“Not Another Engineer”

These are the words, sometimes audible, encountered by every undergraduate engineer in Economics 101 (A class often required for engineers, but seldom required for other scientific disciplines). Engineers are the only people trained in the laws of thermodynamics that any Economics Professor is likely to encounter. We are the only ones to point out the violations of those laws in Economics 101.

Because our economic systems are all based on something that cannot exist in the real universe.

Money is a commodity, of any description, that a society agrees to accept in exchange for every other commodity or service in the society. When you use money in exchange for something else, it represents the work you did to earn the money.

Work and commodities, like everything else in our universe, are subject to the laws of thermodynamics.

Our money is not.

Our money is created as debt with interest, defined by the way it is used, and used as though it can break the laws of thermodynamics.

Nothing in the real universe can do that; we can’t do that. We can only break something else, somewhere else, and probably belonging to someone else.

And in our world, as it currently stands, there is no shortage of breakage.

---

The laws of thermodynamics as they apply to money are not complex:

• The First law, in terms of money, becomes: “Ownership cannot make money”.
  (see Henry George in the references page)
  
• The Second law becomes: “Money cannot be a store-of-value”
  (See Silvio Gesell in the references page)

This means that all Rentier income is a violation of the First Law. Interest paid on debts or savings is a violation. It means that the major religions that unanimously declared interest on debts to be illegal, evil, and immoral in various ways, were correct.

Application of the Second law in terms of physics means the more stuff you have, the more maintenance you have to do. (That feeling that your stuff owns you is not your imagination.)

Application of the Second law in terms of Money means that the accumulation of “capital” on which our dominant socioeconomic paradigm is based, is not possible.

This is the largest single mistake in human history; a mistake our civilization has evolved over thousands of years. (See David Graeber in the references page)

Unwinding an error that large is not a job for the economists who made it. We are discussing the laws of thermodynamics. This book, by a former NASA engineer, is apt to prove a more useful guide.