The Entropy Law and the Economic Process

by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

Book Overview

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674257812
• ISBN13: 9780674257818
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 450 Pages
• Weight: 1.48 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant, but not Perfect

It must be admitted that Georgescu-Roegen's understanding of entropy was flawed. He, along with many other authors including physicists, thought entropy was a measure of disorder. It is not. That entropy is not a measure of disorder is discussed in a recent scholarly article by chemistry Prof. Frank Lambert, who has a nice web site devoted to the topic. More to the point, it was also discussed in Beard and Lozada's book about Georgescu-Roegen (p. 88, "Economics, Entropy, and the Environment: The Extraordinary Economics of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen"). It's not easy to say what entropy actually is, but it is straightforward for scientists to measure that, say, the standard entropy of one mole of iron (about 55.8 grams of iron) is 27.7 Joules per Kelvin. While Georgescu wasn't completely right about all of entropy's aspects, his attacks on Boltzmann's H-Theorem, and on the "information as entropy" school, show completely correct understanding of other aspects of entropy. Furthermore, in his indictment of neoclassical dynamic economics, he was the vanguard of critics who decry slavish devotion to mathematical models which assume we know the future (at least probabalistically). Absorbing Georgescu's lessons would've spared Economics Nobel Laureates Merton and Scholes their disastrous experience running the failed hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (described in the book "When Genius Failed"): change happens, the past does not always predict the future, and the consequences of one's actions sometimes cannot be imagined by anyone. When investing money, that's a good perspective; when talking about man's effect on the environment, as Georgescu was, it's a perspective that could save the planet.

A Law of Thermodynamics as it Applies to Economics...

...entropy is the idea that there is a growing disorder to all systems, living and otherwise. Roegen is the social philosopher who originally, successfully tied the no limit-growth of capitalism to our decreasing natural resources, our increasing endangered species lists, and our decreasing resistances to a bunch of ailments... I remember having to study passages of this book in college and my instructor said that there's no scientific data to verify what he's saying had any merit. And, now, today, mosquitoes and terrorists and brown outs have everybody up in arms. I can't say Roegen is prophetic, but his argument, to me, always did make a whole lotta sense...and, you know, the artists and the poets seem to have always intuited the validity of this great man's message.What has really put things in perspective for me is my further readings... I've read works from EF Schumacher ("Small is Beautiful"), Rene Dubos ("A God Within"), Jeremy Rifkin ("Entropy"), and more recently, Derrick Jensen. And they all seem to speak to needing a more humane way of capitalism which doesn't seem bent on destroying everything in it's path.There are many other authors who may be easier to read than Roegen, but you will find, if you are in anyway interested in the fate of the world, they all refer to his seminal work here.

One of Most Important Economics Works of the 20th Century

Georgescu-Roegen argues that neo-classical economics(the dominantform of economics at this time) is not consistent withfundamental physical laws. The law that NC economics is most inconflict with is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the entropylaw. NE Economics assumes that continuous economic growth isboth desirable and possible. According to Roegen any economy ispermanently physically limited by the supply of low-entropymatter and energy as a source for raw materials and as a sinkfor our wastes. The only possible long-term source forlow-entropy energy is the sun and even this is available at a limited rate of flow.An attempt at steady-state economics (as espoused by HermanDaley) would be a significant improvement over the presentsituation, but would still not be possible in the very longrun because of limitations on the supply of low-entropy rawmaterials such as metal ores.Roegen's point of view is fundamentally in conflict withcurrent economics, but we ignore his arguments at our peril. In the not terribly distant future we will run up againstthe limits that Roegen warns of.The book is dense and difficult, but the concepts are extremelyimportant...More readable books on the subject are"Beyond Growth" and "Steady-State Economics"by Herman Daley.

A must for ecological economists, economists, and ecologists

This review includes: 1) Review, 2) guide to related books 3) some citations, and 4) table of contents. The first 9 chapters he discuss the historic developments in philosophy of science, physics and economics. This leads him to conclude that standard economics is founded on analogies to newtonian mechanics. He explores several problematic aspects of this line of thought. These includes the problem of defining the boundaries of the economic process, the problem of treating qualitative changes within the mechanical framework. Within physics the theory of classical thermodynamics, was to revolutionize the discipline of physics. The first law of thermodynamics stated that matter-energy cannot be created nor destroyed. This was not in conflict with Newtonian mechanics. The second law of thermodynamics states that within a closed system the availability of matter-energy decreases. This second law conflicts with classical mechanics, in the way that this process can only consist of a qualitative change. The first part of the book is deals primarily with philosophical and physics issues, and although NGR was economist himself - these discussions are very hard to grasp for a social scientist, as myself. The second part consists of an analysis economic theory (Marx, Marshall, Leontieff and others), founded on the conclusions reached in the first part of the book. The general conclusion is that it is unreasonable to believe that the economic process can defy any laws of physics. At present economic theory ignores the second law of thermodynamics, leading to an uneconomical use of our physical surroundings. Although NGR is cited in any decent microeconomics textbook (for his contributions to micro-theory), this book recieved little response from economists, allthough it remains a classic within ecological economics (Herman Daly cites it all the time). And it is a must for any advanced student of human-environmental interactions. It is, however a VERY demanding book - Some of his articles are recommended instead for starters. John Peet (1992) 'Energy and the ecological economics of sustainability' is also recommendable. Here is a few citations, followed by a list of contents of the book: ' In this sense Classical mechanics is mechanistic because it can neither account for the existence of enduring qualitative changes in nature nor accept this existence as an independent fact. Mechanics knows only locomotion, and locomotion is both reversible and qualityless' ' Since the economic process materially consists of a transformation of low entropy into high entropy, i.e., into waste, and since this transformation is irrevocable, natural resources must nessecarily represent one part of the notion of economic value. And because the economic process is not automatic, but willed, the services of all agents, human or material, also belong to the same facet of that notion. For the other facet, we should note that it would be utterly absurd to think that the eco

Important work on neglected subject

Although there have been other efforts to tie economic theory to ecology, game theory, and other fields, and even, as in this book, to physics, particularly thermodynamics, none has approached the breadth and depth of this author's work. It is a promising but neglected field of research, and much more attention should be devoted to it.