Economic Profitability Versus Ecological Entropy*

Economic Profitability Versus Ecological Entropy

There is a long-standing trade-off in bioculture between concentrating on high-yield varieties and maintaining sufficient diversity to lower the risks of catastrophic infection. The paper uses a simple ecology-based model of endogenous disease to indicate how a local decision to plant more of a widely grown crop creates negative externalities by increasing the probability that new pathogens wil...

Ecological intuition versus economic ”reason”

This article discusses the discount rate to be used in projects that aimed at improving the environment. The model has two di¤erent goods, one is the usual consumption good whose production may increase exponentially, the other is an environmental good whose quality remains limited. The stylized world we describe is fully determined by four parameters, re‡ecting basic preferences "ecological" a...

Economic Entropy

Economists have neglected to study the phenomenon of vanishing uncertainties and risks in the production process as maturing goods approach the final consumer who is eager to buy them at established prices. We fill this gap in resurrecting Adam Smith’s long-forgotten notion of social circulating capital. Then the propensity to consume appears as the volume, and the discount rate as the marginal...

Ecological and Socio-ecological Economic Models

Kolmogorov - Sinai Entropy Rate versus Physical Entropy

We elucidate the connection between the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy rate k and the time evolution of the physical or statistical entropy S. For a large family of chaotic conservative dynamical systems including the simplest ones, the evolution of Sstd for far-from-equilibrium processes includes a stage during which S is a simple linear function of time whose slope is k. We present numerical confir...