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The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
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Product details
Paperback: 476 pages
Publisher: iUniverse (November 23, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1583486003
ISBN-13: 978-1583486009
Product Dimensions:
6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
Average Customer Review:
4.6 out of 5 stars
8 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#3,263,657 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's fame is due to his book The Entropy Law and Economic Process (1971) in which NGR conjugates thermodynamics and economics. But his importance for political economy goes far before the publication of this book and involves many different aspects of the analysis. While the complete theoretical framework described by NGR has been frequently contested, his analysis of the production process has been considered as truly innovative and useful, by many points of view.
good book
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.
There are many great criticisms of neoclassical economics in this book. Georgescu-Roegen (G-R) points out such flaws as @ regarding the economy as a closed, circular system; @ neglecting qualitative changes because of the theory's preference for "arithromorhpic" concepts, i.e., concepts organized into distinct and non-overlapping gradations (such as preference/indifference/non-preference), rather than having fuzzy edges or ambiguities (such as real human preferences); @ failing to attribute value to leisure, and negative value to the drudgery of work (albeit that assuming work must involve drudgery is itself based on some presuppositions not mentioned by G-R); and @ fallacies in production models, "stock-flow" analysis and input-output tables.The critique is usually presented with a refreshing brio. G-R isn't afraid to call ideas stupid when he believes them so.But ... a lot of this book seems to go off the track. There is way more discussion of history of math and physics than seems necessary. Lengthy discussions of eugenics and cloning near the end of the book kind of come out of nowhere. Much of this, especially the biology, is by now very dated, and even that which is less so is often superfluous and bombastic. Some readers may think G-R prophetic because of his occasional allusions to solar power, and I was surprised to see him use the expression "nanotweeze" (as a noun) in 1971 (@351) -- but the book is wrong about so many other forward-looking details that these seem almost like lucky guesses, given the wide range of topics G-R drags into the book.More substantively, G-R's understanding of physics was quite loose and often wrong. He errs when he talks about how "our whole economic life feeds on low entropy" (@277). Here he seems to be following an error Erwin Schroedinger made in an early edition of his "What is Life?"; Schroedinger corrected the error in a subsequent edition long before G-R's book, but that correction goes unnoticed. G-R's idiosyncratic usage of the terms "free energy," "bound energy" and "polymeres" (sic) will also set your teeth on edge if you come from a natural science background.G-R does not make a convincing case for the relevance of entropy to economics. There are at least three reasons for this. First is G-R's faulty exposition of the concept, as mentioned above. Second, G-R doesn't adequately motivate the thermodynamics metaphor in economics. As shown in P. Mirowski's "More Heat than Light", the adoption of this metaphor was without empirical motivation, and came in no small part from a kind of "physics envy". It's true the metaphor as adopted didn't include the Second Law (about entropy). But before faulting the model for that omission, one should show why the analogy is appropriate at all. Instead of doing so, G-R mentions a few times that thermodynamics was based on an economics analogy. That's not good enough, especially given the distinctions between physical and social sciences G-R describes in his Chapter XI. Third, even assuming the thermodynamics metaphor can be justified, G-R doesn't address the proper limitations for the metaphor's domain of application. Why just add the Second Law into economics? How about non-equilibrium thermodynamic formalism? How about an analogue to chemical kinetics, which prevent chemical reactions from reaching equilibrium instantly or even at all, and without which we could not be alive? G-R ignores all these, without explanation (indeed, without seeming to be aware of them).G-R is more convincing in the more limited claim that neoclassical economics models err in considering waste as an "externality", if not ignoring it altogether. That's a significant point, and he deserves credit and gratitude for making it. But this ambitious book does not read today like the grand philosophical synthesis it seems to have been intended to be.
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.
Believe it or not, this is one of the funniest, most high-spirited books I've ever seen. Demanding, but brilliant and rewarding. Like the part about Marx leaving the enjoyment of life out of his equations of use. And arithmomorphism and identity. This is real.
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