Economics and Thermodynamics

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Introduction

   • Peter Burley, John Foster

   Pages 1-8

3. An Essay in Macroeconomics

   • Andras Bródy, Katalin Martinás, Konstantin Sajó

   Pages 9-16

4. The Use of Thermodynamic Models in Economics

   • Andras Bródy

   Pages 17-22

5. A Survey of Thermodynamical Ideas

   • John R. Christie

   Pages 23-37

6. Economic Development as an Escape from Full Employment Entropy Ceilings

   • Peter Burley

   Pages 39-45

7. Comparative Thermodynamics in Chemistry and Economics

   • James A. Reiss

   Pages 47-72

8. A Non-Equilibrium Evolutionary Economic Theory

   • Robert U. Ayres, Katalin Martinás

   Pages 73-97

9. Conservation of Mass and the Time Behaviour of Ecological-Economic Systems

   • Charles Perrings

   Pages 99-117

10. Entropy, Liberty and Catastrophe: The Physics and Metaphysics of Waste Disposal

    • Martin O’Connor

    Pages 119-182

11. The Self-Organisation Approach in Economics

    • John Foster

    Pages 183-201

12. A Thermodynamic Analysis of Library Operation

    • Gordon J. Troup

    Pages 203-206

13. From Entropy to Economy: A Thorny Path

    • Charles Dyke

    Pages 207-238

14. Thermodynamics and Chaos in Economic Prediction

    • Greg C. O’Brien

    Pages 239-253

15. Back Matter

    Pages 255-258

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Over the past two decades we have witnessed something of a revolution in the natural sciences as thermodynamic thinking evolved from an equilibrium, or 'classical', perspective, to a nonequilibrium, or 'self­ organisational' one. In this transition, thermodynamics has been applied in new ways and in new fields of inquiry. Chemical and biological (evolutionary) processes have been analysed, increasingly, in non­ equilibrium thermodynamical terms. Economics has, since the late 19th century, relied heavily upon metaphors and analogies derived from the natural sciences - mechanical analogies cast in terms of traditional Newtonian physics and expressed in terms of Cartesian logic have been especially popular. Thermodynamics, on the other hand, has been less popular, despite its early application in economics by Stanley Jevons, the father of modern notions of utility maximisation in neoclassical economics, and despite its promotion in economic contexts by Paul Samuelson, the author of the definitive treatise upon which post war neoclassical economic theory was based, namely, his Foundations of Economic Analysis. The general neglect of thermodynamic thinking in economics was brought to our attention by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in the late 1960s, by which time economic theory, evidenced in, for example, the Arrow­ Debreu general eqUilibrium system, had become so sophisticated that it could not be penetrated by thermodynamical ideas. To Georgescu­ Roegen, this presented something of a crisis in economics because neglect of thermodynamics led, in his view, to blindness amongst economists to an economy/environment problem in the global economy.

• economic development
• economics
• employment
• equilibrium
• macroeconomics
• nonequilibrium
• nonlinear dynamics
• thermodynamics

• La Trobe University, Australia

  Peter Burley

• University of Queensland, Australia

  John Foster

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