PARIS -- No economy is a closed, autonomous universe, governed by rules independent from law, morals and politics. Indeed, the most interesting economic questions generally border neighboring disciplines. But nowhere is this clearer than in the interaction between economic processes and the natural environment.
The distinctive feature of this exchange is that it is governed not by the laws of mechanics, but by thermodynamics, particularly the law of entropy, according to which the quantity of free energy that can be transformed into mechanical work diminishes with time -- an irreversible process culminating in "heat death."
Numerous researchers, inspired by the late Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's pioneering work on the relationship between economic processes and physics, tried -- not very successfully -- to formulate an "entropic" theory of economy and society, especially during the 1970s. The entropic view assumes that economic processes produce irreversible consequences because of their multiple interactions with nature.