autobiografia de nicholas georgescu-roegen

Nicholas GEORGESCU-ROEGEN 217

supply of labour and the demand for it results from adaptations of the supplyof labour to demand. In the past various ‘reserve armies’ have provided thissupply, including pre-capitalist sectors, agricultural underemployment andhousewives, as well as frequent and controlled migration flows (1990a, p. 16).

Garegnani’s Major Writings(1960), Il capitale nelle teorie della distribuzione, Milan: Giuffré.(1962), Il problema della domanda effettiva nello sviluppo economico italiano, Rome: Srimez.(1970), ‘Heterogeneous Capital, the Production Function and the Theory of Distribution’,

Review of Economic Studies, 37.(1976), ‘On a Change in the Notion of Equilibrium in Recent Work on Value and Distribu-

tion’, in M. Brown, K. Sato and P. Zarembka (eds), Essays in Modern Capital Theory,Amsterdam: North-Holland. Reprinted in J. Eatwell and M. Milgate (eds), Keynes’s Eco-nomics and the Theory of Value and Distribution, London: Oxford University Press andDuckworth, 1983.

(1978–79), ‘Notes On Consumption, Investment and Effective Demand: Parts I and II’, Cam-bridge Journal of Economics, 2 and 3. Reprinted in J. Eatwell and M. Milgate (1983).

(1981), Marx e gli economisti classici, Turin: Einaudi.(1982), ‘Summary of the paper “Some Notes for an Analysis of Accumulation”’, manuscript

distributed at the Trieste International School of Economics.(1984), ‘On Some Illusory Instances of “Marginal Products”’, Metroeconomica.(1987), ‘Surplus Approach to Value and Distribution’, in The New Palgrave Dictionary of

Economics, London: Macmillan.(1989), ‘Some Notes on Capital, Expectations and the Analysis of Changes’ in G. Feiwel (ed.),

Joan Robinson and Modern Economic Theory, London: Macmillan.(1990a), ‘Sraffa: Classical versus Marginalist Analysis’, in K. Bharadwaj and B. Schefold

(eds), Essays on Sraffa, London: Unwin and Hyman.(1990b), ‘Quantity of Capital’, in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics: Capital Theory,

London: Macmillan.(1992), ‘Some Notes for an Analysis of Accumulation’, in J. Halevi, D. Laibman, E. Nell (eds),

Beyond the Steady State: A Revival of Growth Theory, New York: St Martin’s Press.(1997), ‘Equilibrium in the Classical Conception and Some Supposed Obstacles to the Ten-

dency of Market Prices toward Natural Prices’, in G. Caravale (ed.), Equilibrium and EconomicTheory, London: Routledge.

Nicholas GEORGESCU-ROEGEN (1906–1994)I was the first born of a family whose ancestry could not serve as an ingratiat-ing introduction. I knew none of my grandparents. My mother came from atruly modest family of six children, three of whom were completely illiterate.She was a teacher at a professional girls’ school. At the time of my birth myfather was an army captain. A couple of years later he came upon a majorslipping away with some meat from the soldiers’ foodstock. During theensuing altercation my father struck the culprit. For striking a superior heshould have been court-martialled, but in view of the nastiness of the episodehe was just pressed to resign. I can offer no proof, but I believe that learningat a very young age about that tragic event in my family fostered my idiosyn-cratic repugnance against trespass. In the society of scientists one coulddeplore the unavowed shams in education – the now corrupt title of Master of

218 Nicholas GEORGESCU-ROEGEN

Arts, once Alfred Marshall’s qualification, or the idle Ph.D. requirement forforeign language efficiency. (A deeper dissection is in 1976a.) And I shouldnot fail to decry the plagiarisms towards which the intelligentsia shows nodisgust. Quasi-plagiarism is committed by many an author who refers only tovery recent works although the primary contributions to that field go backseveral decades. The manifest intent is for such an author to appear asbelonging to a tidal wave of a new discovery.

