“Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately it also brought mortis.”
- Kenneth Boulding
"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
- John Maynard Keynes
When thinking about economics and the economic thinkers who have most influenced the 20th century to this day and sorry state of affairs, who do we normally think of? Keynes, of course, alongside Hayek and - like it or not - Marx (who, by the way, has also eventually in the last 2-3 decades proven scientifically useful in fields such as geography and others). Some might also add the name of Milton Friedman, but he wasn't as original, knowledgeable or thoughtful as his major influence was, namely Friedrich von Hayek as representative of the Austrian school of economic thinking (matter of fact, Hayek even disliked Friedman and avoided him in the university halls).
But barely anyone has ever heard of Georgescu-Roegen - which makes sense, since nobody likes bad news, nor the their bearer and the expression "kill the messenger" implies just that. Georgescu-Roegen wasn't an extroverted eccentric of an ideas man charming everybody with his wide range of knowledge about everything altogether, but nothing at all in the required depth of understanding necessary for taking up the role of shaping how the world works. And actually, this short video clip here of an interview with Hayek about Keynes explains exactly that and I always find it highly amusing:
But back to Roegen - he was more of the scientific type, or rather the mathematician and statistician, two fundamental pre-conditions for approaching economics. What is considered his magnum opus that he is best known for was published rather late in 1971 under the title "The Entropy Law and the Economic Process". In essence, he argues that ALL natural resources irreversibly degrade as they are put in use in the process of driving economic activity (thus, the first to bring the concept of natural resource flows into economic modeling - or that which we prefer to not think about for as long as the sun still rises). Thus, naturally, as resources shrink along with the planet's capacity to sustain its population and levels of consumption, future collapse and eventual extinction are at some point inevitable. Or, to quote Sick Boy from Trainspotting, "All I am trying to tell you, Mark, is that The Name of the Rose was merely a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory".
Georgescu-Roegen is really the founder that established the paradigm of ecological economics, and his work is largely based on the concept of entropy. And because of his radical pessimism (presented and articulated in the most scientifically neutral and objective tone of a matter-of-fact, reading more like applied physics than "economics", which makes it all the more disturbing in some ways, but also very different from other so-called economic paradigms in its solid foundations in the hard sciences of facts, not on simplistic theories about human behavior or appealing speculations that come off as music to the ears of politicians and banksters, telling them just what they want to hear in absolving them from the burden of responsibility - "just print more money and create useless jobs to circulate the cash, and things will eventually sort themselves out, cos markets magically do that", etc.), his theoretical position was termed by his followers as "entropy pessimism".
The degrowth movement that formed in France in the early 2000's was mostly influenced by Georgescu-Roegen's thought. Among his influences and inspirations were Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein, and, as he himself states:
"My philosophy is in spirit Machian: it is ... mainly [concerned] with the problem of valid analytical representations of the relations among facts."
- Georgescu-Roegen
Much of is general criticism, and particularly of neo-classical economics and Marxism was based on that attitude of his (and also since Marx himself had probably been the one most obsessively preoccupied with conceptualizing, diagnosing and understanding capitalism itself, to the point where he would sometimes come off as a factory owner in his attitudes, but above all - in my opinion at least - it is Hegel's influence which has been the ultimate poison and pollutant of Marxist thought - if you subtract all Hegel from Marx, you wouldn't end up with the historical materialism which led to what it did in practice, etc. - not to mention the Hegelian dialectics, which are so wonderfully general that one can basically just apply them to anything at all and amuse themselves at it...) He was also just as critical of abstractions and algebraic/algorithmic formalisms that weren't grounded in any facts of social reality as such (like how neo-classical economics understands human agency's role and function as the always already self-interested maximization of profits, or what somebody somewhere more accurately termed this homo economicus, "paper clip maximizers").
