Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen is Distinguished Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Vanderbilt University. He was born in Romania and while growing up, he lived under four dictatorships and three wars. According to Georgescu-Roegen, "Romania was at that tim e a struggling, over-populated, peasant-dominated culture and economy. And as I came to learn the economics professed in the capitalist world, I was struck by the claims of that discipline that it was a representative guide not only for capitalism but fo r absolutely all economic conditions. It was evident to me that standard economics could not represent an agrarian economy, and hence could not be a guide for it." Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg expound upon this ethnocentrism in economics in ," The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought".
Georgescu-Roegen received his degree in statistics, but , due largely to the influence of Joseph Schumpeter, he turned to the study of economics. He believes that "economic phenomena are not governed by a mathematical network...in economics, there is a vast and growing literature of purely mathematical exercises that correspond to absolutely no facts, not even to physical ones, If one starts only with mathematics, one is trapped inside it and cannot even think of the epistemological issues... A super b illustration is the theorem of some mathematical economists that the market tends to an equilibrium even if the traders are more numerous than the continuum power. Being trapped, they could not even dream of asking what actual space could have room f or so many actual traders."
Works by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen:
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