Abstract
As a specific concept of economics, value does not need to be reduced to any scientific concepts, but as far as a production process can be considered as a process of transformation of ‘wild’ forms of matter into forms useful for humans (dwellings, food, clothes, machinery and so on), one can look for analogies in thermodynamics. Thermodynamic laws are quite general and are applicable to any system, no matter how big and complicated it is, while they do not require a knowledge of the structure of the system in all details. The phenomenon of production can be considered from a general point of view, assuming all our environment to be a thermodynamic system, which is in a far-from-equilibrium state. For the matter to be transformed into shapes of different commodities (complexity), one needs in the creative work of production equipment. The process of production can be regarded as process of materialisation of information, whereby the cost of materialisation is the work of the production system. To maintain complexity in a thermodynamic system, fluxes of matter and energy must flow through the system.
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British thermal unit \(\mathrm{(Btu)} = 252 \;\mathrm{cal} = 1053.36\;\mathrm{J}\,\approx 10^3\;\mathrm{J}\).
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The existence of the utility function is justified by the fact that there is a preference relation on the set of products. Similar to that, the existence of entropy is justified by an acceptability relation on the space of thermodynamic variables. The similarity between the utility representation problem in economics and the entropy representation problem in thermodynamics was demonstrated by Candeal et al. [18]. Astonishingly, it seems to be not just a formal analogy: the two functions appear to be different estimates of a set of products.
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Pokrovskii, V.N. (2018). Value from a Physicist’s Point of View. In: Econodynamics. New Economic Windows. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72074-6_11
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