Boletín CF+S > 4 -- Especial sobre VIVIENDA Y PARTICIPACION SOCIAL > http://habitat.aq.upm.es/boletin/n4/aaval.html |
Edita: Instituto Juan de Herrera. Av. Juan de Herrera 4. 28040 MADRID. ESPAÑA. ISSN: 1578-097X
En Noviembre de 1991, un colega americano y yo fuimos a
visitar a D. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen a su casa de Nashville.
El había sido profesor de la Vanderbilt University y ya estaba
retirado. Vivía en una casa tipo chalet americano enorme y lo
más curioso era que tenía toda la casa llena de libros
abiertos y desperdigados por muchas mesas, lo que denotaba su
intenso trabajo. Aún vivía su mujer, muy discreta, no tenía
buena salud. No me termino de imaginar al gruñón de D.
Nicholas sin la ayuda de su mujer ya que realmente se veía que
la necesitaba, y estaban solos en aquella casa perdida en una
urbanización dispersa.
Hacía unos años (1986) que yo había publicado la Teoría del
Coste Exergético y me di cuenta que utilizar el Segundo
Principio para aproximarnos conceptualmente a la Economía
obtenía unos resultados que filosóficamente ya estaban
descritos por D. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen a principios de los
70 en su libro La ley de la Entropía y el Proceso Económico,
cuya excursión intelectual fue la opuesta, acercarse desde la
Economía al Segundo Principio.
Siempre consideré que la Termodinámica era esencialmente una
Teoría Económica de la Naturaleza y trabajé en ello creando
una extensión lógica del Segundo Principio que incluyera las
ideas de coste y de irreversibilidad, y con ellas los
conceptos de propósito, eficiencia y causalidad. Lo hice con
mis colaboradores al viejo estilo Carnotiano, fijándonos en
"mejorar las máquinas térmicas", pero nuestra sorpresa fue que
D. Nicholas, desde el campo totalmente opuesto de la Economía
ya había criticado a este cuerpo de doctrina porque no incluía
(ni incluye) el concepto de irreversibilidad y sí en cambio el
concepto de total sustitutibilidad del capital por recursos
naturales. Jocosamente, Herman Daly se refiere en esto al
truco de magia de hacer un pastel sólo con cocinero y cocina
pero sin ingredientes.
Georgescu-Roegen es el padre de la Economía-Ecológica, en el
que la Termodinámica, y con ella el Segundo Principio juega un
papel fundamental. Nosotros (unos cuantos ingenieros
termodinámicos de todo el mundo) contribuimos a crear la
Termoeconomía que es una herramienta para la mejora y
optimización de los sistemas energéticos y que se basa en la
aplicación sistemática del Segundo Principio utilizando las
ideas de coste y eficiencia. Era evidente la conexión.
Por ello me decidí a conocerlo personalmente. Ya no estaba
para muchos ajetreos cuando fui a visitarlo a su casa, y como
se sabe murió en 1994. Jacques Grinevald protestó amargamente
porque su muerte pasó desapercibida. Yo estaba en Estados
Unidos cuando murió y debo decir que el New York Times dio una
reseña, desde luego no fue lo que merecía pero con el tiempo
su figura se irá agrandando. Ha sido uno de los grandes
pensadores del siglo XX.
La entrevista que le hice no pretendía ser una interviú
periodística, sino simplemente ser utilizada para mi uso
exclusivo y personal. Estaba yo interesado en conocer su
opinión sobre temas que me inquietaban como consecuencia del
desarrollo de mi propia teoría. Y al menos a mí me sirvió. No
recoge lo escrito todo lo que hablamos, sobretodo de algunas
experiencias vitales que tuvo visitando España y
Latinoamérica. No obstante recoge su opinión sobre su
pensamiento, y esto era lo importante. Se ha transcrito del
inglés sin traducirlo al castellano porque así sus opiniones
pueden ser mejor difundidas y están menos manipuladas. Puede
que sin pretenderlo, éstas sean algunas de sus últimas
palabras. Hasta siempre D. Nicholas.
