Georgescu-Roegen’s decisive move is to displace economics from the reversible universe of mechanics into the irreversible universe of thermodynamics. The economic process is not a circulation of abstract values capable of returning indefinitely to equilibrium, but a transformation of low-entropy matter and energy into high-entropy waste while producing the non-material benefit of lived enjoyment. His critique therefore operates at once epistemologically and materially: mechanistic economic models suppress qualitative degradation, the asymmetry of time and the finitude of accessible resources. The paper also refuses the consoling symmetry between endless growth and a supposedly permanent stationary state, arguing that zero growth does not abolish entropic depletion. Methodologically, Georgescu-Roegen works by forcing economic categories to answer to physical constraints without reducing social choice to physics. The wider intellectual bridge is to ecological economics and theories of irreversible systems, where sustainability becomes a problem of throughput, temporal direction and the ethical allocation of finite low entropy rather than merely improved efficiency.
