| | A detailed review of our new book, Entropy Economics https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/209049954-entropy-economics I am in the middle of trying to pull together some more coherent thoughts on this but I might as well write something.
Galbraith and Chen have worked together for years now and much of this work is based on prior work Chen (and also Galbraith, with Chen) has published in prior works like Physical Foundations of Economics. What is most important in here are the entropy theory of value and the production theory proposed. The former was already fleshed out, the latter is much newer, though building on a similar grafting of the simple firm-level economics of "fixed cost", "variable cost" framing that we are all familiar with.
Chen & Galbraith are building on a small but significant literature on Biophysical Economics that has been around for awhile but has often lacked the analytical formalism that they are proposing in particular with their theories of value & production, these are the most significant -- and that they back them up with some initial examples.
The other important bit about this book, in my view, is that Galbraith is attaching his name here. So far, Biophysical Economics has not had people with already-built reputations within economics really staking their reputation on it. The field was mostly populated with outsider academics from other disciplines and peak oil enthusiasts (the peak oiler's, Charles Hall, and some others were more or less the only people you could find who would talk about things like EROEI/EROI, which they also do in here).
An interesting piece I wish to read more about was their conflict with the Sante Fe/complexity economics school. It seems to me like an interesting vein to mine to clarify some epistemological issues around modeling and assumptions, the role of complexity, and the relationship between complexity and entropy. They are both staking some claim on dissipative systems and so, what gives?
Entropy Economics is part of a lineage that goes back to Ilya Prigogine and his "dissipative systems", and on to touching other thinkers such as Tainter, too (if not explicitly than implicitly). I'm personally excited to see some increased legitimacy of this subfield, but I have some reservations as well. Crucially, in my view, Chen and Galbraith make two major mistakes: (a) they are too quick to attribute too wide an array of phenomena to their theories of value and/or production without providing mechanisms of how exactly they apply, we are simply told "its obvious" when it is not always necessarily the case -- or sometimes hand-waving away extenuating circumstances, and (b) their is a fatalism that is present not only in this work but in much of the Biophysical Economics literature, a message that everything dies, everything runs its course and a complete lack of serious distinction between physical eventualities and avenues for real agency and autopoietic. Where is the line drawn between the possible and impossible, between the purely thermodynamic and the social space of potential? We don't know, Chen and Galbraith devote very little time to exploring this question -- and I would say neither does the rest of the literature -- which is of utmost importance, because it tells us what we can, and maybe what we should do, in the realm of political economy. Seeing is simply not enough.
Biophysical & entropy economics seems to me to be useful, and to have produced some parsimonious models, but it needs to find and clarify it's scope in relation to the social and cultural world.
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