A second influence on my development came from the town of Constantzawhere I was born and raised; having been an important trading centre forcenturies, this was a truly cosmopolitan town. Occupations followed roughlynational lines and so did marriages, but there were no conflicts whatsoeverin this regard. Growing up in such an atmosphere I reached the faith that,although people are not identical, each can contribute to the happiness ofsociety (if other things do not impinge upon it). Any restrictions imposedwithout imperative reason against particular groups of humans have alwaysgiven me goose pimples, as in the US in the mid-1930s where hotels stillhad brass plaques outside to advise that only Caucasians were accepted,and where the town of Brookline (Mass.) was at one time bedecked withimmense placards painted with anti-Semitic slogans. During the madnessthat plagued Europe since the 1930s I could not possibly escape from beingterrorized in Romania by the entire gamut of extremists against whom Iprotested loudly enough to put my life in danger, a risk that almost materi-alized twice.

The foregoing sentiments are so obviously beyond question that they donot constitute dissent. Yet one of them is germane to dissent. As I have arguedin several places, first in ‘The Steady State and Ecological Salvation’, thecommandment ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ cannot sustain an entropicsalvation. A new one, ‘love thy species as thyself’, must be accepted. This isthe strongest dissent to the vulgar question used by many economists, ‘Whathas posterity ever done for us?’ From a first hint of bioeconomics I observedthat societies of other species, which take care of their offspring in unimagi-nable ways, could teach us some very good lessons. True, some standardeconomists have ultimately succumbed to the idea that concern with thewelfare of future generations is a sine qua non for the survival of the speciesand come out with a characteristic observation: certainly, they say, the wel-fare of all future human generations is fully ensured by the common fact thatevery family cares about its children, those children in turn care about theirown children, and so on down the line. But as in many other cases the desireof getting out of a tight professional spot has got the best of standard econo-mists’ logic. None has stopped to ask whether the relation ‘to take care of’ istransitive for, if it were, our present welfare should have been warranted byAdam and Eve.


The first fateful influence on my development was that of my father. Underhis kind incitements, by the time I was four I could dance with the three Rs. Ikept writing the numbers from 1 to 99 on any piece of paper I could get holdof. Probably to spare the paper in the house my father kept from me the secretof how to write the number ‘one hundred’, which was to be my discovery byall kinds of R&D. When I was seven I lost not only a father but also a mindwhich could have prepared me to cope with the kind of world that began withthe 1914 war.

In the elementary school my love for arithmetic was first enhanced by ateacher who taught us how to solve, by elementary means, problems thatbelong to college algebra. Guided by other devoted teachers, by the age of 14I saw my name in print in Gazeta Matematica, a didactical periodical then inits fiftieth year. While in the lycée I participated in a strenuous nationalcompetition for mathematics in which I once came second and once first.Naturally, I enrolled at the Faculty of Mathematics of the University ofBucharest where I listened to some of the world renowned masters and gotmy licence ès mathémathiques in 1926.

Ever since my first contact with the mysteries of mathematics I dreamed ofbecoming a teacher of that discipline. Now, with the licence in my pocket,that dream seemed fulfilled. However, as I was soon to discover, some ful-filled dreams are metastable. Of course, my spirits were lifted up when on therecommendation of the Faculty of Mathematics I was awarded a scholarshipto study at the Sorbonne which, together with Gottingen, then formed the twomathematical ‘navels’ of the world. One of my professors, Traian Lalescu,frustrated by the lack of data relevant to Romania’s economic problems,advised me: ‘In Paris, study mathematical statistics. We urgently need statis-ticians, rather than pure mathematicians.’ I felt this as a call to intellectualarms and, ignoring my old dream, I switched to statistics. My dissertationwas so well received that members of the committee wrote on my diploma‘félicitations du jury’. Emile Borel presented a résumé of it to the Académiedes Sciences and the entire October 1930 issue of Journal de la Société deStatistique de Paris was devoted to its discussion.

The dissertation began with an analysis of the general stochastical scatterin which all variables are affected by random errors – a total novelty becauseeven now the theory just covers the simplified case in which only one vari-able is affected by error. On that result I based a special method for discoveringthe latent cyclical components of time series, a result especially important atthat time when business cycles were the focus of great attention. I stillwonder to this day why this important (as I think) method has never beennoticed in any way although Schumpeter used it in his Business Cycles and adetailed English summary appeared in Proceedings of the International Sta-tistical Conference (1947), in Econometrica (1948) and in Chapter 10 of my


Essays (1976b). One plausible explanation is that Herman Wold, who hadexcellent public relations, proposed an almost identical model in 1938; Woldattracted all attention.

