Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen - From Bioeconomics to Degrowth (Routledge Studies in Ecological Economics)

From Bioeconomics to Degrowth

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (190694) is considered one of the founders of ecological economics, which he himself, however, defined as bioeconomics. Based on a profound rethinking of the epistemological foundations of neoclassical economics, bioeconomics represents a new paradigm compared to both the standard and the Marxist approaches.

Opening up economics to natural sciences led Georgescu-Roegen to point out the biophysical limits to growth. On the other hand, his positive approach to the analysis of social reality, with the careful attention he paid to the institutional and cultural premises that have characterized the history of development since the very beginning of time, led him in the latter years of his life to criticize very strongly the paradigm of sustainable development, which rapidly became dominant within ecological economics.

Thus it was that his criticism disappeared when he died only to re-emerge recently thanks to research into his archives and to the interest in his viewpoints within the new framework of sustainable degrowth. As a result, Georgescu-Roegens bioeconomics is now considered one of the analytical cornerstones of the degrowth standpoint.

This book aims to pick up the original spirit that characterized Georgescu-Roegens bioeconomic project in two ways: first, by collecting Goergescu-Roegens main contributions to bioeconomic theory, some of which are still unpublished, and, second, by recuperating that full multidisciplinarity that involves both the biophysical and the socio-anthropological analyses that represent the essential characteristics of the bioeconomic approach.

Today the world is facing an unprecedented crisis in both the ecological and the social fields. If the analysis proposed here is correct, within a few decades the basic economic institutions will be very different from those dominant today as a consequence of a process of adaptation to new ecological and social constraints. This is the reason that induced the editor, in the concluding essay, to attempt to individuate some fundamental processes that, in the interface among physical, biological and social organizations, may help to understand the long term evolutionary dynamics of the system. In this framework, the process of the formation of a new social imaginary is showed to play a decisive role in determining, among the various eventual scenarios, which future path humanity will choose to follow. This volume therefore makes an important contribution to the literature on this topic and will be of great benefit to researchers and professionals alike.

Mauro Bonaiuti is one of the first scholars to devote his research to the field of sustainable degrowth and is also considered one of the major experts on Georgescu-Roegen. At present he is teaching at the University of Turin, Italy.

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Drivers of Environmental Change in Uplands

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Environment and Employment

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Philosophical Basics of Ecology and Economy

Malte Faber and Reiner Manstetten

Carbon Responsibility and Embodied Emissions

Theory and measurement

Joo F. D. Rodrigues, Alexandra P.S. Marques and Tiago M. D. Domingos

Environmental Social Accounting Matrices

Theory and applications

Pablo Martnez de Anguita and John E. Wagner

Greening the Economy

Integrating economics and ecology to make effective change

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Sustainable Development

Capabilities, needs, and well-being

Edited by Felix Rauschmayer, Ines Omann and Johannes Frhmann

The Planet in 2050

The Lund Discourse of the future

Edited by Jill Jger and Sarah Cornell

From Bioeconomics to Degrowth

Georgescu-Roegens New Economics in eight essays

Edited by Mauro Bonaiuti

From Bioeconomics
to Degrowth

Georgescu-Roegens New
Economics in eight essays

Edited by Mauro Bonaiuti

First published 2011

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2011 selection and editorial matter, Mauro Bonaiuti; individual chapters, the contributors.

The right of Mauro Bonaiuti to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

1. Introduction (Mauro Bonaiuti) 2. The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem 3. Energy and Economic Myths 4. The Steady State and the Ecological Salvation: A Thermodynamic Analysis 5. Inequality, Limits and Growth from a Bioeconomic Viewpoint 6. Energy Analysis and Economic Valuation 7. Bioeconomics and Ethics 8. Feasible Recipes Versus Viable Technologies 9. Quo vadis homo sapiens-sapiens 10. From Bioeconomics to Degrowth (Mauro Bonaiuti)

ISBN: 9780415587006 (hbk)

ISBN: 9780203830413 (ebk)

Contents

MAURO BONAIUTI

NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN

NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN

NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN

NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN

NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN

NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN

NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN

NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN

MAURO BONAIUTI

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Serge Latouche, Joan Martinez-Alier, David Lane and the group of researchers at the Autonomous University in Barcelona, in particular Federico Demaria, Giorgos Kallis and Franois Schneider, for having read and offered me their comments on the proofs of this work. I am also grateful to my friends Roberto Burlando, Paolo Cacciari, Marco Deriu, Chiara Marchetti, Fiorenzo Martini, Ferruccio Nilia, Dario Padovan, Auretta Pini and Gianni Tamino for the continual observations, and criticisms, with which in the course of recent years they have enlivened all the times we have met to discuss the questions of degrowth. My thanks also go to Carmel Ace for her help with the English edition of the work and to Hariton C. Sprinceanu for authorizing the publication of the hitherto unpublished material from the G-R Archive in the Special Collection Library at Duke University. Finally, I am greatly indebted to Dalma for our daily discussions, particularly on the theme of the imaginary. However, I probably owe my most particular thanks to Georgescu himself: even today, after so many years of familiarity with his ideas, the combination of his faith in intellectual endeavor with his awareness of its (natural) limits, not to mention his undying love for human beings, which is to my mind the profoundest characteristic of his personality (together, obviously, with all his bitterness), continues to be a source of stimulation and inspiration for me.