Scientific Knowledge, Individual Behavior, and Social Value

Knowledge is of value if it changes what people do in beneficial ways. Here, I provide evidence of how people respond to new knowledge. I also show how, using this evidence, the value of this knowledge can be assessed.

Biographical sketch

Scott Barrett is the Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural Resource Economics at Columbia University with appointments in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and in the Earth Institute. He is also Vice Dean of SIPA.

He taught previously at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC and, before that, at the London Business School. He has also been a visiting scholar at École Polytechnique, Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin), Princeton, Yale, and Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

His research focuses on the design of institutions to address global issues requiring international cooperation, including climate change, infectious disease eradication, and ocean governance.

He is the author of numerous journal articles and two books, Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making and Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods, both published by Oxford University Press.

He has also played a variety of roles in the policy arena, including as a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, lead advisor to the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, and member of the World Health Organization’s Strategic Advisory Group on malaria eradication.

He received his PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.

www.scottbarrett.org.