Entropy Economics
The Living Basis of Value and Production
Jing Chen author James K Galbraith author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
Publishing:19th Jan '25
£28.00
This title is due to be published on 19th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Economists dream of equilibrium. It’s time to wake up.
In mainstream economics, markets are ideal if competition is perfect. When supply balances demand, economic maturity is orderly and disturbed only by shocks. These ideas are rooted in doctrines going back thousands of years yet, as James K. Galbraith and Jing Chen show, they contradict the foundations of our scientific understanding of the physical and biological worlds.
Entropy Economics discards the conventions of equilibrium and presents a new basis for thinking about economic issues, one rooted in life processes—an unequal world of unceasing change in which boundaries, plans, and regulations are essential. Galbraith and Chen’s theory of value is based on scarcity, and it accounts for the power of monopoly. Their theory of production covers increasing and decreasing returns, uncertainty, fixed investments over time, and the impact of rising resource costs. Together, their models illuminate key problems such as trade, finance, energy, climate, conflict, and demography.
Entropy Economics is a thrilling framework for understanding the world as it is and will be keenly relevant to the economic challenges of a world threatened with disorder.
“Old theories die hard, especially in economics. Galbraith and Chen offer an elevated understanding of value and production for a world that is anything but steady. Entropy Economics is an essential, critical work for twenty-first-century economics.” -- Clara E. Mattei | author of "The Capital Order"
“Neoclassical economics has failed, and the call for a paradigm shift seems to pop up everywhere. But to truly move to a new approach to economics, an alternative theoretical foundation needs to be built from the bottom up in full knowledge of what came before. Few are willing, let alone equipped, to take on this task. Galbraith and Chen have done a masterful job by laying out an economics without equilibrium that starts from life processes and physical laws.” -- Isabella M. Weber | author of "How China Escaped Shock Therapy"
“Entropy Economics is an eloquent call for the abandonment of the equilibrium fetish that characterizes mainstream economics and an exposition of a nonequilibrium economics, grounded in the laws of thermodynamics, with an objective measure of value based on entropy and scarcity. Galbraith and Chen will be part of the foundation for the new economics that we desperately need.” -- Steve Keen | author of "The New Economics: A Manifesto"
ISBN: 9780226827193
Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 23mm
Weight: 399g
248 pages