Monday, December 2, 2013

Energy and economic myths

Continuing the recent theme of regressive myths, Georgescu-Roegen is mentioned in this wiki on thermoeconomics. He's been preaching thermoeconomics for decades but has been largely ignored by the economic ideologues wedded to Enlightenment-era mechanics and its brainchild, capitalism. Here are a few excerpts from one of his 1975 articles, "Energy and economic myths":

"Economists over the last hundred years remained stubbornly attached to one particular idea, the mechanistic epistemology which dominated the orientation of the founders of the Neoclassical School. [...] They thus had some attenuating circumstances, which cannot, however, be invoked by those who came long after the mechanistic dogma had been banished even from physics. The latter-day economists, without a single second thought, have apparently been happy to develop their discipline on the mechanistic tracks laid out by their forefathers, fiercely fighting any suggestion that economics may be conceived otherwise. [...] The consequence of this indiscriminate attachment to the mechanistic dogma [...] is thus reduced to a timeless kinematics. [...] Complete reversibility is the general rule, just as in mechanics" (347-48).

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