Economics and Thermodynamics: New Perspectives on Economic Analysis

Over the past two decades we have witnessed something of a revolution in the natural sciences as thermodynamic thinking evolved from an equilibrium, or 'classical', perspective, to a nonequilibrium, or 'self­ organisational' one. In this transition, thermodynamics has been applied in new ways and in new fields of inquiry. Chemical and biological (evolutionary) processes have been analysed, increasingly, in non­ equilibrium thermodynamical terms. Economics has, since the late 19th century, r...