Conservation laws, financial entropy and the Eurozone Crisis

Cockshott, P. and Zachariah, D. (2014) Conservation laws, financial entropy and the Eurozone Crisis. Economics, 8(2014-5), (doi: 10.5018/economics-ejournal.ja.2014-5)

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Publisher's URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5018/economics-ejournal.ja.2014-5

Abstract

The article starts by examining the idea of conservation laws as applied to market economies. It formulates a measure of financial entropy and gives numerical simula-tions indicating that this tends to rise. We discuss an analogue for free energy released during this process. The concepts of real and symbolic appropriation are introduced as a means to analyse debt and taxation. We then examine the conflict between the conservation laws that apply to commodity exchange with the exponential growth implied by capital accumulation and how these have necessitated a sequence of evolutionary forms for money, and go on to present a simple stochastic model for the formation of rates of interest and a model for the time evolution of the rate of profit.

Item Type:Articles
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Cockshott, Dr William
Authors: Cockshott, P., and Zachariah, D.
College/School:College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
Journal Name:Economics
Publisher:Universitaet Kiel, Institut fuer Weltwirtschaft
ISSN:1864-6042
ISSN (Online):1864-6042
Copyright Holders:Copyright © 2014 The Authors
First Published:First published in Economics 8(2014-5)
Publisher Policy:Reproduced under a Creative Commons License

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