Robert Ayres (scientist)


Robert Underwood Ayres is an American-born physicist and economist. His career has focused on the application of physical ideas, especially the laws of thermodynamics, to economics; a long-standing pioneering interest in material flows and transformations —a concept which he originated. His most recent work challenges the widely held economic theory of growth.

Career

Trained as a physicist at the University of Chicago, University of Maryland, and King's College London, Ayres has dedicated his professional life to advancing the environment, technology and resource end of the sustainability agenda. His major research interests include technological change, environmental economics, "industrial metabolism" and "eco-restructuring". He has worked at the Hudson Institute, Resources for the Future Inc and International Research and Technology Corp. From 1979 until 1992 he was Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, except for two years on leave at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg Austria. In 1992 he moved to the international business school INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France as Sandoz Professor of Environment and Management. Since his formal retirement in 2000 he has been Jubilee Visiting Professor and king Karl Gustav XVI professor of environmental science at Chalmers Institute of Technology Gothenburg. He is currently an Institute Scholar at IIASA.
He remains an active researcher. He has written or co-authored 20 books, edited or coedited another dozen books, written or co-authored more than 200 journal articles and book chapters not to mention many unpublished reports, on subjects ranging from environmental effects of nuclear war to theoretical economics. But most of his life-work is interdisciplinary. He was a pioneer of a new field, sometimes called Industrial Metabolism or Industrial Ecology. He has contributed to futures studies, technological forecasting, transportation and energy studies, material flow studies, environmental technology, environmental economics, thermodynamics and economics, and the theory of economic growth.
Here taken from one of his recent papers are two paragraphs that provide a flavor of his recent work:

Mainstream economics today is based to a large extent on bad ideas. Economic concepts, from foundational issues like markets, supply and demand and “free trade”, to money and finance, lack any systematic awareness of the physical process of production or the implications of the Laws of Thermodynamics for those processes. A corollary, almost worthy of being a separate bad idea on its own, is that energy doesn’t matter because the cost share of energy in the economy is so small that it can be ignored e.g.. The so-called “production functions” used by all schools of economic thought that build growth models omit any necessary role for energy, as if output could be produced by labor and capital alone—or as if energy is merely a form of man-made capital that can be produced by labor and capital.
The essential truth missing from economic education today is that energy is the stuff of the universe, that all matter is also a form of energy, and that the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services. This is a thermodynamic process, as the Rumanian economist Georgescu-Roegen said half a century ago. The economic process is subject to both the first law of thermodynamics and the second law of thermodynamics. The “first law” implies that the notion of “consumption” as applied to products is misleading: material transformation processes unavoidably generate large quantities of material wastes or residuals

Publications

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