Daniel Little — Entropic social mechanisms

Does entropy apple to the social world as it does to the physical world, that is, realistically, or it is only analogously?

Understanding Society
Entropic social mechanisms
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Herman Daly — The Dualist Economics of Fredrick Soddy

Herman Daly gives a brief account of the philosophical basis of Fredrick Soddy's Cartesian (dualistic) approach to economics. 

Soddy, a (real) Nobel prize winner in chemistry, held that entropy is a chief limitation and that credit is not capable of creating perpetual motion, given finite real resources and the mathematics of compound interest. He was an opponent of economists' unlimited growth model and an advocate of 100% reserve banking under the gold standard of his day. Today he is better known as the founder of steady state economics, the forerunner of the economics of sustainability.

Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
Dualist Economics
Herman Daly

Peter Radford — Quote[s] Of The Day #2

Economists have made the study of economies more tractable – some would say they have simplified things – by sealing off all the exits and entrances so as to prevent novelty from disrupting their analysis. Even then they were forced to enforce ever more strict definitions of rationality and access to information on the participants in an economy in order to arrive at their chosen outcome: that market magic exists. This is why, in general terms, an economic equilibrium exists when there are no sources of change within the economy.

As the quotes above illustrate, and presumably there are thousands like them littering the literature outside of economics, the very concept of the economy being a closed system is absurd. The act of closure severs the link with reality, thus rendering conclusions from the subsequent analysis highly suspect if not outright irrelevant. Defending such analysis on the grounds of simplification places a great burden on the assumptions involved and on the ease of transference of whatever is learned back into an open system such as planet earth.

Such simplification may, indeed, prove useful, but of much greater use is any analysis that tackles an economy as it actually exists rather than as it might exist in the imagination of an economist unaware of the progress other sciences have made in tackling the complexity of highly entangled systems where the pull of entropy undoes order relentlessly.

Real-World Economics Review Blog

Quote[s] Of The Day #2
Peter Radford