Agradecimiento
Lidia Ranz fue quien transcribió la conversación desde la
cinta al papel. No fue un esfuerzo menor ya que la grabación
no era de calidad. Quede aquí mi agradecimiento.
Nicholas Georgescu_Roegen: When my father was born in the
nineteenth century (1850) when he was over there, there was a
special kind of arrangement. Family names at that time did not
exist in Romania. People were named according to where they
were from; the upper classes had the names of the places where
they had their fields. The other case was almost like that of
the Jews.
The Romans had a family name. The Ancient Greeks didn't. It
was something like that. My grandfather's name was Athanasius,
but his first name was George. And when my father went to
school he had to be listed in the register and so the teacher
asked him- "What's your name?" and he said "Stavros" "Yes, but
what's your family name?" and he said "I don't know what that
is." -Well, what's your father's name, then?". "George" -"Very
well, then, you're Georgescu!"- a romanisation. So that was
how it was. I should have been Nicholas Athanasius, because
I'm half Greek, but it isn't -and that's why.
Antonio Valero: You have always encouraged the study of the
Ancient Greeks as a way of reflecting on our modern society.
Do you believe that Greek thinking has determined our way of
thinking, of understanding our present society?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: You know, the British think (and
also our American colleagues) bigger and bigger. But if the
Greeks had not made us think about the cause, the "proximate
cause", the First Cause, we would still be in the same
situation as the Indians or the Chinese. Either contemplative,
like the Indians, or simply registering facts without asking
why. That's why they invented the compass.
Aristotle talks of four types of cause. All of them explain
what a thing is, what it is intended for, how it was made, why
it was made. I believe the Greeks have given us this view of
the world so we can not nowadays ask one single question which
has not been asked and found in Aristotle or Plato. There is
no single question.
I've just finished reading a book about the future of the
human being. The problem which preoccupies many people -
physicists, chemists, astronomers - is the future of the
universe. They have always talked about this, but now the
question has become "why?". Because they say that there is
more matter in the invisible universe than in the visible. And
now they are trying to get knowledge of the invisible matter -
i.e. matter which cannot be seen. And the way they go about
that is by asking questions and trying to suggest why?, why?.
The Chinese language, the old Chinese doesn't have the word
"why?". They knew only for what purpose. As I said, without
the Greeks we would still be a contemplative community or
society.
One of my colleagues, one day, he says (and I said to him
"that's very interesting, because that idea has something to
do with what Aristotle said"): "I've never read Aristotle", so
I asked him why. That was the wrong word because his answer
gave him away. He said "Why should I read Aristotle? He lived
twenty five centuries before me. I live now". I talk about it
in one of my papers. I get my assistant and ask how far back
the references go of a man who is publishing today, and it
will be in the eighties, in 1985 or 6, say. He's in the New
Wave. He's not been pushed by, and he's making it. That is the
idea. And this is particularly true because it reflects this
type of broker business philosophy.
Antonio Valero: In the Promethean Condition of Viable
Technologies you propose in the end that conservation is the
only solution.
Nicholas Georgescu_Roegen: Do you know why I proposed
conservation? Because there's some bad weather coming?... some
snow, and I wont be able to go to the grocer's? Because I have
to live for three or four days with what I already have in the
pantry? Because I should eat a little less than usual every
day? No. That's not my idea.
My reason is this -In the past there have been similar crises.
At one time there was a wood crisis, such a big crisis that
people tried to economise. And in England and even in Norway
there are rules and restrictions attached to the cutting of
trees. And coal wasn't considered until the 16th century in
Europe. The Chinese had it earlier and they used it to make
oils. So they knew about it, but it was a very difficult thing
to get. You scrambled over the water and there was the mine.
All mines have plenty of water in them below the ground, so
what do you do? Well, to get at the coal you have to take out
the water, so hundreds of horses were used to drain it from
the mines - the power of animals was used to get at the coal.
And the coal has, say, a kilogram of energy in it so it is not
worth using the energy of the animals to get the water out and
thereby get at the coal. Then Prometheus' second gift arrived
- the steam engine.
