Steven Stoft
Stoft, a Berkeley radical from the 1960s, is an economist with a background in physics, math, and astronomy. Between graduate astronomy and economics, he taught middle school and high school science, and hired and trained disadvantaged youth as “explainers” for San Francisco’s Exploratorium science museum.
Late in his economics career, he began researching climate change, which eventually led to Global Carbon Pricing (MIT press, 2017). He is still actively engaged in climate-cooperation research, which has included behavior experiments conducted at the University of Cologne. Recently however, his life-long, somewhat-activist interest in politics has resulted in a pair of books on the American left’s contributions to the new populism and to polarization.
Here on zFacts, he’s now upgrading the first of these, Ripped Apart, to show the path to reconciliation in the Democrats’ civil war and to stem the national tide of polarization.
You can find a more complete bio (including his arrest record and his role in starting Berkeley Citizens Action) here in the preface to Ripped Apart ver. 2. You can find his professional publications and bio here.
Get Ripped Apart: How Democrats Can Fight Polarization to Win on Amazon in Paper ($7.95) or Kindle ($1.99), or cheap out and get the original PDF for free. (PDF and Kindle have color images.)
In 2017, with a couple of colleagues, I published an edited book, with MIT Press, on international climate policy: Global Carbon Pricing: The Path to Climate Cooperation. I organized the project. But, except for David Mackay, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (where I was consulting), Axel Ockenfels and Peter Cramton made the contacts with the big names, including three Nobel economists, Stiglitz, Nordhaus, and Tirole. I wrote the preface and Chapter 4, which summarizes the book’s main points. Axel’s Center for Social and Economic Behavior (at U. of Cologne) paid to make the PDF of the book available free of charge.
I taught myself climate policy by writing Carbonomics: How to Fix the Climate and Charge It to OPEC (2008, free PDF). Part 3 introduced and analyzed what is now usually called a “carbon fee and dividend” — I just called it a carbon untax. Part 4 proposed the key mechanisms underlying many of the papers in Global Carbon Pricing.
I updated those two parts and a bit more. Those were translated into French (thanks to Mathieu Thomas) and published as Dépasser Copenhague, apprendre à coopérer: Proposition de politique post-Kyoto, with L’Harmattan Press (2010). The English version, Beyond Kyoto, is available as a free PDF here,
Ripped Apart
