Description:

MATTHEW KOPEC
Philosophy, Northwestern University

TITLE Economics and the Self-fulfilling Climate Tragedy

Description: It has become common practice within the economic literature on climate change to model the problem of international greenhouse gas emissions game-theoretically as a so-called “Tragedy of the Commons.” If this choice of model is the correct one, we’re in trouble – the conditions under which such commons problems have historically been “solved” are almost entirely absent in the case of international greenhouse gas emissions. While I believe that this model will support many accurate predictions, I don’t believe this is necessarily a cause for concern. In this essay, I will argue that the predictive accuracy of the tragedy model stems from the model’s ability to make self-fulfilling predictions within our current international setting. Each nation’s expectation of self-interested actions on the parts of other members in the game, in effect, modifies each nation’s behavior. I present some recent work in behavioral economics that offers a glimmer of hope. In particular, individuals don’t typically act in what such models consider to be rationally self-interested ways. A call for nations to act “irrationally,” much like we all seem to do, may well be our best promise in solving the climate problem

Bio: 

Starting June 2015, Mathew Kopec will be joining the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Pubic Ethics as a Research Fellow in Applied Philosophy. He is currently a member of Northwestern University's Philosophy Department, where he is serving as a postdoctoral researcher for their Mellon Sawyer Seminar entitled Theoretical Issues in Social Epistemology. From 2012-2014, Kopec was a member of the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado - Boulder, where he served as an Instructor and as the Faculty Teaching Mentor for the Graduate Instructors. Kopec earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His dissertation, which he wrote under the supervision of Elliott Sober (Chair), Dan Hausman, Michael Titelbaum, and Peter Vranas, was on the topic of group rationality.

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