Filip Lubinski

Can the US win the “trade war” with Canada?
Is economics a science about life or death?

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo239242610.html

These are only two of many questions Galbraith and Chen try to answer from an entropy-oriented perspective in their new book. Check my review to learn their way of reasoning.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5254004

Is economics a science? This question is often asked these days. The modern role of this discipline makes an answer to it of policy and maybe even of political importance. James K. Galbraith and Jing Chen take an unconventional attempt to find it (following Georgescu-Roegen). Debate on this topic usually occurs between those criticizing the controversial normative assumptions and those underlining the measurable worldly successes of studies on the economy. Instead, the authors of the Entropy Economics ask how much the mainstream of this discipline has in common with the fundamental rules of exact sciences, primarily physics and biology. This inquiry leads them to a somewhat bitter conclusion that most investigations on human activity coping with scarcity take a perspective torn apart from the lens used by others to understand biophysical life processes. They try to overcome this bitterness by constructing an alternative perspective focused on the Living Basis of Value and Production. It seems to be the highest time to offer readers this choice nowadays, when the critical problems of our world are mainly of environmental or energetic character, and exponentially rising urgency. Galbraith and Chen argue that to understand them correctly, we must start with entropy.