"This natural 'asymmetry' between man's access to the stock of minerals and the flow of solar energy accounts for the historical contrast between urban and rural life: The busy urban life, on the one hand, is associated with industry and the impatient extraction of minerals; the tranquil rural life, on the other hand, is associated with agriculture and the patient reception of the fixed flow of solar energy. Georgescu-Roegen argues that this 'asymmetry' helps explain the historical subjection of the countryside by the town since the dawn of civilisation, and he criticises Karl Marx for not taking this subjection properly into account in his theory of historical materialism."
- Source: Wikipedia
Thus, he had waged intellectual war on both fronts - that of mainstream economics and of Marxism - for both not taking into account the vitally critical importance of natural resources and their not being able to survive Hume's guillotine (what is known as the "is-ought problem", the mistaking of what ought to be with what is). Largely based on and grounded in thermodynamic theory and its principles (that, in a closed system, energy is neither created nor destroyed and that due to entropy, energy tends to degrade over time as it transforms into something that has poorer and poorer qualities than before, as sometimes nicely summarized in the popular wisdom of how there's "no free lunch").
To make things even worse, thermodynamics - in the terms of its own laws and the cosmology that arises from them - predicts the eventual and inevitable heat death of the universe, as all energetic transformation is pushing the universe closer and closer towards the final state of inert physical uniformity and maximum entropy. He claims this process to be an inevitable trajectory of human economic activity where valuable low entropy natural resources are sought out and exploited (therefore, no surprise in that wars are fought over resources and the capacity to sustain unsustainable status quo, afraid of what might happen if it isn't - and also explaining why much of Africa and especially places rich in rare and precious mineral resources such as Congo are the failed states and hell holes they are, etc.), then - if at all - recycled back down into higher entropy products along with valueless waste of pollution and heat. And while recycling is possible, it also can only go for as long.
And also, since modern agriculture depends on mechanization, automation, organic chemistry when it comes to fertilizers, pesticides, etc. (which in turn is entirely dependent on fossil fuels) - in other words, it is entirely dependent on Earth's mineral stock of resources that fuel the entire process, and as these raw material resources shrink and deplete, so will human population (currently overpopulated due to accelerated processes of production and consumption, but just like any other living orgasm's population, prone to falling into Malthusian traps) - towards eventual extinction.
Memorial statue of Baruch Spinoza in Amsterdam, where he lived for most of his life.
Now, I also feel like mentioning that this "state of inert physical uniformity" which defines maximum entropy very much evokes in me an association with Spinoza's "eternal substance" of what he called God and that everything else was just (temporary) attributes, , modes, modifications and manifestations of it (while this one singular fundamental substance he understood as "that which stands underneath" in constituting the one Reality). I mean, his Ethics really is above all a systematized ontology (upon which then all ethics derives from, in knowing how to behave right by having the knowledge of what the world consists of in its fundamental essence). The whole thing (entropy pessimism) is also kind of intuitively closely related to the Buddhist philosophy of how life should be lived in accordance with the laws of, well, again, reality - get rid of all passions that drive action, attain indifference, peace, stillness, inactivity and silence, don't produce more than the barely necessary you need and divorce yourself from worldly human affairs, including family. Indifference and compassion being the two main values in this philosophy, derived from Hinduism (which is basically more like a framework for constituting religions and philosophies, than a religion or systematic philosophy itself - by the way, there are also plenty of odd parallels between it and Spinoza's philosophy, as Hinduism to a large extent appears like some kind of Spinoza explained with comic book characters, rather than picking up on rationalism and Medieval concepts to turn them against themselves and turning the page of modernism - and in doing all that, Spinoza had absolutely no idea of Hindu philosophy or religion whatsoever....)
