In memory of Marty Weitzman, a man intolerant of humbug and pomposity

Marty Weitzman was undoubtedly one of the greatest environmental economists in the world today

In the midst of the hullabaloo around the United Nations Climate Action Summit I kept on remembering my friend Marty Weitzman, one of the great environmental economists, who passed away a few weeks back.

I first met Marty around the time I started teaching at MIT many decades back. The first thing that struck me about him was his accent — it sounded like a deep New York street drawl, which at first I had some difficulty in following. (I don’t know if his early years in a New York orphanage was responsible for this. His mother died when he was