I took two economics courses, one with Jacques Rueff, the othermagisterially taught by Albert Aftalion. From those courses and from myown intellectual torments I reached the idea that economic phenomena can-not be described by a mathematical system, a faith that I have never renounced.So although studies of business cycles were then in great vogue, I decided toapply my method of discovering cyclical components, not to economic data,but to the rainfall in Paris (which, curiously, showed the same periodicities asthose recognized in economics by Schumpeter).

The Paris interlude was the first switch on my life tracks. I came as amathematician and left as a statistician. I then yearned to do some researchunder Karl Pearson whose contributions had been highly praised by GeorgesDarmois, the chairman of my dissertation. There were two obstacles though:the cost of living in England was then far higher than the usual Romanianstipend, and I did not even know what ‘goodbye’ meant. The solution camefrom the family of a Master of French, Leonard Hurst, whom I had be-friended in Paris. With things getting hard because of the depression, they – aworking-class family – took me in as a paying guest for 171⁄2 shillings perweek! An extension of my Romanian scholarship thus permitted me to go toLondon and also to learn English (as a child does) from the wonderful lady ofthe house, a marvellous retired schoolteacher.

The contribution closest to Karl Pearson’s heart was the method of moments,a formidable idea that has unfortunately been completely shelved by the pecu-liar undercurrents of the society of scientists. I said unfortunately becausePearson’s method is superior in research to the maximum likelihood, as nowtends to be admitted. It was from that field that I chose the topic of a paper ofmore than 40 pages published in Biometrika (1932). My direct, simple contactswith Pearson for almost two years, together with the study of his magnificentGrammar of Science, convinced me that a scholar must also do some philoso-phy in order continuously to control the verisimilitude of his own scientificendeavours. Pearson was a Machian, a disciple of a philosophy that has beendowngraded like no other but is still endorsed, even by some pundits of phys-ics. In a subdued way I became a Machian too. In fact, this peculiar philosophyis the root of my most irritating dissents. I profess an epistemology concernedmainly with the analytical representations of observed phenomena. Satisfactoryrepresentation is the primary issue in any scientific endeavour. The controver-sies about the use of mathematics in economics would clear up if the antagonistssaw that mathematics is irreproachable; the fault rests with the economist whoapplies it to flawed representations. Analytical Economics was the title I coinedfor my first English monograph (1966).


Having heard from Aftalion’s course of the so-called ‘Harvard EconomicBarometer’ of Warren and Pearson, based on three periodic series, and of thefantasized manipulations of economic data by Karl Karsten, I kept wonderingwhether some connection might exist between those activities and my periodanalysis. Naturally, I was elated when the Rockefeller Foundation granted mea fellowship to visit Harvard University. It was there that the second switchon my life tracks was waiting for me. By the time I arrived there (1934) theEconomic Barometer had closed shop. Failing to establish an amiable rela-tion with Professor W.L. Crum, who directed research in periodograms, inutter despair I decided to contact the person in charge of the course ofBusiness Cycles. This is how by mere chance I met the man who was to havethe most decisive influence on my further thinking, Joseph A. Schumpeter,whose name I did not even know at first how to pronounce correctly.

From the small group of young Rockefeller Fellows – Nicholas Kaldor,Oscar Lange, August Losch, Fritz Machlup, Gerhard Tintner – who metweekly under Schumpeter’s guidance as well as from the private luncheons Ioften had with him, I turned into an economist with a degree from ‘Universi-tas Schumpeteriana’. I naturally plunged first into the mathematical theory ofutility. My first economics paper (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1935)was on a mathematical slip of Pareto, not a great feat since Pareto, although atruly great economist, was not an accomplished mathematician. But I wasrather out of step for mathematical economics which was still esoteric.

