> Ed, > > At 21:09 12/01/03 -0500, you wrote: > (EW) > <<<< > Economists have lots of blind spots. Energy from the sun is one of them. > Air and water are others. I do believe that they were known as "free > goods" in Economics 101. I don't think they are nearly as free as > economists have liked to think. > >>>> > > I agree with your last comment but you're missing the main point I'm > making. (By the way, what economists call "free" energy and what physicists > call "free energy" are entirely different concepts. Perhaps the following > makes this clear.)
I admit to having been a bit flippant. > Yes, we and all lifeforms have free goods such as energy, fresh air and > water, but it's our ability to discover and manipulate a surplus of energy > (to produce true profit) above what normally falls to us from Nature's > bounty. In this way we become homo economicus, and not merely another > animal species, homo sapiens. Economics is not just about re-arranging > things in order to survive. All species do that. It's about discovering an > extra available margin of energy that leads to a profit in all > transformations and subsequent transactions. What I believe you're saying is that, in any transaction, the objective is to get more out than you put in. You thus have a surplus that you can either invest or consume. While the terms you use are different, conceptually your idea seems very close to Marx's surplus value or the consumer's or producer's surplus of the neo-classicists. > Thus, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when energy became by > far and away the most important economic product of all (besides personal > energy, food), Ricardo and subsequent economists entirely overlooked the > thermodynamic aspects of economics. (By "thermodynamics" I mean nothing by > way of advanced mathematics and integral calculus -- as it's often > presented -- but what I hope I have written in a simple way in the > preceding paragraph.) If I win David Smith's prize of a free lunch for two, > you'd better come over here and I'll explain further at the Royal Crescent > Hotel shuffling objets de table around as is the usual way with all great > ideas. > > Keith I'd suggest that what economists focused on was not energy itself, but the ability to turn energy to productive purposes. In their view, was not energy that fueled the industrial revolution, but the entrepreneurial (including scientific and engineering) ability to combine human and natural energy into productive purposes that produced surpluses (capital) to permit further entrepreneurship. The steam engine, for example, was not invented by coal or the energy contained in coal. It was invented at the turn of the 18th Century by Thomas Newcomen to provide a method of pumping water from deepening coal mines when horse driven pumps could no longer do the job. But then, seeing its potential, entrepreneurial engineers, James Watt in the lead, turned it to a variety of uses. By 1785, steam was being applied to the driving of spinning machinery. The first steam driven railway, Liverpool to Manchester, was in operation in England in 1830, and by 1845, all the large cities of England were connected by rail. Rail lines existed in most of western Europe by 1835. For many thousands of years, people lived with potential sources of energy without recognizing their value. Primitive people may have used lumps of coal to heave at each other, or they may even have tried to make tools out of it. It took a very long time for people to find that you could actually derive heat energy from it and ever so much longer to discover that you could use it to drive machinery. In all of this, it was the human process of discovery and invention that was important. Without that, coal would still be lumps that people could heave at each other, nothing more. If you win David Smith's prize, I would be only too happy to join you at lunch. Air Canada has a pretty good seat-sale on now. Best regards, Ed Ed Weick 577 Melbourne Ave. Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7 Canada Phone (613) 728 4630 Fax (613) 728 9382 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