This part of his theory/model - the production process and the flow-fund model, I do not yet right now fully comprehend, frankly, but on the surface of it it makes financial capital(ism) seem not simply just wrong, senseless, absurd, stupid, unjust, unethical, criminal, etc., but ULTIMATELY SENSELESS in its demented end goal (yet, brilliantly efficient and creatively resourceful in achieving it by all means available - effectively divorcing price and value, and using speed of computation to capture and multiply price as quantitative dimension, as most things in the world aren't really measurable, let alone against an universal equivalent of measuring all value there is... here, Holochain has interesting, valuable propositions, but let's not digress too much). And PoW-based crypto-currencies that dedicate entire countries' total energy expenditure for the purpose of brute forcing a hash at the speed of gazillions per second.... Jesus fucking Mohammed... Green energy, yeah, right. Selling units of waste for value as proof of work operating on the massively distributed consensus of devices designed to senselessly compute senseless one-way functions, til they get it "right", so they can issue verifiable "proof" that counts as something akin to money - we realize here that the very terminology is as if deliberately misleading? Anyway.
And here now, next, I directly quote from Wikipedia:
In his social theory, Georgescu-Roegen argues that man's economic struggle to work and earn a livelihood is largely a continuation and extension of his biological struggle to sustain life and survive. This biological struggle has prevailed since the dawn of man, and the nature of the struggle was not altered by the invention of money as a medium of exchange. Unlike animals, man has developed exosomatic instruments, that is, tools and equipment. These instruments are produced by man and are not a part of his body. At the same time, production is a social, and not an individual, undertaking. This situation has turned man's struggle to sustain life and survive into a social conflict which is unique when compared to animals. Contrasting his own view with those of Karl Marx, Georgescu-Roegen asserts:
[L]ike Marx, I believe that the social conflict is not a mere creation of man without any root in material human conditions. But unlike Marx, I consider that, precisely because the conflict has such a basis, it can be eliminated neither by man's decision to do so nor by the social evolution of mankind.
When man (some men) attempts to radically change the distribution of access to material resources in society, this may result in wars or revolutions, Georgescu-Roegen admits; but even though wars and revolutions may bring about the intended redistributions, man's economic struggle and the social conflict will remain. There will be rulers and ruled in any social order, and the ruling is largely a continuation of the biological struggle of sustaining life and survive, Georgescu-Roegen claims. Under these material conditions, the ruling classes of past and present have always resorted to force, ideology and manipulation to defend their privileges and maintain the acquiescence of the ruled. This historical fact does not end with communism, Georgescu-Roegen points out; quite the opposite, it goes on during communism, and beyond it as well. It would be contrary to man's biological nature to organise himself otherwise.
Later, Georgescu-Roegen introduced the term 'bioeconomics' (short for 'biological economics') to describe his view that man's economic struggle is a continuation of the biological struggle. In his final years, he planned to write a book on the subject of bioeconomics, but due to old age, he was unable to complete it. He did manage to write a sketch on it, though.
Getting rather dismal pretty fast. Reminded also of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" - both the book (which I could never bring myself to finish even after 3 attempts) and the film. And how it suddenly seems less like deliberately exaggerated post-apocalyptic horror, for the sake of affecting and traumatizing in drawing one's attention and thinking about what he was just served, but closer to a potential and real future-to-be somewhere along the.... road....
Another thing that occurs to me reading all this, more or less at random (before I do so systematically, I have a bit from back before, but never got to his magnum opus), is the optimization efforts taking place in terms of conservation and efficiency, like what I mentioned about Gentoo in a previous post, but also undertakings like IOTA, which aim to waste less in accomplishing more (whether or not their concept will be proven in practice remains to be seen - talking here the ternary logic micro-processors for large scale distributed computing, which claim to be at least 30% more efficient and economical than their binary counterparts, to making use of things like LiFi, photons and ensuring precision of computation, measure and exchange of units of value - whether that be energy, data, information, real-time sensors streaming granular data, precision farming, etc. - all that without the need for energy intensive "consensus", but validation via the old lightweight proof-of-work and measuring against the weight of accumulated valid transactions already in the ledger, among other means and mechanisms that could be implemented upon the surface of the tangle's DAG).