My most significant work of that period was a long essay on ‘The PureTheory of Consumers’ Behavior’ in which, through the prism of my episte-mology, I constructed new analytical issues of the utility concept. I beganwith a logical dissection of indifference and ended with a theory of satietyand of stochastic choice; ever since, these have served as the trade articles forcontributions to utility theory. My salient finding concerned a time-honouredparadox of why the differential elements derived from consumer demand areintegrable if the economy consists of only two commodities. Dissenting froman assertion by Vito Volterra that in two dimensions the differential elementsare always integrable so as to provide an ordinal map for utility, I pointed outthat the issue is not hanging on the number of dimensions, that even in twodimensions demand elements are not necessarily so integrable. I have repeat-edly returned to this point, the last time in a 1973 paper reprinted as Chapter13 of my Essays (1976b) where I proved a stronger theorem: even if thedifferential elements are integrable into an ophelimity map, that map doesnot necessarily reveal an ophelimity order. It is curious, nonetheless, that thisresult has not been incorporated into the utility theory, not mentioned even inthe works critical of revealed preference. I presume that the exceptionalpopularity of Paul Samuelson’s construction, which requires complete inte-grability, is alone responsible for it.


Schumpeter wanted to write a theory volume with me; this led to an offerto join that department. It is next to impossible for me to conceive now why Iturned him down, if it was not the memory of Lalescu’s call. I returned toBucharest where I had several jobs rather unrelated to my mathematicaleconomic armamentarium. I went back to teach statistical methods whileliving through four dictatorships, the last brought in by the Soviet tanks. Andit was my hard fate, later, to get the onerous job as Secretary General of theRomanian Armistice Commission which, however, did allow me to learnmore about how the great powers implement their written treaties. During my12-year exile in my own country until fleeing from the Communist terror, Ialso learned two invaluable economic lessons that were to represent the thirdand a very important switch on my life tracks.

I had entered into a wonderful friendship with Andrew Edson, the Secre-tary of the US Legation in Bucharest and a Ph.D. candidate in economics atHarvard. One day Andy softly said, ‘Romania is a deficient economy becauseher institutions are inept. The man who just sits outside the office of everyhigh functionary, public or private, does nothing to deserve a slice of thenational cake.’ The fundamental principle of standard theory – marginalpricing – was violated by my own economic world. The answer to thisanomaly, when it finally dawned upon me, was that in an overpopulatedcountry marginal pricing is the worst economic policy. In a country of dearth,people must work as much as they can in order to maximize the nationalproduct, to the point where their marginal productivity may even approachzero.

The internal logic of the Agrarians who insisted on the merits of familyfarms (where there are no wages) was thus justified. I presented this idea at a1948 after-dinner chat at the University of Chicago, which was followed by ageneral silence: the group did not want to expose me as an economic ignora-mus. Hating to have the paper refused I sat on a draft until the day whenGeorge Richardson, after listening to a lecture of mine, immediately commit-ted me to prepare a version to be published as a leading article in OxfordEconomic Papers (1960). In spite of the lack of attention for the politicalimplications of my agrarian theory, after more than 40 years I still think it tobe highly valuable, particularly my belief in the efficiency of the family farm(see Chapter 6 of 1976b).

In my essay in Oxford Economic Papers I pointed out, first, that there areendless types of economies and that each one requires a different theory; nosingle theory could describe them all – an idea which is anathema for thestandard school. Second, that the famous Arrow–Debreu proof of the exist-ence of a solution of the Walrasian system rested on an absurd premise:namely, that all individuals are ab initio endowed with an adequate incomeforever. That exposure must have so appalled the econometric establishment


that at the 1969 conference of the American Economic Association, theyscheduled their business meeting at the same hour as my Richard T. ElyLecture! But other signs over the years have revealed that those with vestedinterests in extolling standard economics have striven to obstruct the publica-tion of my works and to support even flawed attacks against them (see ‘MyLife Philosophy’, 1992).

The second lesson I learned in Romania happened as the Communists, stillencountering resistance, thought of using wild inflation to stop the peasantsfrom bringing food to the recalcitrant towns. Since there was virtually noth-ing the peasants could find to buy, I thought the strategy would surely succeed.To my public shame, the peasants kept selling food even for almost worthlessbills because, for them, any form of money was the summum bonum. Theyjust kept filling their mattresses with paper money. That monetary disappear-ing act of 1947 strengthened my awareness of the danger that resides inmoney manipulations.

