Booker Prize? Awarded to the best fiction?
Quote from the article: "that it will award its 2011 Leontief "
It amazes me that you can award a 2011 a.d. prize to someone when we are (I think, maybe I have missed something?) in a.d 2010!
Has time travel been invented at last I wonder?
If so, could they please send someone forward about 100 years. Could that same someone root around in the news media of the day and carry home with them the reports, no doubt hysterically funny, detailing the pseudo science relating to CAGW which was prevalent in our day.
Peter Walsh
I am no great fan of the Stern Report, but Nicholas Stern has had a distinguished academic career and can in no way be described as a career civil servant, see for example this short biography http://www.hsbc.com/1/2/newsroom/news/2007/biography-sir-nicholas-stern
Or you could google his many publications.
@mikep
Fair enough.
http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/dasgupta/STERN.pdf
Interesting comments here on the Stern Review.
@mikep
You are being charitable. One could argue that Lord Stern is a fortunate man and obviously well connected as he has been sacked from, or left prematurely, every serious job he has ever had.
Stern critic,
With respect, this is complete nonsense. He has been employed at Oxford, Warwick, and MIT among other places - some of the best economic departments in the world. People do move jobs, especially in academia. This sort of comment just gives sceptics a bad name. I don't agree with the Stern report - and the link pesadia gives is to a comment by an equally distinguished economist. But pretending that these people are fools is just counter-productive. Stern is no fool. That does not mean that he cannot be wrong, but the way forward is to lay out the arguments why, not cast aspersions.
The thing that stops economics being a real science is that advancement comes not from being proven right but from saying the things that those in charge want said.
I've worked in economics and climate science. I don't particularly respect either, but I respect economics a lot less.
Climate science has math and physics. Economics is very much value judgements.
(why can't you have a one armed economist? Because they are always saying " on the one hand.. but on the other hand..)
mikep
Agreed.
Mike P:
Dasgupta and 'equally distinguished economist'? You have to be kidding. He is head and shoulders above Stern. Let's face it, Stern produced for Gordon Brown an analysis that justified high levels of energy tax - all on the basis of a damage estimate that relied on a misrepresentation of Pielke Jr's research (2% real escalation in damage form extreme weather event over 100s of years) and a ridiculously low discount rate (approaching zero, but well disguised). Fully half the costs used to justify stern policy now occur after the year 2800. Gimme a break.
The surprise that this nonsense on stilts was ever taken seriously. But then it was leaked over the weekend (little competing news, prime the journos), and then released on a Monday (slow news day) at a press conference where the report had not been circulated on an embargoed basis in advance, and no questions were taken. It was considerably more than halfway round the world before critical analysis had its trousers on! Pure spin.
I am not too well up on economics at a greater level beyond reading the histories of economics in the extremes of wartime conditions (eg Galbraith, Niall Ferguson), and I admit my ignorance of Stern's detailed history led to my labelling of Stern as a career civil servant above. But other than at war-time I do find myself feeling disdainful of the practice of economics, it may be unsophisticated of me to say that until I find out more.
However I suspect no matter how much I learn I will still I feel a disdain for grand economic plans for the future that can only be apparently realised by dictat or claims of an artificial war-time like footing. This back slapping award to Stern strikes me as insidious as some of the recent Nobel Peace prizes, a sort wish fulfillment fantasy nudge in the right direction to the powers that be.
Thansk pesadia for that stern review of the Stern Review, I think its last line neatly sums it up:
"But the cause isn't served when parameter values are so chosen that they yield desired answers."
mikep
I looked at the short biography of Stern that you cite as proof of his "distinguished career".
Certainly from 1994 to 2007 he had been a civil servant - at times an international civil servant (what is "working for the World bank" but a civil service appointment?) and at other times a civil servant in the UK. Prior to 1994 he was on the faculty of LSE, latterly being appointed to an economics chair. I note that at the time of that appointment the then Director of LSE was Anthony Giddens a noted apologist for the then Labour government, adviser to Tony Blair and architect of the "Third Way" which, as it turned out, led directly to the ruin of the UK economy and the corruption of its institutions.
Since 2008 he has ben chairman of that distinguished propaganda outfit the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. I don't deny that his career has been "distinguished" but his economics? He was, for instance, one of the notorious 364 economists who wrote to the Times in 1981 to the effect that Thatcher's economic policies would end in ruin. Not only was he wrong he was unapologetic: a suitable pedigree for someone whose later career has been devoted to putting an "academic" economic veneer on the CAGW scam. Just to observe: his climate change "economics" involves the highly unusual (although not altogether unprecedented) step of setting at nil - or close to nil - the interest rate in the net present value calculations concerning the effects of anthropogenic CO2 creation. A less unconventional analysis would, of course, have undermined the whole economic analysis to the detriment of the warmist argument.