Also, cutting out middle men, "bullshit jobs" (as the recently deceased David Graeber called them, dedicating an entire book to the subject), HR and marketing departments, advertisement businesses, cumbersome bureaucracies and their tendency towards inertia, more unnecessary and complicating bloating with agencies, departments, watchmen watching the watchmen, their minions and secretaries of secretaries, etc., etc. - one thing is Marxist alienation, of man from his labor and the fruits of his work, another is the robbing him of the possibility of something meaningful and/or useful, since those are the things on which the fulfillment of human life depends on. Rapid, but well thought through and properly analyzed reforms towards simplification by eliminating what is unnecessarily complex in its being parasitic (this also due to our human habit and tendency for coming up with the dirty quick fix as first resort, without thinking too much about the larger-scale consequences of accumulating and ever increasing complexity further along...) - one obvious example, stop using Windows, don't have every member of the family have/drive his own car, but perhaps everybody just use one, and so on.
One such other project whose underlying concept and philosophy is Tabula rasa reset in overlaying the entire existing internet with something so small and lightweight in its functional simplicity (following the calm technology design philosophy of non-invasive quiet simplicity and minimalism, re-enabling technologies as tools designed to serve us and not vice versa) is the Urbit project which was launched some time around 2007 by Curtis Yarvin (also known by his other pseudonym, Mencius Moldbug, under which he's written many political philosophy blog posts and essays that served as the foundation of what became known as the neo-reactionary movement or Dark Enlightenment - and one can find some parallels in both the aesthetics and pull towards clever/wise simplicity), that not only does it eliminate everything unnecessary and malignant (including flashy ads and pop-ups, curation engines that geo-profile and personalize search results and queries, while pretending to operate as actual search engines - and yes, I mean Google...), handing over full control to the user and his own personal space, but having reciprocal feedback effects by doing so, where things such as ADHD, addictions to social media and networking and/or porn, demographically targeted emotional responses and outrage, etc. - also calm down the metabolic rate of what your brain exhausts energetically (being the most energetically costly human organ).
Again, from Wikipedia:
"According to Georgescu-Roegen's terminology, a technology is 'viable' only when it is able to return an energy surplus sufficiently large to maintain its own operation, plus some additional energy left over for other use. If this criterion is not met, the technology in question is only 'feasible' (if workable at all), but not 'viable'. Both viable and feasible technologies depend on a steady flow of natural resources for their operation."
So, there are some trends and nascent movements out there that seem to somewhat align with what Georgesu-Roegen seems to have already recognized and warned against. The very word economy and economics derives from the Greek oikonomia, which originally means/implies how one manages and organizes his household, resource and land, family and kids (and, well, yes, slaves too, in those times...) In other words, those were individual responsibilities of decision-making, which have now been transferred to other external agencies whose motives and interests do not necessarily align with our own - so, therefore, again, the vitally critical importance of decentralization and handing back responsibilities and control to individuals (as genuine authentic communities can only exist as autonomous when they posses autonomy both individually and collectively, as Cornelius Castoriadis has pointed out in his researching of Greek philosophy and texts and writings on autonomy and social institutions).
"Will mankind listen to any program that implies a constriction of its addiction to exosomatic comfort? Perhaps, the destiny of man is to have a short, but fiery, exciting and extravagant life rather than a long, uneventful and vegetative existence. Let other species — the amoebas, for example — which have no social ambitions whatever inherit an Earth still bathed in plenty of sunshine."
- Georgescu-Roegen
But what Georgescu-Roegen claims in either case is that we can only slow down (even if significantly so) the inevitable, not change or escape it. And there is an interesting term here that comes to mind, the eschatologically Biblical and (eventually) political concept of the katechon - of "the one who withholds", as in postpones the inevitable, and by the inevitable here it is understood (in the Biblical text) the arrival of the Antichrist and the ensuing apocalypse (and that his revelation - what apocalypse translates as from Greek - depends on the removal of that "something which/who restrains him"). The analogous meaning of the same in political philosophy, largely associated with Carl Schmitt, is more or less self-evident, implying the power and capacity (as in historical power and collectively organized will, etc.) to "restrain" the worst from happening (such as Hobbesian "war of all against all" or Orwellian totalitarianism of all pervasive disciplinary surveillance and control, etc. - or, nowadays, dangerous ideas and movements such as some various forms of accelerationism - the idea that if we accelerate the ongoing dis-integrative processes and capitalism as a whole to the point of a breakdown, only then can something else be re-imagined and re-constituted from the ruins of what will be left...)