Now, you see, at that time there was a change. We know that
there have been crises in the past very similar to those we
face nowadays. And we know that there was a solution. A
Promethean solution. Now, the Economy postponed the real
catastrophe for some years. My idea is that with conservation
we gain time and in gaining time we make it more probable for
a third Prometheus to arrive. If it is to arrive. We don't
know what is to come next. This way we increase our chances.
If not, what's going to happen? We have to go back to where
the steam engine found us. That means going back to the
"wooden age". But how do we get back to that? That's the
problem I'm talking of. Because you have to share your food
with the animals. And there are already too many of us. If we
just stopped now there would be some kind of catastrophe, with
people who have nothing invading other places and so on. So,
in order to slide down slowly from the energy of the steam
engine to the energy of wood and perhaps the energy of the
winds and the tides and running water which are also solar,
though they are called indirect. In order to slide back to the
time of Plato, of Charlemagne, of Galileo, we need a slow
change that will avoid the catastrophic shake-up of humanity.
And this is my reason for conservation. I'm not saying, oh,
conservation, conservation, which people think means going
without for a few days, not eating everything today. It's not
that. Because that would be stupid. One of my colleagues asked
me a stupid question - he said "Oh yes, conservation,
conservation, but how can you be sure that humanity will even
continue to exist in the next thousand years?".
Do you know Eskilos, in Antigone? When the messenger comes to
tell him that Antigone has buried her brother, that's bad
news, so he came and said "I don't want to bring bad news.
Nobody likes to be the bringer of bad news".
And another thing. There are economists who don't like my
theory and they say "What sort of time scale are you thinking
in? 500 years? 1000 years? 2000? 3000?" They want to fit me
into a time scale, to be more precise than anyone possibly can
be. I said "I'm talking about the flowing future, the future
that is subject to change. Change that I am not able to
predict. I can't say it will happen next year or the year
after. I only know that things will go in one direction or the
other and I'm simply saying here that we're at this
crossroads, and that at this crossroads our best option is
conservation. Nor is it as simple as I say in my papers. The
question isn't to start saying "Oh, Georgescu's going to start
conserving". Conservation is to be applied for just the reason
I've come to work with it. I could give you a list of articles
on conservation written by engineers. But there is another way
to talk about conservation and this is conservation from the
point of view of entropy. You can say "Well, there are certain
mechanisms, boilers, for example, which exist in order for
things to be the way they are, and with a few small
modifications we can make them more useful, improve their
efficiency". Most of New York, for example, is heated by steam
that comes from plants. That's an example of how you can do
it. You make the system more efficient because everything
remains the way it is. But this is technological conservation.
And I'm talking about entropic conservation, in which the
conservation of materials is implicit.
I formulated the fourth law which has not been accepted. Why
not? I don't know. No one has attacked it. No one has said
it's OK. Some Italians have written to me and I haven't had
time to answer them. One paper has accused me of trying to
present my Law, the Fourth Law, as something new when actually
it is a known fact. That was Mr A, and then Mr B comes along
and says "No, in fact it's wrong". So someone says it's true
but it's been known since the time of Tutenkhamen and another
one says it's not known at all. It's new but it's wrong. So in
the end I don't know whether what I'm saying is something new
or something wrong, or what?
Antonio Valero: Do you agree that recycling is one of the
solutions?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: Yes, but not maybe what most people
mean by recycling. You know what I said about recycling? What
can you recycle? You can only recycle the "carbojunk" That
means that you can recycle the matter that is still available
but not in a useful form. Broken glass, for example. You can
recycle the glass, you can recycle the material, but when a
glass breaks you can't recycle that glass. There are some
small molecules that you can't recycle. So you can recycle, of
course, but there are some people who maintain that you can
recycle completely.
Antonio Valero: And what about production?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: I have written about this too.
Production means time. I was in Rome, at a meeting of the
Association of Italian Economists and I noticed how people who
have worked on conservation and discuss the problems of the
conservation of energy confuse the ideas of flows and
resources. A lot of people talk about the problem of
resources. But what is output a function of? Labour,
machinery, capital and natural resources. In Economics we can
make this substitution - you can have a farm with more capital
and less labour or more labour and less capital. Or more land
and less capital or more capital and less land. This is the
substitution. So they say "If you reduce the resources you can
increase the capital". But what matters is not substitution
but complementarity.
