----- Original Message -----
From: Tom Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>issues must be examined. How large are the drags from natural resources
>>and land? What is the quantitative relationship between technological
>>change and the resource-land drag? How does human population growth
>The irony is that Nordhouse is right that the questions are "empirical
>questions that cannot be settled solely by theorizing" but he glosses over
>the inconvenient fact that the tradition of economic analysis is precisely
>that of "settling" empirical questions by theorizing.
There are some other interesting aspects of Nordhouse's piece. For
example, he introduces the concept of "drag". It's not in my MIT
Dictionary of Modern Economics, but it seems an ad hoc definition:
"that which drags". <G> Economics is based on such tautologies.
>Nordhouse is a co-author with Paul Samuelson of recent editions of the
>textbook, Economics, which contains several glaring distortions of
>empirically verifiable fact. The facts have simply been "corrected" or
>omitted where they embarass for the theory.
>
>Is that any way to write a textbook? Would you trust such "scholarship"
>with the fate of your world?
Physics incorporated thermodynamics -- moved from "production" to
"circulation" -- over 100 years ago. But modern economic texts such as
McConnell & Brue, 1999, and Samuelson & Nordhouse, 1998 still do not
discuss thermodynamics or entropy!
"An answer might lie in the fact that economics is no more than a
mechanistic belief (though defended with fanatical vigour) that by
exchanging goods for money, countries can make themselves better
off. It is true that by buying from another country we can avoid
resource depletion and environmental degradation here, but that
degradation is transferred to the supplying country. If the country
that sells us those goods buys its materials from us, it avoids its
own resource depletion and environmental destruction and transfers
the impact back to us. So while we are all at it (and use each
other's best economic advantage), we cannot avoid environmental
damage by trading with each other and thus get perpetual
environmental benefits like perpetual motion. Indeed, if that
worked, we could achieve absolute environmental integrity by just
selling our products to another country and then buying them back.
That proposition is clearly absurd. We shall see that globally no
environmental advantage can be gained from international trade and
much environmental capital is lost while amenity assets are
destroyed in the process.
"Unfortunately there is a physical law, the entropy law, that will
not permit perpetual motion to take place, and a technical law, the
Carnot limit of maximum efficiency, that will not allow any material
and energy to be used without generating some waste. That means it
is impossible to convert energy and material 100% into useful
product. Technical processes in the real world cannot exceed a
theoretical efficiency of around 60%, while most production
processes take place with efficiencies of between 25% and 0%. The
latter being all modes of transport, which are a total loss in terms
of physics. Transport adds nothing to the actual value of a product.
Only in economic valuation, something may have a higher value in one
place than another, but the product itself can only deteriorate in
the process.
"Thus, no economic process is possible without some degradation of
the planet." [ pp. 59-60, TOES Proceedings 1995, Gerhard Weissmann ]
More at http://dieoff.com/page168.htm
Jay -- www.dieoff.com
