This book, now in its third edition, explores how human populations
grow, based on their creative abilities. To reconsider the theory of
economic growth from a physicist's perspective, the book analyses the
concepts of value and utility and their relationship to thermodynamic
concepts. This approach allows the author to include characteristics of
technology in descriptions of development and to formulate a
phenomenological (macroeconomic, no-price fluctuations are discussed)
theory of production as a set of evolutionary equations in one-sector
and multi-sector approximations. The theory is proved to be useful for
describing both national economies and global production in ancient
times.
This monograph presents the topics in a compact and consistent manner
and can be used by students with a background in physics and other
natural sciences who wish to specialize in economics. It explains how
the growth of production is connected with advances in technology,
consumption of labour and energy and makes it possible to analyse past
and present social production systems and to build scripts of future
progress. The book is of interest to energy specialists engaged in
planning and analyzing the production and consumption of energy
carriers, and to economists wanting to know how energy and technology
affect economic growth.
This third edition has been substantially revised and three brand new
chapters have been added. Chapter 8 illustrates the robustness of the
theory with the aid of statistical historical data from the Russian
economy, while Chapter 12 is devoted to a reconstruction of the global
production activity in ancient times. Chapter 13 discusses the
principles of the organization of social production.