So, even though "'bigger and better' motorcycles, automobiles, jet planes, refrigerators, etc., necessarily cause not only 'bigger and better' depletion of natural resources, but also 'bigger and better' pollution" (directly quoting Roegen) and that "the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck" (citing Paul Virilio here, who is another theoretician, philosopher and researcher in those related fields of technology, speed and warfare), the best we can get and hope for lies within our human capabilities for building and organizing around institutions - and with technologies like Holochain, implementations of peer-to-peer quadratic voting schemes encapsulated by zero-knowledge cryptography protocols, Tim Berners-Lee's latest project called Solid and quite a few more, we seem to have the necessary tools for building the parallel and alternative institutions to constitute the new basins of attraction (to use the systems theory term for it) to fall back on as all else collapses one level at a time, dragging all and everybody else along in the abyss (a situation like that is how long periods of what are called Dark Ages come to be).
Anyway, this whole post has become too long and stretched out and branching away in too many directions and different associations, so I think I'll stop here for now, hoping that somebody will actually take take the time to read through it - while I myself am taking upon reading Goergescu-Roegen's original works in full.
Final Words and References (Partially in a way notes to self
Georgescu-Roegen's economic theory and overall philosophy appears very reminiscent, if not almost analogous in many of its premises and basic mathematical/statistical rationale/reasoning and overall conclusively pessimistic and dark expectations about "industrial society and it's future" (as the relatively short essay, sometimes considered manifesto, is entitled) as that of the famous genius mathematician turned secluded forest hermit, Theodore Kaczynski. Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was a born mathematician (as those are born rather than made), acquired his professorship very young at Harvard University and was considered a brilliant mathematician with bright future and academic career... until he abruptly quit everything and went out to live as simple and primitive a life as possible in the forests of Maine, all on his own, occasionally going out of his way to supply himself with whatever he can in terms of needs and necessities (food, books, clothes and whatever he can get without actually committing a crime or robbery).
Eventually Kaczynski took upon committing actual crimes of terrorism and attempted murders upon people and academics associated with modern technologies and industrial engineering by sending them mails and packages with concealed explosives. This brought him the name and reputation of the Unabomber, and when eventually caught, he went on to immediately and voluntarily confess to everything without requiring any assistance or help from a lawyer, pleading guilty on all counts and given a life sentence without possibility of parole.
Now, while Kaczynski may seem like a radical extremist or a disturbed and mentally unstable person at first, taking the time to read the 40+ pages of his (personal, political, social, philosophical, analytical, etc.) statement and general analysis of the observations, thoughts and conclusions which made him do the things he did, one would probably be surprised, even shocked, to discover the clarity of coherence in how he articulates it all, with the similarly cool and neutral matter-of-fact tone of voice as a mathematician would (just like Georgescu-Roegen) and perhaps even be a bit overwhelmed with it all by the end. But the point is that both Kaczinsky's philosophy and that of Georgescu-Roegen overlap in very similar ways and Kaczynski's.
Lastly, what comes to mind as worth looking back into after soaking up Georgescu-Roegen's ecological economics and entropy pessimism is Murray Bookchin's Social Ecology movement, which has been one of the main influences and inspirations in the articulating of Rojava's socio-political program of (municipal and local) organization, (decentralized and cooperative-based) development and power dynamics distribution of decision-making in between the various involved interest groups (in an endeavor of building a non-State-based system of autonomous self-governance from the bottom-up, composed of committees, representatives, councils and other various agencies and social institutions, as well as defense and protection forces and units, which tend to be necessarily more centralized, as per the nature of what they do).
