Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Hansen (C tax) vs. Krugman (cap and trade): A lesson in transdisciplinary understanding?

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

An interesting exchange happened yesterday at the NY Times.  Climate scientist James Hansen wrote a column, Cap and Fade, which, as the name suggests, is critical of cap and trade policies for mitigating climate warming.

In his blog, Paul Krugman responded with an article, Unhelpful Hansen, in which he takes readers through a basic primer of C taxes and cap and trade, arguing that they are basically the same and that Hansen is wrong for trashing what may end up being the best available approach.

Most of this is the kind of policy play-by-play that dominates daily blog traffic.  However, one of Krugman’s paragraphs caught my eye:

Things like this often happen when economists deal with physical scientists; the hard-science guys tend to assume that we’re witch doctors with nothing to tell them, so they can’t be bothered to listen at all to what the economists have to say, and the result is that they end up reinventing old errors in the belief that they’re deep insights. Most of the time not much harm is done. But this time is different.

Although this may not be an entirely fair criticism of Hansen (I have no idea what his formal training in economics is), it is interesting to see the implied call for better transdisciplinary understanding.   Social scientists have a responsibility to call out natural scientists for being naive when they wade around in social issues (and vice versa).  Although most of us are trained as disciplinarians, this is why it’s good to stretch ourselves and really understand perspectives and theory from fields with which we are not traditionally affiliated—as any good Environmental Studies program should do.  Most of the time it makes us better teachers and scholars.  And more humble about what we know and don’t know.

Specialization and expertise have their limitations, and, as Krugman points out, in some cases, they can be downright counterproductive.