Energy, Complexity and Wealth Maximization

This book is about the mechanisms of wealth creation, or what we like to think of as evolutionary "progress". For the modern economy, natural wealth consists of complex physical structures of condensed ("frozen") energy - mass - maintained in the earth's crust far from thermodynamic equilibrium. However, we usually perceive wealth as created when mutation or "invention" - a change agent - introduces something different, and fitter, and usually after some part of the natural wealth of the planet has been exploited in an episode of "creative destruction". Selection out of the resulting diversity is determined by survival in a competitive environment, whether a planet, a habitat, or a market. While human wealth is associated with money and what it can buy, it is ultimately based on natural wealth, both as materials transformed into useful artifacts, and how those artifacts, activated by energy, can create and transmit useful information. Humans have learned how to transformnatural wealth into other forms. Can the new immaterial wealth of information and ideas, which makes up the so-called knowledge economy, replace depleted natural wealth? This seemingly simple question is the grand challenge of the 21st century. In this book, you will learn about the three key requirements for wealth creation, and how this process acts at all scales from elementary particles to biological organisms to the human economy according to physical laws. At the planetary level, continuing life on Earth depends on "entropy minimization" or the "circular economy". In the human economy, however, the massive circular flow of goods and services between producers and consumers is not a perpetual motion machine; it has been dependent for the past 150 years on energy inputs from a finite storage of fossil fuels. Knowledge and natural capital, particularly energy, will interact to power the human wealth engine in the future as it has in the past. Will it sputter or continue along the path of evolutionary progress that we have come to expect?

Autorentext
Professor Ayres holds a PhD in Mathematical Physics from Kings College, University of London, a MSc in Physics from the University of Maryland and a BA, BSc from the University of Chicago. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Economics and Political Science and of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD, the international graduate business school.
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).

Inhalt
Preface.- Glossary of Terms.- Glossary of People.- Part I..- A Brief History of Ideas: Energy, Entropy and Evolution.- The Cosmos, the Sun and the Earth.- The Origin of Life.- Energy, Water, Climate and Cycles.- Summary of Part I: From the Big Bang to Nutrient Cycles.- Part II.- Energy and Technology.- The New World and Science.- Energy, Technology and the Future.- Part III.- Mainstream Economics and Energy.- New Perspectives on Capital, Work, and Wealth.- Epilogue.- Appendix. Energy in Growth Theory.- References.