Moral philosophy, climate econ, health policy | Associate Prof, UW-Madison. | Fan: @Celtics, P.G. Wodehouse | Tweets are my views/humor only
Sep 22, 2021 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
This week I published a book. Not my own book (who knows when that'll be), but a book that means a lot to my home state of Maine and to my family there.
The book is Bill Geagan's *Nature I Loved*. It's a memoir of the 2 years Geagan spent living in the woods after high school.
Geagan couldn't bear the thought of punching a timeclock or having a boss. But he also didn't have a clue how to avoid this while making a living. So he escaped to a ramshackle cabin on the shore of Hermon Pond (just outside of Bangor).
Sep 17, 2020 • 32 tweets • 8 min read
MEGATHREAD: I tweeted some quick thoughts yesterday about this new paper but I wanted to follow up with a more thoughtful take. Yesterday I griped that the paper’s numbers omitted the co-benefits of CO2 mitigation, & that the relevance of co-benefits were noted only the end.
I want to set those gripes aside and engage with the paper at the level the authors clearly wish for it to be engaged with, namely at the conceptual level. I should have begun with that yesterday, and I apologize to the authors for pouncing rather than engaging.
Mar 12, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Philosophy profs: I posted this idea here once before, and with many of us going online, I thought it'd be useful to re-up it. To help my students understand the point & structure of a philosophical essay, I have them listen to an episode of @philosophybites 1/
I encourage them to think of philosophy the way that Socrates did: as a dialog whose aim is to get at the truth. I then ask them to pick an episode of Philosophy Bites (usually from among a select few) that they will listen to and then rewrite as a philosophy paper. 2/
Oct 8, 2018 • 53 tweets • 10 min read
A rather long thread about newly minted Nobel laureate Bill Nordhaus’s “debate” with Nicholas Stern over the vexed issue of discounting. tl;dr: Though very different from one another, I don’t think their views on discounting are inconsistent.
As Robert Nozick wrote of his rival John Rawls's landmark book _A Theory of Justice_, "Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls' theory or explain why not." The same goes for Nordhaus and his pioneering work in climate economics.
