Entropy and Economics, continued

This must be so (that the immaterial output is greater by orders of magnitude than the material output, and that the material input must be proportionately more valuable than we now think) even considering the value of the life enjoyment that man-made capital might enable for future people; the most valuable part of future lives will still be immaterial, so the value of the low entropy that goes into today's man-made capital still corresponds mostly to values beyond just the capital output itself.

Another important point is that life enjoyment is the immaterial aspect of human purposes; the material aspect of our purpose lies in sorting not merely for matter and energy but specifically for low entropy, as noted by Boltzmann and Schrodinger (p. 192). In contrast to this biological-life purpose, of sorting, the purely material environment involves the simple shuffling of matter-energy. In these two senses, then, (of the immaterial significance of entropic flow on the one hand, and of the primacy of low-entropy sorting on the other) understanding entropy is necessary to understanding the point of life.

Another thread essential to GR's book is the issue of dialectical versus positivist understandings. In GR's view, dialectical concepts reflect "the most fundamental aspects of change" (p. 47). The positivist holds that the only things that have meaning are things for which there can be "absolutely sharp and distinct" definitions given (Schlick qtd. in Georgescu-Roegen 1971, p. 52). In contrast, change is dialectical; it involves simultaneous existence in a multiplicity of states--the present, for example, is not absolutely distinct from the past or the future. Both statistical mechanics and contemporary, mainstream economics are founded on the positivist orientation; they are both equally unable to reflect the dialectical, macroscopic, qualitative, entropic essence of life, which is nothing if it is not the continuing existence of change and the multiplicity of modes of being.

A final point I will touch on is GR's contention (related to Soddy's quote above) that economics has missed the thermodynamic boat, basing itself still solely on mechanistic models. GR hopes that his "book will achieve one of its main objectives, namely, that of proving that the economic process as a whole is not a mechanical phenomenon" (p. 139.). Regarding a hoped-for transition in economic theory, he says:

As I have repeatedly emphasized, the mechanistic dogma has been abandoned even by the physical sciences [outside of statistical mechanics]. We should therefore regard as a sign of maturity the reorientation of any science away from the belief that all temporal laws must be functions of clock time. (p. 139)

Further he adds that, "The bare fact is that the Entropy Law tells us only that in, say, one clock-hour from now the entropy of the universe will be greater" (1971, p. 138). In other words, it represents a macroscopic view at its core. The immaturity, then, saturating all of economics (microeconomics especially) is constituted by the aim to reduce (again, at least partly with the influence of statistical mechanics) all phenomena and value to microscopic, quantifiable (and reversible) processes and components.