Introduction for Special Issue in Honor of Martin Weitzman
This special issue is a reminder that the world lost a truly remarkable scholar when Martin Weitzman sadly passed away in 2019. Across five decades, he explored policy options for the most challenging issues—from unemployment and inflation in the 1970s to climate change in the twenty-first century. In this article, we provide a brief biography and personal remembrance of Weitzman and describe how his contributions advanced the thinking of environmental economists,1 and the thoughts and actions of policy makers on many fundamental issues. We conclude with a brief description of the articles that follow in this issue.
Weitzman was a treasure—a gift that kept on giving to the research and policy worlds—for Harvard University, for economists around the world, and for the global intellectual community. His work as an economic theorist who addressed a broad set of problems, and as an environmental economist who for over a decade focused on climate change, was unparalleled and formed the basis for theoretical and empirical work carried out by legions of economists and other scholars around the world. Weitzman’s contributions to environmental economics in particular were unprecedented, helped to shape the field for nearly five decades, and as the papers in this volume show undoubtedly set the direction for many more years to come.
If economic theory is about stripping a problem down to its absolute essentials and deriving meaningful insights from those essentials, then Weitzman was a master. Over and over again, he demonstrated how careful and rigorous analysis of artfully constructed theoretical models can provide valuable and often surprising insights into difficult economic problems with real implications for the design of public policies. At a symposium held at Harvard University in October 2018, to mark Weitzman’s retirement and celebrate his contributions, “Frontiers in Environmental Economics and Policy: A Symposium in Honor of Martin L. Weitzman,” he explained, “I’m drawn to things that are conceptually unclear, where it’s not clear how to make your way through this maze.” His writings were works of art as well as science, weaving Greek mythology and everyday anecdotes into his expositions like few others.
As a teacher and colleague, he left a memorable impression on many, both with his ideas and his approach to tackling some of the most important economic problems of his lifetime. He was fond of saying that the best tools of his trade were a No. 2 pencil, a yellow legal pad, and a hard, wooden chair. Across the board, the example of his rigorous and often ingenious work set high standards for theorizing in environmental economics and thereby served to elevate the entire field.
Article: “Martin Weitzman: A Gift that Keeps on Giving” (PDF).
Citation:
Stavins, Robert N. and Gernot Wagner. “Martin Weitzman: A Gift that Keeps on Giving.” Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists 9(5): pp. 843–50 (September 2022). doi:10.1086/721093
Related:
“Marty Weitzman, In Memoriam” (29 August 2019)
EAERE 2020 Special session in memory of Martin L. Weitzman (26 June 2020)
“Martin L. Weitzman (1942–2019)” by Robert Stavins and Gernot Wagner, The Palgrave Companion to Harvard Economics (6 July 2024)