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NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, DEVELOPMENT ECONOMIST

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2022

Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak Open the ORCID record for Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak [Opens in a new window]
Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak*
Affiliation:
Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak: Associate Professor, The American University of Paris. Email: csuprinyak@aup.edu.
*
Correspondence should be addressed to: 147, rue de Grenelle, 75007, Paris, France.
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Abstract

Accounts of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s career usually focus on his pioneer contributions to mathematical economics during the 1930s and his later conversion to a critical approach to economic theory anchored on the entropy law. These disparate moments, however, were connected by Georgescu-Roegen’s strong attraction to the study of problems afflicting less developed societies. This began with his work on the agrarian economy of his native Romania, in the late 1940s, under the auspices of Harvard’s Russian Research Center. Thenceforth, he embarked on a journey that spawned his early interest in Leontief-type linear models, an extended tour of Southeast Asia commissioned by Vanderbilt University’s Graduate Program in Economic Development, and several visits to Brazil during the 1960s. The paper highlights these lesser-known aspects of Georgescu-Roegen’s trajectory, examining how he built on neo-populist writings from the early twentieth century to construct an alternative to the mainstream emphasis on industrialization policies.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 205 - 225
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the History of Economics Society

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Footnotes

The author thanks Andrea Maneschi, Antoine Missemer, Jimena Hurtado, Jeffrey Williamson, and Salim Rashid for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. This research was financially supported, at different stages, by CNPq, Fapemig, the Fulbright Commission, and Duke University’s Center for the History of Political Economy.

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