Overview
- Offers a first-principles view of the history of wealth creation
- Shows the unity of the disciplines, from physics and biology to economics, for understanding the requirements of wealth creation
- Explains the interactions of information and natural resource flows in the human economy
- Highlights the need for business and political leaders to understand basic science, particularly the laws of thermodynamics, in order to make good decisions
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection (FRONTCOLL)
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Part II
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Front Matter
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Part III
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
- energy and climate change
- the end of economic growth
- environmental effects of consumerism
- steady-state economy
- natural wealth depletion
- information, technology, and wealth creation
- exergy, entropy, and work
- energy, complexity, and economic growth
- circular economy and limits to growth
- natural resource depletion
- energy and technology
- wealth and evolutionary progress
- data-driven science, modeling and theory building
About this book
Praise for Energy, Complexity and Wealth Maximization:
“... people who run the modern world (politicians, economists and lawyers) have a very poor grasp of how it really works because they do not understand the fundamentals of energy, exergy and entropy ... those decision-makers would greatly benefit from reading this book ...” - Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Manitoba
“... A grandiose design; impressive, worth reading and reflecting!” - Prof. Dr. Ernst Ulrich von Weizäcker, Founder of Wuppertal Institute; Co-President of the Club of Rome, Former Member of the German Bundestag, co-chair of the UN’s Resource Panel
“... The book is a must read for concerned citizens and decision makers across the globe.” - RK Pachauri, Founder and Executive Vice Chairman, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and ex-chair, International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Reviews
“Economists and physicists, like oil and water, resist mixing, sadly to the detriment of useful human knowledge. Bob Ayres is the rare combination of a physicist and a resource economist, giving him a unique understanding of the importance of useful energy services to all of life. This unique understanding is critical to the massive challenge human kind now faces – how to ‘power’ continued wealth creation without destroying the planet we call home. This book will almost certainly alter the way we approach this great challenge.” (Thomas R. Casten, Chair, Recycled Energy Development LLC)
“This is a must read for those who wish to understand what we've got wrong in our contemporary development paradigm and how we can fix it. By far the most important book in years that will reshape physics the way Darwin and Einstein have done, and will hopefully reshape economics too!” (Dr. Stefanos Fotiou, Director of the Environment and Development Division, UNEP)
“Bob Ayres is amongthe pioneers of this biophysical approach to economics, which may prove to be the most fruitful innovation in economics since Keynes. This extraordinary book crosses disciplinary boundaries to takes a broad, evolutionary perspective on human societies as thermodynamical dissipative structures. As natural resources become scarce and quality declines, knowledge is the one ingredient that may save us from following a path analogous to supernovae explosions. At a time when most economists confine themselves to partial and local micro-explanations, Ayres provides a big-picture understanding of the forces that underlie our current economic paradoxes.” (Gaël Giraud, Professor of Economics, Ecole Normale Superieur (Paris), and chief economist, Agence Francais pour Developpement)
“This magisterial synthesis traces the evolution of order and complexity from the Big Bang to Big Data to Big Dangers ahead. The book delineates the urgent collective challenge of making the ‘great transition’from an economy that squanders nature’s wealth to a new paradigm rooted in a knowledge-based wealth.” (Dr. Paul Raskin, Founder and President Tellus Institute)
“Robert Ayres’ new book is a historic, a contemporary, and a future oriented work of immense depth of thought, written by an author of incredible knowledge and wisdom, and encompassing views and concepts of both social and natural sciences. It is theoretically interesting, empirically relevant and timely regarding integrated assessments of social and natural systems. I think the work is a seminal contribution to looking at the co-evolution of human (economic and social) development and the Earth system, and will especially help to comprehend the new geological era – the ‘Anthropocene’.” (Udo E. Simonis, Professor emeritus for Environmental Policy at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB))
“In an age of sustainable development goals, there is no more urgent need for the policy makers and the public alike than tohave a clear understanding of the complex linkages among energy, innovation, and wealth. Bob Ayres’ book has done a superb job, weaving back and forth between physics and economics seamlessly, in illuminating the history of wealth creation in the past through the conversion of materials into ‘useful things’ based on the consumption of energy, and providing insights into the future when wealth will be created by knowledge accumulation, de-materialization and institutional innovation. It is a must read for all of us who wish for a sustainable future for humanity.” (Lan Xue, Dean of School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, and Co-chair, UN Sustainable Development Solution Network)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
He joined INSEAD in 1992, becoming the first Novartis Chair of Management and the Environment, as well as the founder of CMER, Center for the Management of Environmental Resources. He directed CMER from 1992-2000. Since retirement he has been a visiting professor at Chalmers Institute of Technology in Sweden (where he was also a King's Professor) and Institute Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, He remains active, producing publications on topics ranging from Industrial Metabolisms and Industrial Ecology, through Environmental Policy and EnvironmentalEconomics, to Energy. Professor Ayres is the author or coauthor of 21 books, most recently including The Economic Growth Engine (2009, with Benjamin Warr), Crossing the Energy Divide (2009, with Edward Ayres) and The Bubble Economy (2014).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Energy, Complexity and Wealth Maximization
Authors: Robert Ayres
Series Title: The Frontiers Collection
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30545-5
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Physics and Astronomy, Physics and Astronomy (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-30544-8Published: 26 July 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-80835-2Published: 07 June 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-30545-5Published: 14 July 2016
Series ISSN: 1612-3018
Series E-ISSN: 2197-6619
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXV, 593
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 120 illustrations in colour
Topics: Data-driven Science, Modeling and Theory Building, Energy Policy, Economics and Management, Political Economy/Economic Systems, Thermodynamics, Natural Resource and Energy Economics