Antonio Valero: What can you tell us about your professional
relationships?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: Listen - three or four times my old
professors, my old colleagues have treated me in a most
incredible way. Once I presented a paper at the International
Economics Association in Rome. Only invited speakers were
allowed and you had to submit your paper at least a month in
advance for distribution. You personally didn't present your
paper. In your discussion you had to summarise and say what
you thought was good about it and what was bad. My reporter
was an economist from Israel, Potemkin. My paper was the first
paper, the opening paper of the Congress. The previous evening
we were put together in the same hotel and had dinner
together. Potemkin sat opposite me at table and talked about
all kinds of things - paradise, hell, nice girls, bad men...
this was his conversation. And he had to present my paper the
next day. He got up and he said "I cannot summarise or present
the content of Professor Georgescu's paper because it is based
on a fantastic mathematical error" and then he sat down. The
conference was on agriculture in the developing countries.
Most of the agronomists and economists there knew nothing of
mathematics. The only one there who knew mathematics was his
assistant and this man, who was there to report on someone
else's paper, stood silently on the platform behind him during
our exchange of views.
Before I got home I received a letter from the secretary of
the Congress in which he said "Here is a copy of a letter from
Professor Potemkin - Dear Mr X, having arrived home and read
Professor Georgescu's paper, I now realise that he was right
and I was wrong, and as wrong opinions should not be put down
in black and white I would like to withdraw my comments from
the proceedings". And I had to approve this because otherwise
the secretary could not accept it. What do you think I did? I
let him take it out. What I would have done is this, see. I
would have met you, I would have talked about the problem. I
would have known I would be presenting your work to two
hundred people so I wouldn't simply have stood up and said
"Nicholas, I think you are wrong".
Antonio Valero: Do you think that humanity's great theories
and discoveries are the results of individual geniuses or of
the collective mind?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: People don't produce innovation and
invention. The Community does. The Community is like a
balloon, and when it's about to burst along comes somebody
like Newton. If Newton hadn't existed somebody else would have
come along because the idea came to Newton's mind as if he
were some kind of interpreter. Someone asked the question -
what would have happened if Newton, instead of having the mind
of Newton, had had the mind of Kepler? And if Kepler had had
the mind of Newton? I wrote a paper on this subject. Were they
unique minds? The best argument against this idea is that
there aren't you can't talk so much of "people" as of
"discoveries". Many discoveries have been made at the same
time and I asked why it should be that this is so. Because
some are like the answers to mathematical questions. The
professor sets a mathematical problem, say - find the solution
to this differential equation. Naturally, if the problem is
set and it is a problem that preoccupies society, then many
people will try to solve it and there would be at that time,
or maybe within periods of fifty or a hundred years, the same
discoveries made.
Well, I would say that, in that case, how should we see the
Law of Gravity? You can look at it as a kind of power that
emerges in a uniform manner in the whole of space, the further
away from a body you are, the less force there is. Nowadays we
see that this led Newton to what we consider his great
discovery - gravity. I have given other interpretations in the
past, and for other things such as optics, etc. I put it
forward as an example of the kind of theory I have about
cosmology. If two things are quantitatively measurable and
directly connected, the relations between them are linear.
There are only a few cases in which linearity works in this
way, giving a kind of qualitative residue. If you're an
engineer, then you know Hookers Law, which is linear. And any
lack of linearity is the residue - the qualitative residue;
the phenomenon involves a quality. This is why we have so many
different forms of measurability.
Antonio Valero: And what about value and cost?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: That is an extremely complicated
question you have just asked. What do you think value is? You
might think in terms of something that would make people
generally happy, such as democracy, good schools, good
universities, good friends. These are things which have a
value because we want them. On the other hand, the question is
commodity - either you work for something or you pay for it.
This means that sometimes you make a trade-off of your own
services for those of others. This you do in a market and this
is the type of value Marx speaks of, and also the
Neo-classicists.
