Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994): An admirable epistemologist

Review of Social Economy, 1998

Georgescu-Roegen's work is usually divided into two categories, his earlier work on consumer and production theory and his later concem with entropy and bioeconomics beginning with his 1966 introductory essay to his collected theoretical papers published in the volume Analytical Economics. Most economists usually praise his earlier work on pure theory and ignore his later work which is highly critical of neoclassical economics. Those economists sympathetic to his later work usually take the position that he "saw the light" and gave up neoclassical theory some time in the 1960s to turn his attention to the issues of resource scarcity and social institutions. It is argued here that there is an unbroken path running from Georgescu's work in pure theory in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, through his writings on peasant economies in the 1960s, leading to his preoccupation with entropy and bioeconomics in tbe last 25 years of his life. That common thread is his preoccupation with "valuation." The choices our species makes about resource use and the distribution of economic output depends upon our valuation framework. Georgescu-Roegen's work begins in the 1930s with a critical examination of the difficulties with the hedonistic valuation framework of neoclassical economics, moves in the 1960s to the conflict between social and hedonistic valuation, and culminates in the 1970s and 1980s with his examination of the conflict between individual, social, and environmental values. This paper traces the evolution of Georgescu-Roegen's thought about valuation and the environmental and social policy recommendations which arise out of his bioeconomic framework.

Encyclopedia of Ecological Economics, 2022

A divergent series of Georgescu-Roegen's work is found in his penetrating epistemological reflections, those which inspire his entire corpus of scientific contributions. Said reflections work to convince him that any useful theory in economics must be an operational description of how economic realities actually function. In particular, proper operational description in economic science must be equipped with both analytical and dialectical reasoning. Georgescu-Roegen's unique position in economic science is signified by his proposal to reformulate economics as his own "bioeconomics", wherein the entropy law and the nature of Promethean destiny of human species are emphasized. Georgescu-Roegen is the only well-known economist to declare without hesitation that the primary purpose of economic activity is the self-preservation of the human species.

2000

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Development and Change, 2009

Recent concern for 'sustainability' has attracted attention to the comprehensive theory of economic development, institutional change and biophysical constraints developed by Romanian-born economist, mathematician and statistician Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. However, his seminal and pathbreaking contributions have still not received the attention they deserve from mainstream economists. Georgescu-Roegen's early work on consumer choice theory and his innovative critique of Leontief dynamic models have never been incorporated into standard economic theory or into current behavioural and biophysical critiques of that theory. His theory of economic development is a serious critique from within the conceptual edifice of economic thought which he himself helped build. His theoretical innovations provide essential clues for a fundamental analysis of sustainability, at the level of theory as well as of policy. Nicholas Georgescu was born in Constanta, Romania, in February 1906. He graduated from the mathematics department of Bucharest University in 1926 with the highest grade: foarte bine. On the advice of Traian Lelescu, a prominent Romanian mathematician, he went to study statistics at the University of Paris and obtained his PhD in 1930 with the dissertation 'On the problem of finding out the cyclical components of a phenomenon'. Having learned from the French mathematician George Darmoi some of the contributions of Karl Pearson, Georgescu-Roegen went to University College in London to study with him for two years. In 1932, he returned to Romania and became Professor of Statistics at Bucharest University. After obtaining a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1934, he went to the Harvard University Economic Barometer. Unfortunately for Georgescu-Roegen, he found that this organization had been disbanded soon after Black Tuesday-29 October 1929-because just the week before the crisis, it had predicted that all was in perfect order! This bad luck, however, brought Georgescu-Roegen the fortuitous opportunity to work with Joseph A. Schumpeter.

The characterization of neoclassical economics as a "taxonomic science" and the understanding of the evolutionary possibilities of economic theorizing are central aspects of Thorstein Veblen's institutional thought. This paper seeks to provide elements for a contemporary resumption of such Veblenian elaborations. Thus, we aim to re-establish the dialogue between economics and biology, focusing on the historical and methodological spheres of the conversation. The first part of the paper demonstrates that evolutionary biology's analysis of the pre-Darwinian past relies on the same principles that Veblen used to build his criticism of neoclassical economics -namely, the principles of typology. The paper also shows how this approach had a negative impact on the theoretical elaborations of pre-Darwinian biology, and how it contributed to the problematic foundations of neoclassical economics. The paper further focuses on the key methodological principles of Charles Darwin's works, highlighting their importance beyond the field of biology, and pointing out that a Darwinian approach constitutes an ontological perspective, premised on what Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen denote as "generalized Darwinism." Finally, the paper discusses certain concepts in the general theoretical debate of Darwinian ontology to stress the revolutionary role of Charles Darwin as a founder of this perspective and to explore the relationship between the ontological perspective and biological analogy.

Globalization and Business

The choice of physics as a model for the development of economic theory, a methodological direction which has been particularly dominant since the Second World War, has increasingly been criticized by economists, and not only by evolutionary economists, but by members of a variety of schools. Many of these critics see biology as an alternative methodological direction that merits investigation. Modelling economics on biology is not a new idea; it is an attempt to revisit a number of questions which were left behind at the turn of the twentiieth century. Thus the fundamental ques- tion is whether the concept of evolutionary economics was abandoned prematurely, or for good reasons. At present, it seems that the unifying position of these different “evolutionists” seems to be a growing contempt with the neoclassical economics, especially to its simplifying assumptions, which take inventions, innovations and dissem- ination of information as external variables The concepts that schumpet...

Journal of Economic Issues, 2013

The characterization of neoclassical economics as a "taxonomic science" and the understanding of the evolutionary possibilities of economic theorizing are central aspects of Thorstein Veblen's institutional thought. This paper seeks to provide elements for a contemporary resumption of such Veblenian elaborations. Thus, we aim to re-establish the dialogue between economics and biology, focusing on the historical and methodological spheres of the conversation. The first part of the paper demonstrates that evolutionary biology's analysis of the pre-Darwinian past relies on the same principles that Veblen used to build his criticism of neoclassical economics-namely, the principles of typology. The paper also shows how this approach had a negative impact on the theoretical elaborations of pre-Darwinian biology, and how it contributed to the problematic foundations of neoclassical economics. The paper further focuses on the key methodological principles of Charles Darwin's works, highlighting their importance beyond the field of biology, and pointing out that a Darwinian approach constitutes an ontological perspective, premised on what Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen denote as "generalized Darwinism." Finally, the paper discusses certain concepts in the general theoretical debate of Darwinian ontology to stress the revolutionary role of Charles Darwin as a founder of this perspective and to explore the relationship between the ontological perspective and biological analogy.

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences