26 - Koopmans Lecture - 18 September 2009

Thomas C. Schelling

Institutions Needed for Climate Management

Listen [MP3 37:52]

Lecture Summary

The nations most at risk, by far, from climate change are those we call developing. Their best defense against climate change is their continued development.

The world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; this cannot be done economically without the participation of the larger developing nations. The only decent, effective way to engage the major developing nations in this enterprise is to demonstrate, by actions, that the developed nations are serious -- a demonstration that may take some years to be persuasive -- and to mobilize resources from among the richer countries to help offset the costs, to the developing nations, of their abatement efforts. But this will require at least three institutions that do not yet exist:

1. Some acceptable way to identify which nations shall contribute, in what proportions, to this enterprise
2. Some way to identify which developing nations will receive, in what proportions, the prospective benefits
3. Some international institution that can perform the intermediate service of channeling the resources and monitor and verify their application to the intended uses -- There are a few historical models, none fully applicable: division of Marshall Plan funds among the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) recipients; acceptance of military commitments by participating nations under NATO; the Bretton Woods institutions; the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration; and, possibly, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The climate project cannot go forward until these three institutional needs are met.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Thomas C. Schelling was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics (shared with Robert Aumann) for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.”

Schelling earned his PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 1951 and was Associoate Professor and Professor of Economics at Yale University from 1953 to 1958. He spent 1958–1959 at the RAND Corporation and was Professor of Economics at Harvard University (Department of Economics, Center for International Affairs, and John F. Kennedy School of Government) from 1959 to 1990. In 1990 Dr. Schelling accepted appointment as Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and taught in its Department of Economics and School of Public Policy until 2005.

Thomas Schelling served as Fiscal Analyst at the US Bureau of the Budget (1945–1946), was in the Marshall Plan Mission to Denmark (1948–1949), and held positions in the European Office of the Marshall Plan, Paris (1949–1950), the White House Office of the Director for Mutual Security (1950–1951), and the Executive Office of the President (foreign aid programs) (1951–1953).

His main theoretical interests include bargaining, conflict and cooperation, racial segregation, and techniques of self-management. His main policy interests are nuclear weapons, the limitation of war, climate change, foreign aid, and nicotine.

From 1993 to 1999, Dr. Schelling spent summers as scholar in residence at IIASA.

His major books are The Strategy of Conflict (1960), Strategy and Arms Control (with Morton H. Halperin) (1961), Arms and Influence (1966), and Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978). His latest book is Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays (2006).

Schelling has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In addition to the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics (formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), Thomas Schelling is the recipient of the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy and the National Academy of Sciences Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War.

He lives with his wife, Alice Coleman Schelling, in Bethesda, Maryland. Together they have six sons and daughters-in-law and twelve grandchildren.

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Last updated: 24 Feb 2011