Having learned this truth from my personal experience, not from theoreti-cal books, I was unable to accept Keynes’s thesis in which planned inflation –a euphemism for government spending – is the unique prescription for uni-versal economic growth. The process of economic development cannot bereduced to the simple Keynesian tool, the diagram with a line at 45°. Becauseof this simplification Keynes’s approach became the darling of a wholegeneration of economists, while the idea that government spending makeseverybody happier supplied politicians with a new ‘invisible hand’, theKeynesian one which picks the pockets of the taxpayers as if under anesthesia.If the bottom line is drawn, government spending does not pickpocket onlythe contemporary generation; it pickpockets future generations in a quiteswift manner which must in the end come to account. The present formidablestruggle in the US with the crushing amount of public interest repayable onpublic debt – created by past government spending – proves that the issue ofintergenerational distribution pertains not only to natural resources (1971),but to money as well. Turning to underdeveloped countries, inflation is ameans by which virtually all economic growth benefits the privileged classes(Chapter 7 in 1976b).

My objection to the neoclassical production function (Chapters 4, 5 and 10of 1976b) and the ‘factors’ comprising it led me into a dialectical discussionof that common but never properly defined concept: process. I argued firstthat a process is identified by a tempo-spatial boundary and described only bythe elements that cross it. Input and output can then be defined analyticallyrather than linguistically. For an adequate analytical representation of a mate-rial process I introduced the essentially different concepts of ‘fund’ – theagents – and ‘flow’ – the elements transformed by the agents (Chapter 9 in1971 and 4 and 5 in 1976b). Like any analytical domain, that of analytical


production processes had to have a proper unit. For it I proposed the elemen-tary process, which brings forth a fact hard to accept at first: that idleness ofagents is a physical predicament of production. In this predicament lies thescarcity of time in our productive activity, a scarcity that may be reducedprimarily by the special arrangements of the elementary processes illustratedby the factory system.

In a 1970 pamphlet (Chapter 3 in 1976b) I pointed out for the first time theimportant role of the entropy law for the existence of our species. As I arguedthen, the entropy law is the root of economic scarcity: it states that the naturalresources on which our existence depends are continuously and irrevocablyturned into waste. For us this is the most important of all the laws of therelatively new science – thermodynamics – which in essence is the physicsnot only of economic value, but of biological phenomena as well. Some, tooppose my idea, argue that the entropy law, like many other laws in history,will be refuted. But history is on the opposite side: few planks now count onthe eventual refutation of the entropy law.

I have grown tired of trying to convince the champions of ‘sustainabledevelopment’ that this plank is even more foolhardy than ‘steady state’; thateven a steady state needs a constant flow of resources that are continuouslyand irrevocably degraded into waste as the entropy law requires. Even Malthus(as I said in Chapter 1 of 1976b) was not Malthusian enough when heaccepted as possible an eternal steady state.

To oppose my ideas a series of so-called alternative technologies have beenpublicized with deafening din: solar technology, in the first place, followedby gasohol and a few others. Fusion is no longer the great hope of the old,and fission may prove to be good only for bombs and wrecks (as I said at asymposium where the Nobelites present did not chop off my head).

For some 20 years I have struggled with the vital problem of the long-runfuture of our exosomatic species. My results must stand up, for otherwiseanyone eager of literary success would have put me down with loud criticism.However, no recognized scholar has wanted to cross intellectual swords withme. My staunch claims are for two entirely novel thoughts. The first is theFourth Law of Thermodynamics (1977), which states that a closed system –that is, a system that can exchange only energy with its environment, as theEarth approximately is – cannot produce mechanical work forever at a con-stant rate.

My second finding concerns the fact that alternative techniques have beenexalted blindly, without anyone realizing how special must be that which couldsustain a viable technology. Surprisingly, among the immense number of feasi-ble techniques (or recipes) known to humans throughout history, only a few cansustain a viable technology; that is, a technology that can go on as long as itsproper type of energy is forthcoming. (Certainly, no recipe can produce energy


or matter; it can only use them.) I have proposed to call these special recipesPromethean for the good reason that fire best illustrates their peculiar proper-ties. To wit, fire changes energy of one form (chemical) into one of anotherform (heat) and may also generate a chain reaction: with just the flame of amatch we can bum a whole forest, nay, all forests. Our first mineral technologywas based on fire from wood. Before long we reached a crisis as forests werebeing depleted. In essence that crisis was identical to the present one. PrometheusII – two mortals, Thomas Savary and Thomas Newcomen – saved the day withthe invention of another Promethean recipe: the steam engine which changesheat energy into motor energy and which has thereby triggered a chain reactionbecause, as in the case of fire, with a little coal we can mine more coal andmetals to make more machines. A legion of ecological tyros exists who, throughluxurious leaflets and magniloquent global forums, seek to convince us all thatone of their favourite alternative technologies is just around the corner. Theyare set on terribly dangerous propaganda for if that promise were true, whyshould everyone not have a car that accelerates to 100 miles per hour before thecigarette lighter gets hot? No thought about the future of our species can bemore disastrous than wishful thinking and decrying the realists as doomsayers.