But you will find that I am criticising the people who see
energy as a value. Let's say you take some caviar and some
potatoes and you calculate the energy in both of them. One
piece of caviar has 1.000 calories and the potatoes you could
buy for the same price has an equal number. Engels was the
first to complain about this. Engels said, in 1877, that there
are people who have argued by measuring the physical force of
work and then established how much money this should fetch per
hour. This is my criticism of Karl Marx, who only attaches one
value to labour and not to any kind of unskilled labour -
rudimentary labour, such as a fellow who carries heavy things
around a harbour. In the end, they say, you have to be able to
measure the accumulated labour. That sounds all right, but I
ask - if you establish that one unit of Georgescu's skilled
labour is equal to twenty units of unskilled labour, that
means the two are substitutable, and my question is: how many
unskilled workers would you need in order to write Das
Kapital? I would say that's better than Engels. It's a
problem.
There are a couple of articles which show you just how
absolute the principle is -how, if you accept the principle
from the beginning, what kind of absolute you arrive at in the
end. And this is worse than in Marx's case, where Marx was
saying that labour is substitutable, whereas these people say
the same thing about energy. At least Marx has a connection
with people. Energy doesn't have this connection.
Antonio Valero: And what about purpose and efficiency?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: I don't know how you can establish
the connection between efficiency and purpose, because purpose
is something that precedes action - a crime, for example, as
the purpose of a criminal, or a dictator - it's not necessary
to have a connection between the one and the other. So purpose
is a general concept which is attached to something according
to a group of people who recognise the existence - and
importance - of purpose. Like myself, like many others.
Purpose is a general thing and it's an aspect, an element, a
part of any connected action. We can't say the moon's orbits
have a purpose, but my studying it has a purpose. Two things
are connected, and the connection disappears if you eliminate
the mind - purpose and error. Nature doesn't make errors -
people make errors. When you say 2+2=5, that seems perfect for
natural science. An electron in your brain jumps and you write
5 instead of 4. It's an error. It's because of mankind that
errors exist, because of man's activities, because their
actions have a programme. My wife is European. She washes the
dishes. I don't break them. She breaks them - because she is
the one who washes them. Error and purpose are connected.
Error is entirely due to purpose. The purpose is defeated.
Antonio Valero: Efficiency is a measure of what you want, of
what your purpose is.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: You want efficiency, but you also
want food, you want to eat, you want to have a family, so you
say that purpose is connected to all these activities.
Efficiency is one aspect of our activities. Only one aspect.
And that's exactly what I'm saying - great efficiency is
desirable , but not always. Nowadays it's more efficient to go
from New York to Paris by plane than by boat, but is it
desirable? Would it not be better to go by boat and not enter
into this kind of society? Primarily, there have been a lot of
influences on the culture of our beliefs.
My philosophy is to find what is "there". You write the
sentence "What is there?" (with a question mark). My
philosophy is concerned with what is causally there, do you
understand? I'm not interested in what is there in the sense
of "What is there?", "What is in the house?". I'm interested
in the house, what is another house and what do you mean by
"there"? Some people think that "there" is over there and
others think that it is in another place, so I want to find
out, what is "there"?
Antonio Valero: For example, causality.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: I believe in causality. I'm an
Aristotelian. If there's no causality, there's no will.
Causality means to say why, for what purpose, and then to say
how. You make a statue of marble, or you make it of wood; but
what kind of statue would be better made in marble, and what
kind of statue would be better made in wood? Brancusi, one of
the originals of abstract sculpture, said that every material
has in it the type of sculpture that fits it. You take
anything that is there as an artist does. You have to
discover.
Antonio Valero: Here we leave Professor Georgescu in a room
full of books, papers, notes, full of his philosophy. He died
a few years after this interview. He was not in good health
during his last years but his mind was as bright and sharp as
ever, and his temper just as grouchy. Goodbye, Professor
Georgescu-Roegen.
Figura: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen con Antonio Valero durante
la entrevista.
Fecha de referencia: 31-01-1998
Boletín CF+S > 4 -- Especial sobre VIVIENDA Y PARTICIPACION SOCIAL > http://habitat.aq.upm.es/boletin/n4/aaval.html |
Edita: Instituto Juan de Herrera. Av. Juan de Herrera 4. 28040 MADRID. ESPAÑA. ISSN: 1578-097X
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