Energy, Complexity and Wealth Maximization

Humans have learned how to transformnatural wealth into other forms. Can the new immaterial wealth of information and ideas, which makes up the so-called knowledge economy, replace depleted natural wealth? This seemingly simple question is the grand challenge of the 21st century. In this book, you w...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ayres, Robert
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 2016, 2016
Edition:1st ed. 2016
Series:The Frontiers Collection
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: Springer eBooks 2005- - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
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245 0 0 |a Energy, Complexity and Wealth Maximization  |h Elektronische Ressource  |c by Robert Ayres 
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260 |a Cham  |b Springer International Publishing  |c 2016, 2016 
300 |a XXV, 593 p. 121 illus., 120 illus. in color  |b online resource 
505 0 |a Preface -- Glossary of Terms -- Glossary of People -- Part I. -- A Brief History of Ideas: Energy, Entropy and Evolution -- The Cosmos, the Sun and the Earth -- The Origin of Life -- Energy, Water, Climate and Cycles -- Summary of Part I: From the “Big Bang” to Nutrient Cycles -- Part II -- Energy and Technology -- The New World – and Science -- Energy, Technology and the Future -- Part III -- Mainstream Economics and Energy -- New Perspectives on Capital, Work, and Wealth -- Epilogue -- Appendix. Energy in Growth Theory -- References 
653 |a Power resources 
653 |a Economics 
653 |a Complex Systems 
653 |a Thermodynamics 
653 |a Political Economy and Economic Systems 
653 |a Natural Resource and Energy Economics 
653 |a System theory 
653 |a Energy policy 
653 |a Energy Policy, Economics and Management 
653 |a Energy and state 
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082 0 |a 530.1 
520 |a Humans have learned how to transformnatural wealth into other forms. Can the new immaterial wealth of information and ideas, which makes up the so-called knowledge economy, replace depleted natural wealth? This seemingly simple question is the grand challenge of the 21st century. In this book, you will learn about the three key requirements for wealth creation, and how this process acts at all scales from elementary particles to biological organisms to the human economy according to physical laws. At the planetary level, continuing life on Earth depends on “entropy minimization” or the “circular economy”. In the human economy, however, the massive circular flow of goods and services between producers and consumers is not a perpetual motion machine; it has been dependent for the past 150 years on energy inputs from a finite storage of fossil fuels.  
520 |a This book is about the mechanisms of wealth creation, or what we like to think of as evolutionary “progress”. For the modern economy, natural wealth consists of complex physical structures of condensed (“frozen”) energy – mass - maintained in the earth’s crust far from thermodynamic equilibrium. However, we usually perceive wealth as created when mutation or “invention” – a change agent - introduces something different, and fitter, and usually after some part of the natural wealth of the planet has been exploited in an episode of “creative destruction”. Selection out of the resulting diversity is determined by survival in a competitive environment, whether a planet, a habitat, or a market. While human wealth is associated with money and what it can buy, it is ultimately based on natural wealth, both as materials transformed into useful artifacts, and how those artifacts, activated by energy, can create and transmit useful information.  
520 |a Knowledge and natural capital, particularly energy, will interact to power the human wealth engine in the future as it has in the past. Will it sputter or continue along the path of evolutionary progress that we have come to expect?