YaleNews | Two Yale professors named Carnegie fellows for research in social sciences:
Two Yale faculty members — William Nordhaus and Vesla M. Weaver — are among 33 scholars awarded fellowships from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to advance research in social sciences and humanities.
The 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellows were selected from a field of about 200 candidates. A panel of 16 jurors chose recipients based on the originality, promise, and potential impact of their research proposals. Each fellow receives up to $200,000 to pay for one to two years of scholarly research and writing “aimed at addressing some of the world’s most urgent challenges to U.S. democracy and international order.”
William Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, is a leading economist on climate change. Since the 1970s, he has developed economic approaches to global warming, including the construction of integrated economic and scientific models (the DICE and RICE models) to determine the efficient path for coping with climate change. These models are widely used today in research on studies of climate-change economics and policies. He has also studied wage and price behavior, health economics, augmented national accounting, the political business cycle, productivity, and the “new economy.”
Nordhaus has authored many books, among them “The Efficient Use of Energy Resources,” “Reforming Federal Regulation,” “Managing the Global Commons,” “Warming the World” and (with Paul Samuelson) the classic textbook “Economics,” whose 19th edition was published in 2009. His book on economic modeling of climate change, “A Question of Balance,” was selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2008. His most recent book, “The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World,” was published in 2013. The Carnegie Fellowship will fund his research into economic modeling of irreversible and path-dependent processes in climate change.
Vesla Weaver, associate professor of political science and African American studies, is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Inequality at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Her work explores racial inequality in the United States, how state policies shape citizenship, and the political causes and consequences of the growth of the criminal justice system in the United States. Her latest book (with Amy Lerman), “Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control,” concerns the effects of increasing punishment and surveillance in America on democratic inclusion, particularly for the black urban poor.
Weaver’s proposal for the Carnegie fellowship, titled “The Faces of American Democracy,” will examine the relationship between poor citizens and communities and government in the United States. The project will provide the first systematic study of how Americans in different communities experience government activity across a number of areas, including schools, social welfare agencies, police and probation agencies, civil ordinances, the housing authority, and child protective services.
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