The Textbook Circle — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

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TEE-ECO-CD-GEO-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

The Textbook Circle Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

In The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, from 1971, Georgescu-Roegen pointed out that the circular flow diagram in the textbooks leaves out the energy that goes in and the heat that comes out. The print is that closed circuit with what escapes it underneath.

A Author

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

B Subject

Bioeconomics

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

The diagram sits on the first page of any textbook: firms produce, households consume, money goes one way and goods the other, and the two arrows close a perfect circle.

Georgescu-Roegen pointed out what the circle does not draw. Concentrated energy goes in and dispersed heat comes out, and that transformation cannot be undone. An ore becomes scrap scattered across the world and no process returns it to the seam except by spending more energy than was in it.

His conclusion was not that we ought to degrow out of decency, but that the textbook circle describes an impossible machine, and that a science beginning with a diagram that violates the second law is calculating on a fiction.

The book is from 1971. He was answered politely, cited rarely, and the diagram is still on the first page.

Details