The author of the 700-page report on climate change, Sir Nicholas Stern, is an economist of a sort that has largely gone out of fashion in Britain. He is a skilful and highly rated academic. He has produced a large number of books and articles, many of them tackling subjects related to economic development.
But Nick Stern has spent much of the past decade not in university departments but in policy-making institutions. For five years in the 1990s, he was Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. From there, he moved to the World Bank in Washington DC, where he became chief economist.
In 2003, Gordon Brown recruited him to the Treasury, where he became head of the Government Economic Service. But unlike most people filling that job, Nick Stern has
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not focused mainly on managing Whitehall economists or advising the Government on British economic policy. Instead, he has undertaken two massive reviews, both on subjects close to Gordon Brown's heart.
The first, begun in 2004, was the Commission for Africa, for which Stern was Director of Policy and Research. The commission's report, published in 2005, formed the background for the Gleneagles Summit. But the summit's promises of more aid to Africa were overshadowed by the London Tube bombings, and their influence has dwindled.
For the past year, Stern has been at work on the climate change report, another subject of deep interest to Gordon Brown.
What makes the Stern Report a daring and original concept is that it was put in the hands not of a 
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