| Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen | |
|---|---|
| Born | 4 February 1906 Constanţa, Romania |
| Died | 30 October 1994 Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Residence | Romania, France, United Kingdom, United States |
| Citizenship | Romanian |
| Fields | Economics, Mathematics, Statistics |
| Institutions | University of Bucharest(1932-46), Harvard University(1934-??), 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 | Karl Pearson, Joseph Schumpeter |
| Doctoral students | Herman E. Daly |
| Other notable students | Kozo Mayumi |
| Known for | Utility theory, Consumer choice theory, Production theory, Evolutionary economics, Environmental economics, Ecological economics, Energetics, Thermoeconomics, Bioeconomics |
| Influenced | Herman E. Daly, Kozo Mayumi, Mario Giampietro, Cutler J. Cleveland, John M. Gowdy[1], Joan Martinez Alier, Jacques Grinevald |
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, born Nicolae Georgescu (4 February 1906 – 30 October 1994) was a Romanian American mathematician, statistician and economist, best known for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which situated the view that the second law of thermodynamics, i.e., that usable "free energy" tends to disperse or become lost in the form of "bound energy", governs economic processes.[2]
Georgescu-Roegen's influence extends well beyond his well-known work on the thermodynamic foundations of economic systems and his career involved "his ambitious attempt to reformulate economic process as 'bioeconomics,' a new style of dialectical economic thought"[3]. He is therefore considered "one of the key intellectual progenitors of ecological economics" and of what would become the "minimal bioeconomic program."[4][5]
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He studied mathematics at the University of Bucharest, graduating in 1926. After winning a scholarship, he went on to study at the University of Paris, where his interests turned towards statistics and economics. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1930 for a thesis on latent cyclical components in time series. Another scholarship allowed him to pursue his studies for two years at the University College in London with Karl Pearson. In 1932, Georgescu-Roegen returned to Romania and became Professor of Statistics at the University of Bucharest. He held this position until 1946.[6] He was a professor of economics at Vanderbilt University from 1950 to 1976. He won the university's Harvie Branscomb Distinguished Professor Award in 1961,[7] and in 1971 the American Economic Association named him a Distinguished Fellow.[8]
A principal contribution to economics by Georgescu-Roegen was the concept of entropy from thermodynamics (as distinguished from the mechanistic foundation of neoclassical economics drawn from Newtonian physics), as well as foundational work which later developed into evolutionary economics. His work contributed significantly to bioeconomics and to ecological economics.[9][10][11][1][3].
He was a protégé of the renowned economist Joseph Schumpeter. His own protégés included foundational ecological economist Herman E. Daly and Kozo Mayumi who further extended Georgescu-Roegen’s theories on entropy in the study of energy analysis[3].