Kümmel Reiner, Lindenberger Dietmar
Institute for Theoretical Physics und Astrophysics, University of Würzburg, D-97074 Würzburg, Germany.
Institute of Energy Economics, University of Cologne, D-50827 Cologne, Germany.
Entropy (Basel). 2020 Oct 14;22(10):1156. doi: 10.3390/e22101156.
The neoclassical mainstream theory of economic growth does not care about the First and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It usually considers only capital and labor as the factors that produce the wealth of modern industrial economies. If energy is taken into account as a factor of production, its economic weight, that is its output elasticity, is assigned a meager magnitude of roughly 5 percent, according to the neoclassical cost-share theorem. Because of that, neoclassical economics has the problems of the "Solow Residual", which is the big difference between observed and computed economic growth, and of the failure to explain the economic recessions since World War 2 by the variations of the production factors. Having recalled these problems, we point out that technological constraints on factor combinations have been overlooked in the derivation of the cost-share theorem. Biophysical analyses of economic growth that disregard this theorem and mend the neoclassical deficiencies are sketched. They show that energy's output elasticity is much larger than its cost share and elucidate the existence of bidirectional causality between energy conversion and economic growth. This helps to understand how economic crises have been triggered and overcome by supply-side and demand-side actions. Human creativity changes the state of economic systems. We discuss the challenges to it by the risks from politics and markets in conjunction with energy sources and technologies, and by the constraints that the emissions of particles and heat from entropy production impose on industrial growth in the biosphere.
新古典主流经济增长理论并不关注热力学第一定律和第二定律。它通常仅将资本和劳动力视为创造现代工业经济财富的要素。根据新古典成本份额定理，如果将能源视为一种生产要素，其经济权重，即产出弹性，仅被赋予约5%的微小数值。正因如此，新古典经济学存在“索洛残差”问题，即观察到的经济增长与计算得出的经济增长之间存在巨大差异，并且无法通过生产要素的变化来解释二战以来的经济衰退。在回顾这些问题之后，我们指出在成本份额定理的推导过程中，对要素组合的技术约束被忽视了。本文概述了对经济增长的生物物理分析，这些分析摒弃了该定理并弥补了新古典理论的不足。分析表明，能源的产出弹性远大于其成本份额，并阐明了能源转换与经济增长之间双向因果关系的存在。这有助于理解经济危机是如何由供给侧和需求侧行动引发并克服的。人类创造力改变经济系统的状态。我们结合能源和技术，讨论政治和市场风险以及熵产生的粒子和热量排放对生物圈中工业增长的限制给人类创造力带来的挑战。
