This is not my bailiwick, but I’m thinking of starting a new branch of economics:
ThermoEconomics
Basically we throw thermodynamics and economics together and see what comes of this Unholy union. My idea is this, the two laws of thermoeconomics…
Does this mean the fabric of economics is curved?
Law 1
Value [money] is neither created nor destroyed, it merely changes form. This goes beyond the conversion of dollars into cents, but the transference of value from one type of currency to another…[money] is transformed into [a refrigerator].
Law 2
Any time you use value [money], including any time you make a transaction, some of the starting value is going to be lost as/to age.
As with the laws of thermodynamics, the second has stronger implications than the first. Namely, no transaction is 100% efficient; also, and probably more importantly, value systems will break down unless they have some input of value. Strictly speaking the second law also says that closed systems become more disorganized over time. This last statement is untranslated from its thermodynamic implication. A closed system will lose value [become disorganized] over time.
I guess this means that the entropy of thermoeconomics is something significant, like age or time. I’m going to side with age, I think. Like in thermodynamics, time is inescapable. Maybe time plays the same role in thermoeconomics as it does in thermodynamics.
Entropy is defined as a measure of disorder or uncertainty about a system. I think entropy works as a term for thermoeconomics, but ‘what’ it actually is is lost on me.
Energy in a system is converted into both work and heat, and scientists say energy is lost as heat. Now ‘heat’ doesn’t really work in an economic sense, so I have to find something that stands in for ‘heat’ in this metaphor. I like ‘age’ because implies time passage, but isn’t time itself.
Of course, among the many things that need to fleshed out are open and closed value systems. They’re pretty self-descriptive to me. Just like the Earth isn’t a closed system, (it’s powered by the sun), so too maybe the value system of a culture or nation. In this sense, we can use imports and exports as some viable evidence of interdependence, which supports a nation as an open value system…economically speaking.
I don’t know if any of this actually works mathematically, but it makes a nice metaphor. I’ll take my Nobel Prize now, but I don’t care which one…they all pay the same.
Tags: economics, energy, ideas, money, posit, synthesis, thermodynamics, Thermoeconomics