The Use of Taxes in Public Finance

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Smoking is a good example of how we've used fiscal instruments such as cigarette taxes, to reinforce our other ways of influencing behaviour. This is a whole uncharted area in public finance, the use of these what i call green taxes, or good taxes. And let and to let good taxes replace bad, bad taxes, bad as being taxes on things we want encourage, like people working or people saving. It's taken really a long time. In lot of work, wild people ine, thats a good analogy, cause it's clean air that we want. And and smoke filled air from cigarettes and cigars is not clean.

In this conversation, based on the book The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World, Nobel Prize-winning pioneer in environmental economics Dr. Nordhaus explains how and why “green thinking” could cure many of the world’s most serious problems — from global warming to pandemics. Solving the world’s biggest problems requires, more than anything else, coming up with new ways to manage the powerful interactions that surround us. For carbon emissions and other environmental damage, this means ensuring that those responsible pay their full costs rather than continuing to pass them along to others, including future generations. Nordhaus describes a new way of green thinking that would help us overcome our biggest challenges without sacrificing economic prosperity, in large part by accounting for the spillover costs of economic collisions. In a discussion that ranges from the history of the environmental movement to the Green New Deal, Nordhaus explains how rethinking economic efficiency, sustainability, politics, profits, taxes, individual ethics, corporate social responsibility, finance, and more would improve the effectiveness and equity of our society.