Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

Nicholas Georgescu - Roegen ( born February 4, 1906 in Constanta, † October 30, 1994 in Nashville, Tennessee, United States) was a Romanian mathematician and economist.

Life

He studied mathematics in Bucharest and later as a Fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he turned to economics. In 1930, he completed a doctorate on latent cyclical components of time series. With another scholarship he continued his studies at University College in London with Karl Pearson continued. In 1932 he returned to Romania and took over at the University of Bucharest until 1942 a professor of statistics, interrupted by research at Harvard ( 1934-1936 ) funded by Joseph Schumpeter. In 1944 he became Secretary General of the Romanian Armistice Commission, however, fled after the seizure of power by communists in his country with his wife in the United States. From 1950 until his retirement in 1976 he taught at Vanderbilt University, but mainly on the GIDS in Geneva (1974) and at the University of Strasbourg (1977 /78).

Thermodynamics and economics

Georgescu - Roegen is considered the father of bio-economic theory and applied as the first economist to the second law of thermodynamics and thus the concept of entropy in economics. He pointed out that as early as 1902 had on the scientific side of the chemist and Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald, a relationship between thermodynamics and Cultural Studies established ( in Lectures on the Philosophy of Nature, see also Energetic Basis of Cultural Studies, 1909). Roegen most famous work is The Law of Entropy and the Economic Process (The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, 1971). With La décroissance (1979 ) he became the mastermind of the same growth- critical movement.

Publications

• Analytical Economics. Issues and Problems. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1966.
• The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1971, ISBN 0-674-25780-4.
• Energy and Economic Myths. Institutional and Analytical Economic Essays. Pergamon Press, New York, NY, inter alia, 1976, ISBN 0-08-021027-9 (excerpt).
• Demain la décroissance. Favre, Paris, among others 1979, ISBN 2-8289-0034- X ( formally wrong ISBN ) ( reissue: La décroissance entropy - Écologie - Nouvelle Économie édition Éditions de la terre Sang, Paris 1995, ISBN 2-86985-077 -. .. 8 (PDF, 1.014 MB).
• The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in Retrospect. In: Eastern Economic Journal. Vol 12, No. 1, January-March 1986 ISSN 0094-5056, pp. 3-25 (PDF, 2.21 MB). The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in Retrospect ( = series of the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (Iow ) GmbH. Vol. 5). German original translation by the IOEW. Institute for Ecological Economy Research, Berlin, 1987, ISBN 3-926930-01-2.