Large parts of our economy are now built around the idea of maximum efficiency — or at least what seems like maximum efficiency in a theoretical model — with much less concern for the distribution of economic benefits or for the unpleasant side effects of economic activity. The clearest example, and the focus of Binya’s book, is the sharp rise of income and wealth inequality — and with it, the stagnation of living standards for most people.

Weitzman’s seminal work focused on some of the other problems caused by the purest version of market economics. He argued that economists should favor higher taxes on carbon emissions than many economic models called for, because of the terrible uncertainties associated with climate change. “If ever there was an example where there was uncertainty, this is it,” as he once told me. To put it bluntly, reducing the risk that Miami becomes uninhabitable is worth paying an extra 10 cents a gallon for gas.

Weitzman also argued that many of his fellow economists were too obsessed with taxes as the optimal solution to climate change, rather than simple limits on pollution. As Justin Gillis, a longtime climate writer and Times contributor, wrote on Facebook:

“For decades, economists had leaned toward controlling pollution and other socially harmful economic activities with special taxes … The stiff taxes on cigarettes are a familiar example. Lay people tended to think instead: if you want less of it, just regulate it. Weitzman broke with his profession in 1974 and said: economists really have no solid theoretical grounds for their preferences for taxes over volume limits.”

Weitzman’s work suggests that much of what ails economics can be cured by economists themselves. To do so, they need to engage even more with evidence from the real world. There are signs, fortunately, that the field is moving in this direction (as Binyamin discusses on the podcast). Call it the Weitzman direction.

“Even as some economists were building a brave new world of inequality and corporate power, others were working to make it fairer, more equal and more sustainable,” Bloomberg Opinion’s Noah Smith wrote. “Weitzman was one of them.”