Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

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Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (born February 4, 1906 in Constanța , † October 30, 1994 in Nashville , Tennessee , United States ) was a Romanian mathematician and economist . He was one of the founders of ecological economics .

Life

He studied mathematics in Bucharest and later as a scholarship holder at the Sorbonne in Paris , where he turned to economics. In 1930 he did his doctorate on latent cyclical components of time series. With another scholarship he continued his studies at University College in London with Karl Pearson . In 1932 he returned to Romania and took over a professorship for statistics at the University of Bucharest until 1942, interrupted by research work at Harvard University (1934-1936) with support from Joseph Schumpeter . In 1944 he became General Secretary of the Romanian Armistice Commission, but fled to the United States with his wife after the Communists came to power in his country. From 1950 until his retirement in 1976 he taught at Vanderbilt University , temporarily also at the University Institute for International Studies and Development (IUED) in Geneva (1974) and at the University of Strasbourg (1977/78). In 1973 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Thermodynamics and Economics

Georgescu-Roegen is considered the father of bioeconomic theory and was the first economist to apply the second law of thermodynamics and thus also the concept of entropy in economics. He referred to the basics of biophysics with Alfred Lotka and to the fact that as early as 1902 the chemist and Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Ostwald had established a relationship between thermodynamics and cultural studies from the scientific side (in lectures on natural philosophy; see also energetic foundations of cultural studies , 1909).

In his book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process , published in 1971, he draws parallels between biological and economic processes, both of which are open systems and must meet the second law of thermodynamics . Accordingly, energy can never be returned to its original state after conversion processes have taken place. Georgescu-Roegen criticizes the neoliberal economists for ignoring the fact that an ever increasing use of resources will lead to a depletion of earth's capacities. In the following years of his book publication, Georgescu-Roegen was a welcome guest in countries such as France, Italy and Spain, where he found other followers of his ideas. The term “declining state” he coined was translated into French as “décroissance”. With La décroissance (1979) he became the pioneer of the growth-critical movement of the same name , which further developed his ideas of growth criticism. In the English-speaking world, however, Georgescu-Roegen's work attracted less interest.

Georgescu-Roegen made a further contribution to economics by expanding economic production processes in his flow fund model through the input of natural resources and the output of waste, which was subsequently also adopted by neoclassical environmental economics . With his work, Georgescu-Roegen developed the basis for new research disciplines such as ecological economy and bioeconomy .

“If we overlook the details, we can say that every baby born today means one less human life in the future. But every Cadillac that is produced at some point also means less life in the future. "

- Nikolaus Piper quotes Georgescu-Roegen, 1993, 2019

See also

Publications

  • Entropy law and economic process in retrospect. Institute for Ecological Economic Research, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-926930-01-2 ( pdf )
  • Analytical Economics. Issues and Problems. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1966.
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1971, ISBN 0-674-25780-4 .
  • Energy and Economic Myths. Institutional and Analytical Economic Essays. Pergamon Press, New York NY et al. 1976, ISBN 0-08-021027-9 ( excerpt ).
  • The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in Retrospect. In: Eastern Economic Journal. Vol. 12, No. 1, January – March 1986, ISSN  0094-5056 , pp. 3–25 ( PDF; 2.21 MB ).
  • Thermodynamics and We, the Humans . Entropy and Bioeconomics, Proceedings of the EABS, Rome 1991. Translated from the American by Richard Kiridus-Göller: Thermodynamics and we, humanity. In: Evolution - Commodity - Economy. Bioeconomic basics for commodity theory. oekom, Munich 2012, pp. 45–70. ISBN 978-3-86581-317-6 .
  • Demain la décroissance. Favre, Paris et al. 1979, Présentation et traduction de MM. Jacques Grinevald et Ivo Rens ISBN 2-8289-0034-X (new edition: La décroissance. Entropie - Écologie - Économie. Nouvelle édition. Éditions Sang de la terre, Paris 1995, ISBN 2-86985-077-8 , PDF; 1.014 MB ).

literature

  • M. Bonaiuti (Ed.), Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (Author): From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen's “New Economics” in eight essays. Taylor & Francis (Routledge). Abingdon, Oxon 2011 ISBN 978-0-415-58700-6
  • T. Randolph Beard, Gabriel A. Lozada: Economics, Entropy and the Environment. The Extraordinary Economics of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham 2000 ISBN 1-84064-122-3
  • Cutler J. Cleveland, Matthias Ruth: When, where, and by how much do biophysical limits constrain the economic process? A survey of Georgescu-Roegen's contribution to ecological economics. In: Ecological Economics. Vol. 22, Issue 3, September 1997, ISSN  0921-8009 , pp. 203-223, doi : 10.1016 / S0921-8009 (97) 00079-7 .
  • Herman Daly : On Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's contributions to economics: An obituary essay. In: Ecological Economics. Vol. 13, Issue 3, June 1995, pp. 149-154, doi : 10.1016 / 0921-8009 (95) 00011-W
  • Joseph C. Dragan, Mihai C. Demetrescu: Entropy and Bioeconomics. The New Paradigm of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Nagard Publ., Milan 1986; 2nd Ed. Rome 1991
  • John Gowdy, Susan Mesner: The Evolution of Georgescu-Roegen's Bioeconomics . Review of Social Economy, Volume 56/2 , 1998 doi: 10.1080 / 00346769800000016 pp. 136–156
  • Kozo Mayumi: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994): An admirable epistemologist. In: Structural Change and Economic Dynamics , 6, 3, August 1995 ISSN  0954-349X doi : 10.1016 / 0954-349X (95) 00014-E pp. 261-265
  • Kozo Mayumi, John M. Gowdy (Eds.): Bioeconomics and Sustainability. Essays in Honor of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham 1999 ISBN 1-85898-667-2
  • Kozo Mayumi: The Origins of Ecological Economics. The Bioeconomics of Georgescu-Roegen (= Routledge Research in Environmental Economics. Vol. 1). Routledge, London 2001 ISBN 0-415-23523-5
  • Pere Mir-Artigues, Josep González-Calvet: Funds, Flows and Time. An Alternative Approach to the Microeconomic Analysis of Productive Activities . Springer, Berlin et al. 2007, ISBN 978-3-540-71290-9 (application of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's concept to production).
  • Rainer H. Rauschenberg: The importance of the second law of thermodynamics for environmental economics. Diploma thesis, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt 1990 ( PDF; 552 kB )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andrea Maneschi, Stefano Zamagni : Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, 1906-1994. In: The Economic Journal. Vol. 107, no. 442, May 1997, pp. 695-707, doi : 10.1111 / j.1468-0297.1997.tb00035.x .
  2. ^ University of Strasbourg: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's Scientific Work. International Conference ( Memento of February 12, 2002 in the Internet Archive ). 6-7 November 1998
  3. ↑ a b c Borowy, Iris & Schmelzer, Matthias (2017): History of the Future of Economic Growth: Historical Roots of Current Debates on Sustainable Degrowth. London: Routledge.
  4. ^ Fournier, Valérie (2008): Escaping from the economy. The politics of degrowth. In: Int J of Soc & Social Policy 28 (11/12), pp. 528-545.
  5. ↑ Maneschi, Andrea; Zamagni, Stefano (1997): NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, 1906-1994. In: The Economic Journal 107 (442), pp. 695-707.
personal data
SURNAME Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Romanian economist
DATE OF BIRTH February 4, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Constanța , Romania
DATE OF DEATH October 30, 1994
Place of death Nashville , Tennessee , United States