Economists and political scientists write books for different reasons. Political scientists use books for long-form research projects, presenting arguments too complex or too richly documented to be contained in journal articles. They primarily write for other scholars. Economists typically write books that translate previously published journal articles into accessible prose for a general audience, sometimes drawing out the implications for public policy. So it is with R. Jisung Park’s Slow Burn, which synthesizes his earlier empirical work in climate macroeconomics on the often-subtle effects of exposure to temperature extremes.
Park’s research is important and deserves close attention. Hotter temperatures inflict real but largely invisible damage on human health, workplace productivity, and interpersonal relationships. Excessive heat also affects education: high school students who took standardized tests following periods with hotter school days have lower scores. As Park and other scholars have demonstrated, these effects fall disproportionately on lower-income populations, while households with access to air conditioning are typically unaffected. The result is that climate change tends to deepen the harm done to already-marginalized communities and to sharpen the problem of climate justice, both within and across countries. This also highlights the value of adaptation as a policy response: much of the inequality goes away when low-income households have access to air conditioning.
Park uses Slow Burn to both explain his research findings and argue for a middle path approach to climate discourse, steering between climate denial or defeatism on one hand and warnings of imminent doom on the other. Readers who think of climate change primarily through the lens of catastrophe—sudden, high-profile events like the collapse of large ecosystems or geological tipping points that render the planet uninhabitable—will find this book revelatory. Those seeking an accessible introduction to cutting-edge work in climate economics might also find it useful. General readers may (or may not) appreciate Park’s practice of intertwining personal anecdotes with explanations of the importance of causal inference.
Do these findings have policy implications that differ from those derived from established frameworks, which, for economists, place carbon taxes front and center? It’s not clear. Park notes that the public tends to overlook the incremental, more mundane effects of climate change, and that a better understanding of these less visible effects could trigger public action in a way that climate disaster scenarios—which are still probably decades away—might not.
I was not convinced, however, that this knowledge is likely to cause people to adjust their beliefs about the value of climate mitigation, especially the kind of large-scale, long-term investments that seem justified by worries about commensurately large climate disasters. Like many policy advocates, Park suggests that greater precision about climate impacts will translate into more motivated citizens and more effective policymaking, but it is not obvious why this should be so. Is it not equally plausible that people are more strongly motivated by misperceptions, for example, about the likelihood of near-term climate catastrophes, or the belief that people everywhere will be equally damaged, regardless of their location, income, or mobility?
I was also not persuaded that Park’s findings have policy implications that differ meaningfully from those of the existing frameworks he challenges. For economists, carbon pricing remains central. Park’s microeconomic evidence about heterogeneous impacts does not displace this recommendation so much as refine it. His research points toward greater investment in adaptation alongside mitigation and toward policies sensitive to the distribution of climate costs across income groups. Whether the incremental harms Park documents should raise or lower the priority assigned to large-scale, long-term mitigation investments is left unresolved.
My inner political scientist was especially frustrated by Slow Burn. Park engages extensively with the economics literature but overlooks a substantial body of political science research that speaks directly to his concern about the links between scientific findings and public policy. Scholars like Thomas Hale, Leah Stokes, Megan Mullin, Matto Mildenberger, Jonas Meckling, and Liam Beiser-McGrath, among many others, have produced important recent work on the role of elite cues, partisan polarization, heat exposure, and policy feedback effects in shaping climate politics. Their findings bear directly on Park’s implicit optimism about the policy consequences of better information. This omission matters: the gap between improved scientific knowledge and effective climate policy is largely a political problem, and the tools for analyzing it require some engagement with political science.
Park makes a single reference to political science, and it is especially unfortunate. Park attributes the notion that climate shapes human civilization to Samuel Huntington, the late twentieth-century political scientist. The actual source is Ellsworth Huntington, an early twentieth-century geographer and eugenicist whose views on climate and racial hierarchy are among the more discreditable episodes in the history of social science.
None of this diminishes the genuine contribution Slow Burn makes to the popular literature on climate economics. Park has done something genuinely useful by making complex empirical research accessible to a broader audience and by insisting on the importance of climate’s mundane, everyday costs alongside its more dramatic ones. The book would have been stronger, however, had it taken more seriously the political obstacles to climate action.
