page_title: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
section_title: Settling in the United States, years at Vanderbilt University
hierarchical_section_title: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen / Life and career / Settling in the United States, years at Vanderbilt University
caption_attribution_description: English: Dennis Meadows, in 2012, at the Herrenhausen Symposium Already Beyond? - 40 Years Limits to Growth in Hanover.
context_page_description: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was a Romanian mathematician, statistician and economist. He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was seminal in establishing ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
  Several economists have hailed Georgescu-Roegen as a man who lived well ahead of his time, and some historians of economic thought have proclaimed the ingenuity of his work. In spite of such appreciation, Georgescu-Roegen was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, although benefactors from his native Romania were lobbying for it on his behalf. After Georgescu-Roegen's death, his work was praised by a surviving friend of the highest rank: Prominent Keynesian economist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Samuelson professed that he would be delighted if the fame Georgescu-Roegen did not fully realise in his own lifetime were granted by posterity instead.
context_section_description: After a journey from Turkey through continental Europe, Georgescu-Roegen and his wife reached Cherbourg in France, from where they crossed the Atlantic by ship. Georgescu-Roegen's arrival at Harvard in summer 1948 was something of a return for him there. Only now, the circumstances were very different from what they had been in the 1930s: He was no longer a promising young scholar on a trip abroad, supported and sponsored by his native country; instead, he was a middle-aged political refugee who had fled a communist dictatorship behind the Iron Curtain. Yet, he was welcomed at Harvard just the same, obtaining employment as a lecturer and research associate, collaborating with Wassily Leontief on the Harvard Economic Research Project and other subjects. This was not a permanent employment, however.
  While working at Harvard, Georgescu-Roegen was approached by Vanderbilt University, who offered him a permanent academic chair as economics professor. Georgescu-Roegen accepted the offer and moved to Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee in 1949. It has been argued that Georgescu-Roegen's decision to move from Harvard to the permanence and stability of the less prestigious Vanderbilt was motivated by his precarious wartime experiences and his feeling of insecurity as a political refugee in his new country. It has also been argued that Joseph Schumpeter had at this point lost most of his former influence that could have secured Georgescu-Roegen a permanent position at Harvard (Schumpeter died in 1950). Georgescu-Roegen remained at Vanderbilt until his retirement in 1976 at age 70. Except for short trips, he would never leave Nashville again.
  During his years at Vanderbilt University, Georgescu-Roegen pursued an impressive academic career. He held numerous visiting appointments and research fellowships across the continents, and served as editor of a range of academic journals, including the Econometrica. He received several academic honours, including the distinguished Harvie Branscomb Award, presented in 1967 by his employer, Vanderbilt University. In 1971, the very same year his magnum opus was published, he was honoured as Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.
  In the early-1960s, Georgescu-Roegen had Herman Daly as a student. Daly later went on to become a leading ecological economist as well as the economists profession's most faithful, persistent and influential proponent of the economics of Georgescu-Roegen. However, Georgescu-Roegen, for his part, would later turn critical of his student's work (see below).
  The publication of Georgescu-Roegen's magnum opus in 1971 did not trigger any immediate debates in the mainstream of the economics profession, and the only review in a leading mainstream journal warned the readers against the "incorrect statements and philosophical generalisations" made by the author; but Georgescu-Roegen did receive four favourable reviews from heterodox, evolutionary economists.
  Through the 1970s, Georgescu-Roegen had a short-lived cooperation with the Club of Rome. Whereas Georgescu-Roegen's own magnum opus went largely unnoticed by mainstream (neoclassical) economists, the report on The Limits to Growth, published in 1972 by the Club of Rome, created something of a stir in the economics profession. In the heated controversies that followed the report, Georgescu-Roegen found himself largely on the same side as the club, and opposed to the mainstream economists. Teaming up with a natural ally, he approached the club and became a member there. Georgescu-Roegen's theoretical work came to influence the club substantially. One other important result of the cooperation was the publication of the pointed and polemical article on Energy and Economic Myths, where Georgescu-Roegen took issue with mainstream economists and various other debaters. This article found a large audience through the 1970s. Later, the cooperation with the club waned: Georgescu-Roegen reproached the club for not adopting a definite anti-growth political stance; he was also sceptical of the club's elitist and technocr
caption: Meadows was the director of the Club of Rome project at MIT in 1970-72.
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