Duende wrote: Can someone break down the conflict between economics and physical science in regard to peak oil?
School of Physics in Les Houches, France, March 2018. Juergen Miknes shows some of the concepts that he has developed in his parallel analysis of thermodynamics and economics. It is a remarkable synthesis that you can find described in detail here. In the slide above, he suggests to replace the Cobb-Douglas function, commonly used in economics, with a function based on the concept of Shannon's entropy. I am not sure of a number of things in Miknes' work, in particular the idea of equating (in some ways at least) the growth of entropy with the growth of production. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating work. Nevertheless, Miknes was strongly challenged by an economist who didn't like his field invaded by another one of those pesky physicists. So far, economists have been able to keep physics away from their secluded garden and continue
dissident wrote:It is the concept of value that is irrelevant. A big hang up of Marx was "value". It does not matter whether it arises from personal desires or collective good. It is a spurious variable that is not causal in any way. Whatever motivates humans, they have to burn energy and shuffle mass to achieve anything. So the heat engine model of the human economy is by far the most realistic one. Human activity generates entropy by literally burning resources. Buildings and products are only minor locally produced anti-entropic entities from a vast pool of entropy increase. Economists are totally lost on this point. They think that humans spontaneously create anti-entropic entities through mere effort. No, you hacks, humans increase global entropy to live.
I haven't seen anyone on this site seriously argue that the long term physical concept of entropy isn't true or isn't valid, or doesn't matter in the LONG run. Only that economic value (respectfully, despite what you're saying about it being "irrelevant") matters FAR more in the timeframes in which humans care about in the vast majority of their practical decision making.
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