How We Got to Where We Are Today: A Brief History of Economic Thought and Its Paradoxes

Abstract

This chapter assesses earlier economic theories from an energy perspective, where that is possible. We also make the case that although economics has not dealt with energy very explicitly, the discipline has addressed many other important issues that help us today to understand just how energy operates within economies as well as provide a number of interesting and important perspectives on economies that are not related to energy. The purpose of this chapter and the next three is to utilize the insights and the methods of prior economic schools of thought to build a new theory that explains actual economies much better while addressing energy and biophysical limits to human activity far more explicitly than does mainstream theory.