From what I have said so far it is clear that the only true hope for ourspecies, fully exosomatic as it has evolved, is whether Prometheus III willcome soon. When? The nature of this question is bioeconomic because, as Iexplained (Chapter 1 of 1976b), it concerns the intimate relation between ourbiological existence and our economic activity. Indeed, these two domainshave many features in common.

The promise of sustainable development is the most saleable snake oil evercontrived. Members of the academe now sell it in global forums amplysubsidized by enterprises of the highest rank. The participants who exult inmutually convincing themselves that the future can be one of continuoussustainable development remind one of those who in earlier times gathered toget delight from panem et circenses.

It is in the opposition to this way of preparing to face the entropic menacethat hovers over our species that resides my sharpest and tragic dissent.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen died in 1994. His

long and productive career was marked by gradual but significant changes in hisoutlook, focus of research interest, and interpretation of the economic process.His publications reflect the unusual breadth of his education and work experience,and an innate intellectual curiosity which caused him to disregard the traditionalboundaries between disciplines. He was an auto-didact in a wide range of areas,and his erudition showed at every turn. He moved easily from economics tophilosophy, including the philosophy of science, and from the physical to thebiological sciences. (Maneschi and Zamagni, 1997)

226 Herbert GINTIS

Georgescu-Roegen’s Major Writings(1930), ‘Le problème de la recherche des composantes cycliques d’un phénomène’, Journal de

la Société Statistique de Paris, October.(1947), ‘Further Contributions to the Scatter Analysis’, Proceedings of the International Statis-

tical Conference, 5.(1951), ‘The Aggregate Linear Production Function and its Application to von Neumann’s

Economic Model’, in T.C. Koopmans et al. (eds), Activity Analysis of Production and Alloca-tion, Wiley and Sons.

(1960), ‘Economic Theory and Agrarian Economics’, Oxford Economic Papers, 12.(1966), Analytical Economics: Issues and Problems, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(1971), The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(1976a), ‘Economics and Educational Development’, Journal of Education Finance, 2.(1976b), Energy and Economic Myths: Institutional and Analytical Economic Essays, Oxford:

Pergamon Press.(1977), ‘The Steady State and Ecological Salvation’, BioScience, 27.(1983), ‘The Promethean Condition of Viable Technologies’, Materials and Society, 7.(1992), ‘My Life Philosophy’, in M. Szensberg (ed.), The Life Philosophies of Eminent Econo-

mists, Cambridge University Press.

Other ReferencesManeschi, A. and Zamagni, S. (1997), ‘Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, 1906–1994’, Economic

Journal, 107 (May), 695–707.

Herbert GINTIS (born 1939)I began graduate school in Mathematics at Harvard University in 1961. Ireceived my Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard eight years later, and contin-ued as a faculty member there until 1974. My career as a graduate studentand young academic thus coincided with four momentous twentieth-centurypolitical movements in the United States: the anti-war movement, the coun-ter-culture movement, the Civil Rights movement and the feminist movement.These political events profoundly affected my career and the contents of mywork.

I realized at the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination that mathematicswas not sufficiently in tune with the events of our times and, despite my lovefor the subject, I abandoned writing my dissertation to begin anew in eco-nomics. I had never taken a course in economics, but a friend who hadstudied Marx told me it was a good field because ‘economics determineseverything else’.

As a graduate student, I came to believe that there were three great issuesin political economy that could not be put right by traditional economics:inequality and discrimination, alienation and overly materialistic culturalvalues, and the unaccountability of economic power. I eventually identifiedtwo major problems with neoclassical economics that prevented it from deal-ing with these issues: the assumption that preferences are exogenous, and theassumption that contracts could be costlessly enforced by the state. The firstof these became the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Alienation and In-

autobiografia de nicholas georgescu-roegen

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