Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
| Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Native name | Nicolae Georgescu |
| Born | 4 February 1906 Constanţa, Kingdom of Romania |
| Died |
30 October 1994 (aged 88) Nashville, Tennessee, United States |
| Residence | Romania, France, United Kingdom, United States |
| Nationality |
 Romanian
|
| Fields | Economics, Mathematics, Statistics |
| Institutions | University of Bucharest(1932–46), Harvard University(1934–36), Vanderbilt University(1950–76), Graduate Institute of International Studies(1974), University of Strasbourg(1977–78) |
| Alma mater | University of Bucharest, Paris Institute of Statistics, University College London |
| Academic advisors | Traian Lalescu, Émile Borel, Karl Pearson, Joseph Schumpeter |
| Doctoral students | Herman Daly |
| Other notable students | Kozo Mayumi, Muhammad Yunus |
| Known for | Utility theory, Consumer choice theory, Production theory, Ecological economics |
| Influences | Aristotle, Rudolf Clausius, Ernst Mach |
| Influenced | Herman Daly, Kozo Mayumi, Jeremy Rifkin, Robert Costanza, Cutler J. Cleveland, John M. Gowdy, Joan Martinez Alier, , Serge Latouche, , , Mario Giampietro, Mauro Bonaiuti |
| Notable awards | The Harvie Branscomb Award |
| Spouse | Otilia Georgescu-Roegen, b. Busuioc |
| Children | None |
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, born Nicolae Georgescu (4 February 1906 – 30 October 1994) was a Romanian American mathematician, statistician and economist. He is best known today for his path-breaking 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, where he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was seminal in establishing ecological economics as an independent academic subdiscipline in economics.
Several economists have hailed Georgescu-Roegen as a man who lived well ahead of his time, and his magnum opus was appreciated by one of his closest peers as 'a landmark' in economics. Historians of economic thought have proudly proclaimed that the man's work has 'heralded a conceptual overturn' in economics, and that the man himself was the most 'able and imaginative' economist of the 20th century. In spite of candid admiration such as this, Georgescu-Roegen was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, although benefactors from his native Romania actively lobbied for this. After Georgescu-Roegen's death, his work was praised by a surviving friend of the highest rank: Prominent Keynesian economist, standard economics textbook author and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Samuelson professed in a foreword that he would be delighted if the fame Georgescu-Roegen did not fully realise in his own lifetime would be granted by posterity instead.
In the history of economic thought, Georgescu-Roegen was the first economist of some standing to theorise on the premise that all of Earth's mineral resources will eventually be exhausted at some point. In his magnum opus, Georgescu-Roegen argues that economic scarcity is rooted in physical reality; that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity; that the carrying capacity of Earth — that is, Earth's capacity to sustain human populations and consumption levels — is bound to decrease sometime in the future as Earth's finite stock of mineral resources is presently being extracted and put to use; and consequently, that the world economy as a whole is heading towards an inevitable future collapse, leading to the demise of human civilisation itself. Due to the radical pessimism inherent in his work, based on the physical concept of entropy, the theoretical position of Georgescu-Roegen and his followers was later termed 'entropy pessimism'.
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