NORDHAUS ON THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF LIGHT. In his summary of Nordhaus’s career, Tyler Cowen calls this Nordhaus paper on the economic history of light “splendid and still-underrated”. Nordhaus begins with the observation that in studying the the long-term growth of income, statisticians confront the problem that “most of the goods we consume today were not produced a century ago. We travel in vehicles that were not yet invented.” Nordhaus argues that statisticians greatly underestimate the income effects of new technologies for consumer products.
He begins with a history of the prices of light going back thousands of years.