Background
GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, Nicholas was born in 1906 in Constanta, Romania.
("Every few generations a great seminal book comes along t...)
"Every few generations a great seminal book comes along that challenges economic analysis and through its findings alters men's thinking and the course of societal change. This is such a book, yet it is more. It is a "poetic" philosophy, mathematics, and science of economics. It is the quintessence of the thought that has been focused on the economic reality. Henceforce all economists must take these conclusions into account lest their analyses and scholarship be found wanting. "The entropy of the physical universe increases constantly because there is a continuous and irrevocable qualitative degradation of order into chaos. The entropic nature of the economic process, which degrades natural resources and pollutes the environment, constitutes the present danger. The earth is entropically winding down naturally, and economic advance is accelerating the process. Man must learn to ration the meager resources he has so profligately squandered if he is to survive in the long run when the entropic degradation of the sun will be the crucial factor, "for suprising as it may seem, the entire stock of natural resources is not worth more than a few days of sunlight!" Georgescu-Rogen has written our generation's classic in the field of economics."Library Journal
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( Toward a Formal Science of Economics provides a unifyin...)
Toward a Formal Science of Economics provides a unifying way to look at the concept of economic science. It lays a foundation for the axiomatic method, focusing on applications in economics and econometrics, and including discussions in logic, epistemology, and probability theory. Each chapter deals with a topic of fundamental importance to a rigorous science of economics while illustrating an aspect of the axiomatic method.Stigum describes an introductory course in mathematical logic, developing a symbolic language for mathematics and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the axiomatic method. He presents the standard theory of consumer choice, illustrating different aspects of the use of the axiomatic method and evaluating economic theories of individual behavior. He takes up problems in the foundations of econometrics and choice under uncertainty and offers an introduction to nonstandard analysis that leads to discussion of exchange and probability in hyperspace. A section on epistemology completes Stigum's construction of a formal unitary methodological basis for theoretical and empirical science.The last three parts of the book apply these methodological tools to various topics in economics and econometrics including empirical analyses of the permanent income hypothesis and consumer choice among risky and nonrisky assets; discussion of determinism, uncertainty, and the utility hypothesis; and study of topics of importance to the analysis of economic time series.Bernt P. Stigum is Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo, Norway.
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GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, Nicholas was born in 1906 in Constanta, Romania.
Licence (Mathematics) University Bucharest, 1926. Doctor Diploma (Statistics) University Paris (Sorbonne), 1930. Honorary Doctor University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, 1976, University Florence, Italy, 1980, University of South, United States of America, 1983.
Professor, University Bucharest, School Statistics, 1932-1946. Assistant Director, Central State Institute, Institution, Bucharest, 1932-1938. Economics Adviser, Romanian Treasury Department, Bucharest, 1938-1939.
Delegate, Committee, on Peaceful Change, League of Nations, 1938.
Director, Romanian Board Trade, 193944. Secretary, General Romanian Armistice Committee, 1944-1945.
Lector, Research Association, Harvard University, 1948-1949. Professor, Vanderbilt University, 1949-1976.
Rockefeller Visiting Professor, Osaka University, Hitotsubashi University, Japan, 1962-1963.
Visiting Lector, Institute, Institution Statistics, India, 1963. Ford Visiting Lector, Consultant, Brazil, 1964, 1966-1967. Visiting Professor, United States Agency International Development, Brazil, 1971.
Committee Mineral Resources and Environment, National Academy of Sciences, United States of America, 1973-1975.
Visiting Professor, Florence, Italy, 1974, Ottawa, 1975. Consultant, Austrian Social Democratic Party, 1976.
Visiting Claude Worthington Benedum Professor, West. Virginia University, 1976-1978. Professor Association, University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, 1977-1978.
United States Office of Technology Task Force, 1977-1978.
Visiting Professor, Technische University, Vienna, 1978, University Texas, Austin, 1979, McGill University,
1979, Institute, Institution Advanced Studies, Vienna, 1982. Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America, since 1976. Association Editor, Econometrica,
1951-1968.
Advisory Board, Fundamenta Scientiae, since 1976.
Editorial Board, Metroeconomica, since 1982.
("Every few generations a great seminal book comes along t...)
( Toward a Formal Science of Economics provides a unifyin...)
At times, it may take a statistician to beget an economist, of some sort. Since in the 1920s business cycles constituted a major problem for economists, for my dissertation in statistics I chose to develop a method for decomposing a time series into cyclical components — a novel approach which filled the entire October 1930 issue of Journal de la Société de Statistique de Paris. Believing that work on cycles as that of G. Warren and F. Pearson was still pursued at Harvard, I naturally wanted to spend my Rockefeller fellowhip there.
To my great fortune, there was no such work when I arrived: seeking someone interested in cycle analysis, I came to meet professor J. A. Schumpeter (who, symptomatically, later used my method in his Business Cycles). His dedication to the young scholars around him guided my path into economics. I thus became a true Schumpeterian, envisioning economics as an evolutionary science.
An old habit (some may say, fault) prompted me to probe the epistemological validity of every mathematical representation, a propensity characterising all my endeavours. Here only those contributions of which I am
proud should be mentioned (there are plenty of which I am not). In consumer theory, I resolved the non-integrability paradox, following with analyses of stochastic choice, want hierarchy, uncertainty versus risk, qualitative residual, all demonstrating the difficulty of measurement, even in production theory.
Intrigued by the disregard of marginal pricing in Romania’s economy, I offered an analytical justification of such economies, with the corollary that Walras’s system, although with a solution on paper, cannot always work because of its stringent initial conditions. On this line, I showed that even accretive growth cannot be represented by dynamic systems My flow-fund model, negating the traditional production function, led me further into environmental economics and, by a Schumpeterian inspiration, into bioeconomics.
Dialectics rather than arithmomorphism is my creed.