Description

The Romanian economist and mathematician Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s ‘famous methodological essay’ in which he outlined his ‘critique of standard economics for having reduced the economic process to a mechanical analogue and a proposal of a new alliance between economic activity and the natural environment – what later would become his ‘bioeconomic programme’. The key to such a project is found in the entropy law (‘the most economical of physical laws’), which brought Georgescu to inquiry on the fundamental relation between mankind’s existence and its environmental dowry. This problem prompted him to step over the fence of economics into thermodynamics, where he formulated a new law (the ‘fourth law’): the impossibility of the perpetual motion of the third kind defined as a closed system that could perform work at a constant rate indefinitely’ (New Palgrave).