In another place and another time Stern would have made Lysenko look like the model of independent thought and apolitical academic excellence. Stern will I'm sure be awarded more medals, prizes and what have you but remember who is awarding these baubles and wonder why.
"Nonsense so blatant that only an intellectual would fall for it." Bob Hoye
With understated costs, overstated benefits, and ridiculously low discount rates, The Stern Review is believable to the gullible.
This will be the Stern report that only looks at the downsides of extra CO2. There is an upside which was ignored.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/11/climate-change-forests-water-amazon
Stern is the UK's answer to Paul Krugman. Men who have done good work in the past but not in the past twenty+ years.
Congratulations to.........for a moment I thought you were going to congratulate James Delingpole for winning the Bastiat Award for 'online journalism' in New York last night, mainly for his work on exposing 'Climategate'.
Mutual admiration societies passing their Bumwad Awards to true-believing hierarchs must nonetheless eventually confront reality. Ten years from now, we guarantee that ineluctable natural processes will have rendered catastrophic AGW theses an acute embarrassment to all concerned. Regardless of academic or policy credentials, anyone notably espousing such inanities will have forfeited all credibility, recognized as a blinkered ideologue if not a conscious, willing tool of Big Government propagandists looting public fiscs.
JB - Or, if their inanities are sufficient, they can become science advisors to US Presidents.
It's the "On, Leftie!" prize.
Much more important, as 'toad' said above, is the fact that yesterday, in New York, James Delingpole was awarded the Bastiat Prize for online journalism:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100063465/telegraph-blogger-james-delingpole-wins-bastiat-prize-for-online-journalism/
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100063486/bastiat-thank-you/
When I caught this out of the corner of my eye, I thought for a moment it said 'Leninist prize'.
Seems more appropriate somehow ;-)
Bishop said-'Is it just me that thinks that this award is a pretty damning indictment of the corruption of academia?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions (Samuel Johnson, or some prior worthy, according to some).
I was idling about looking for just how many professorship chairs have been created in recent times, since so many in the climate academic field seem to be thus endowed. I find has been skyrocketing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/4101317.stm
Now, I've nothing against provincial universities,but its all counterproductive if it only ends in devaluing that honour, those institutions, and their degrees, as was the way of the GCE's.
Amusingly, in this idling about, I discovered that UEA has a motto. And its appropriate.
Well having just finshed watching Martin Durkins documentary about the national debt on 4OD, I can now safely answer the question "What is the the difference between deficit and debt" and feel superior to some MPs who can't. They rather refer that question to their Honourable colleague.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/britains-trillion-pound-horror-story/episode-guide/series-1/episode-1
Even if Durkins has overestimated Britains national debt by a multiple of 4, then that still makes all the discount calculations by Stern or even Dasgupta seem pointless.
@mikep, remind me again. I feel more iconoclastic than I did this morning. When I said "Fair enough" and admitted that the simple description of Stern as a career civil servant was wrong, I still readily admit I am unsophisticated in my knowledge about economics, but other than Stern's gaining a knighthood and enoblement, what else could you tell me about him so that can I be persuaded to be even mildly impressed by his "achievements"?
Remember, just being "titled" doesn't cut it with unsophisticates like me. Durkins documentary highlighted the claim that Hong Kong's achievement owes a lot to a mild mannered scottish civil servant who unshowily minimised Government intervention - John James Cowperthwaite ;-)
Be fair. If Gore can get a Nobel Prize, why can't Stern get a Leontief Prize?
Stern had a distinguished academiccarrer till 1994. His subsequent appointments were all specifically as an economic adviser (note that one of his predecessors as chief economist at he World Bank, Joe Stiglitz, won the Nobel prize for economics). Trying to rubbish him rather than countering his arguments simply plays into the hands of those who think being sceptical about CAGW is part of a right wing plot and not for good Guardian readers like myself.
@mikep
I get it, you are worried about "how it all looks". Gee, you really are a Guardian reader. Personally I am not able to see the "wing" left or right I skewed towards here, maybe you could point it out to me with your fine Guardian antenna? Or is just being sarcastic too much?
After my acknowleged mischaracterisation of Stern as merely a career civil servant (oh, the humanity) I only rubbished the part of his work that I am aware of, the Stern Review, the only part of the mans work I have delved into shows a man willing to work in a field that allows tweaking numbers to get your desired result which garners awards apparently.
All this is very "ignorant" of me surely, but you still haven't nudged me in the right direction by showing me something tangible - maybe he has re-floated an African countries economy? Though I have read Willam Easterly and Dambisa Moyo and what they say about the how the World Bank operates leaves my less impressed by the description "distinguished" there.
In fact if you can only reply by re-iterating how distinguished Stern of Leontief Prize fame or Nobel Prize winning Stiglitz (an author on the distinguished IPCC), then please don't bother.
"Stern is no fool"
That is what makes the Stern report so inexcusably despicable!
Awards are like hemorrhoids.
Sooner or later every asshole receives one.