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The Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy in the History of Economic Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

William S. Kern
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Extract

The development of economic thinking has seldom taken place entirely independently of developments in other disciplines. There is a long history of interdisciplinary influences among economics, mathematics, physics, biology, and philosophy. Among the most influential of these other disciplines has been physics. Numerous authors have attributed significant influence upon economics to Newtonian mechanics (Taylor 1960, Georgescu-Roegen 1971). The strength of that influence is perhaps best illustrated by William Stanley Jevons's proclamation of his attempt to reconstruct economics as “the mechanics of utility and self interest.“ Frank Knight, having observed what Jevons and others had wrought, concluded that mechanics had become the “sister science” of economics (Knight 1976, p. 85).

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 96 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

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