現代経済学における傑出した最も深遠な思考家の一人――そして、存命中はあまり注目されなかったのに、死後にその評価と影響が高まり続け、今後も高まりそうな数少ない人物の一人。
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was trained in mathematical statistics at Bucharest and the Sorbonne - receiving his Ph.D at 24. In the 1930s, he spent three years at Harvard, where he was apprenticed in economics by Joseph Schumpeter - and immediately put his mark on this new field with a few outstanding papers on producer and consumer theory (1935, 1936) - which included a solution of the "integrability problem" as well as killing the revealed preference-derivation of utility ("where is indifference?", he asked). He also set forth propositions on stochastic choice and lexicographic preferences.
After returning to Bucharest, Georgescu-Roegen took on official duties for the Romanian government, including a position in the post-war negotiations with the Soviet Union. In 1948, Georgescu-Roegen fled Communist-controlled Romania, stowing himself and his wife away in barrels aboard an Istanbul-bound freighter.
Georgescu-Roegen made his way back to the United States, finally settling at Vanderbilt University - finding the time, in the meanwhile, to contribute three seminal chapters to the celebrated Koopmans-edited 1951 Cowles monograph on linear programming and general equilibrium theory. There, we find several contributions - including the independent discovery of the Hawkins-Simon conditions, an alternative existence proof for von Neumann's system, the general laws of substitutability for Leontief systems and more. His ingenious contribution to the Marxian theory of crisis (1960) is also well-known.
In 1966, Georgescu-Roegen bailed out of the Neo-Walrasian ship with a salvo of critical torpedoes - contained in the insightful and erudite introduction to his Analytical Economics (1966). There, he developed his initial ideas on a new biological or evolutionary approach to economic theory.
His ideas were further developed and consolidated in his magnum opus, The Entropy
Law and the Economic Process (1971). Georgescu-Roegen's claims, among others, were
that an economy faces limits to growth, for which he invoked the Second Law of
Thermodynamics ("useful energy gets dissipated"). Although generally ignored by
mainstream economics, he was hailed by the fledlging environmental movement and, until the
end of his life, never ceased to speak out on his ideas for a new approach to economic
theory. Today, his work is gaining influence, and his insights are being grafted into the
new field of evolutionary economics.
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