Pigou Club Pigou Club Homepage – an elite group of economists and pundits that promote the use of pigovian taxes

Stern Report

Economists’ Free exhange in his latest posts reports: “every time I sit down with an economist today, the Stern Report on global warming comes up”.

Stern report argues that we should use 0% discount rate when discounting future costs of carbon dioxide emissions. A lot of economists disagree, one of the most prominent critics is W. Nordhous (co-author of Samuelsons book of Economics).

The use 0% discount rate also raises new questions, Free exhange is applying it to abortions and concludes that abortions can only make sense when the discount rate for utility is >0.

Correction by Valuethinker: “Stern actually uses a 0.1% discount rate.”

Members

Ok, we have our members page up. If I missed anyone please let me know. I intend to put up a list of “common people” where anyone will be able to sign in, just to show the support.

Pigovian taxes and spending

What should happen with the money collected with pigovian taxation? Should it be used to increase government spending or to lower other taxes? Mr. mankiw makes his position clear - “Pigovians need not be united about this”.

First Post

Here are the first words on this site.

The goal of this site is to promote mr. Mankiw’s Pigou Club and pigovian taxes in general. Hopefully this site will grow and gain new supporters.

I will try to add a simple explanation of the externalities in the near future.