Economics and thermodynamics
Doing a perfunctory search on google about Economics and Thermodynamics I found a bunch of articles about the second and third laws of thermodynamics as they apply to economics. Don’t worry, I will not talk about chaos or entropy, I will talk about the first law of thermodynamics: “The increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings.” In other words, the increase of the output of an economy is equal to the amount of work added to the economy minus the destruction of resources available to the economy. If you feel lost, do not worry. You intuitively know the first law of thermodynamics in the dictum “if it looks too good to be true, it is probably not true.” Applied to current economic systems and the environment, what the first law of thermodynamics tells us is that it is not possible to create and accumulate wealth without expecting to pay some price in some way.
We are living an era of extraordinary wealth, however, we are paying a high price for our generational wealth: the destruction of our biosphere. If we keep traveling our current road of accumulation of excess without changing our technology, we will most probably end up blowing up the boiler for everyone.
Tags: biosphere, economic systems, Economics, entropy, first law of thermodynamics, generational wealth, internal energy, law of thermodynamics, laws of thermodynamics, oil, thermodynamic, thermodynamic system, United States
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November 19th, 2007 at 5:43 am
Try my paper “A Thermodynamic Theory of Economics“, International Journal of Exergy, 2007 Vol 4 (3)
November 19th, 2007 at 8:21 am
John, I edited your comment to add the link to your article. I came across the abstract to your article when checking around what was written on the subject. I will download the full article as soon as I have some time to read it in detail.
My main interest is trying to figure out how the first law of thermodynamics limits the speed and scope of human development. Beyond economics, and economic systems, I think that the first law has environmental implications and that the economic systems need to take it into consideration to find viable ways for further development.
January 5th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Nice presentation. Good thinking. It is like application of thermodynamics in real life.