Growing Importance of BioPhysical Economics

* Article: The Need for, and the Growing Importance of, BioPhysical Economics. By Charles Hall, and Kent Klitgaard. Current Analysis on Economics & Finance| 1:2019 | 75-87

URL = http://mesfordpublisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/The-Need-for-and-the-Growing-Importance-of-BioPhysical-Economics.pdf?

Abstract

"Actual economies are based upon a variety of processes whereby humans interact with nature: Extraction; production; distribution; consumption; and waste production. Material goods and energy-requiring services originate not in markets but in the Earth. But for the past 150 years, economics has been treated primarily as a social science. The conceptual model upon which mainstream (neoclassical) economics bases its analyses consist of a circular flow of income between producers and consumers, mediated by means of markets. In this "perpetual motion" of interactions between firms that produce and households that consume, little or no accounting is given to the flow of energy and materials from the environment and back again, and little account given to human interactions that take place outside of market processes. Analyses by natural scientists (and others) find that the conventional model is simply not credible. In this paper we bring to the attention of the readership of this new journal the approach of BioPhysical Economics, an important but not widely understood development in economic theory. We review these criticisms and offer the basic concepts to construct a completely new approach to economics, one that will probably be essential in our future that is likely to be highly constrained by climatic, other environmental, resource depletion and other BioPhysical issues."

Excerpts

"Since the 1980s productivity has grown six times faster than wages, and the rewards have been captured by those at the top of the income distribution.

These new criticisms upon which we focus are aimed at the logical basis of the discipline, its residency within social sciences, and the misrepresentation of the real biophysical underpinnings of actual economies.

They continue and build upon earlier criticisms leveled by economists themselves, including especially Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1975), Kenneth Boulding (1961) and Nobel Laureate in economics Wassily Leontief (1982).

Those trained in the natural sciences look at the assumptions and procedures of conventional economics with something bordering on disbelief.

The criticisms of economics as a discipline by natural scientists tend to focus on the fact that conventional (i.e. neoclassical) economics does not qualify as real science because (among many other things) its basic tenets and models:

1) break the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of materials,

2) uses inappropriate boundaries for its analysis and

3) presents its basic tenets as logical givens, or maintained hypotheses, not testable/tested hypotheses.

We call for an integration of economics with natural science. Why should economics be (only) a social science when it is basically about stuff and physical services?

Why should economists be allowed to disregard the fundamental laws of nature and procedures of natural science when all other scientists know that if they did that they would be drummed out of their disciplinary club? This sleight of hand was accomplished in the years following the 1870s, when the focus of political economy changed from the idea that value was produced by the transformation of the materials of nature into exchangeable commodities using human labor, to that of value as the production of psychological, and unmeasurable, human utilities.

One considers economic production a work process, requiring energy, which indeed it is.

The increase in economic production (i.e. GDP) is highly correlated with the increase in our use of fossil fuels and other energy resources.

The availability of fossil fuels and the technologies to use them has meant an enormous increase in labor productivity.

Neoclassical economics gives low value to energy because of its low price, normally only 5-10 percent of GDP. But energy is critically important to economies because of its low price, and because we can do so much work on so little money. ... Hence energy availability is a critical issue in economics.