Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, development economist

Accounts of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s career as an economist usually focus either on the brilliance of his pioneer contributions to mathematical economics during the 1930s, or more frequently, on his later conversion to a critical approach to economic theory anchored on the centrality of the entropy law in a dynamic setting. These two disparate moments, however, were connected by Georgescu-Roegen’s strong attraction to the study of the problems afflicting underdeveloped societies. This began with his work on the agricultural economy of his native Romania, produced under the auspices of Harvard’s Russian Research Center in the late 1940s. 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 to assist in the development of academic economics in the country. The paper highlights these lesser-known aspects of Georgescu-Roegen’s intellectual trajectory, while using his case to illustrate some of the paths open for inquiry during the heyday of development economics.