ICTA-UAB supports a collective nomination of Emeritus Professor Robert Ayres for the Nobel Prize

ICTA-UAB researchers Joan Martínez-Alier, Jeroen van den Bergh and Gara Villalba are part of the Scientific Committee for the nomination.

Last week, Prof. Robert Ayres visited ICTA-UAB to give a keynote on “Economics as an Island of order far from Equilibrium”. During the seminar, he explained that economic systems in equilibrium are impossible because closure prevents essential energy (exergy) inputs from outside. The human economic system is driven by useful energy, or exergy (including from the cosmos, past and continuing) and thus exergy needs to be included in our economic models. For Ayres, wealth is not created by capital or labor, except as they embody exergy extracted from nature, via photosynthesis, wind or flowing water (hydrology), geothermal power or nuclear power. 

The arguments for such nomination are presented herewith.

Open Letter from the Scientific Committee for the Nomination of Emeritus Professor Robert Ayres to the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Motivation and objective

A summary of Ayres’s work (until 2013) is contained in the introductory editorial toaspecial journal issue in homage to Ayres,entitled Robert Ayres, Ecological Economics and Industrial Ecology (van den Bergh 2013). It describes Ayres as “unique, a walking encyclopaedia, an environmental scientist who moves easily between physics, chemistry, biology, economics and engineering, a technological expert and optimist, and an environmental as well as ecological economist” and Ayres’s main preoccupation since the 1960s as “how to realize the sustainability transition”.

Robert Ayres is widely regarded as one of the intellectual forerunners of Ecological Economics, a field that closely connects the environmental sciences with economics and the social sciences more broadly. This group of heterodox economists also include Kenneth Boulding, Herman Dalyand Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Of this group, Robert Ayres and Herman Daly are the only surviving members. They are rapidly approaching their nineties but are both still active.John Manoochehri has dedicated a two-part episode to Ayres and Dalyin his recent series on Apple Podcasts, Resource Talks (Manoochehri, 2021). The series investigates such topics as the environmental sciences, sustainable design, nature, and life support systems of the planet including climate. Manoochehri describes both authors as having “led the contemporary reassessment of technical and material progress by revisiting the foundational science, including thermodynamic limits and quantitative economics, and reasserting the need for social-ethical framing of industrial progress”. These podcasts have both intellectual and historical value.We encourage all to tune in.

It is completely warranted to award a joint Nobel Prize to both Ayres and Daly, as they are very complementary in their research focus, with Ayres integrating economics and physics and Daly crossing economics to connect it with the broader social sciences. Both write about environmental limits to growth, Daly covering the full analytical spectrum from ultimate means to ultimate ends, while Ayres focuses on ultimate physical means and consequences, as well as breakthroughs and transformation. A joint award would be a very strong and timely statement. It would also acknowledge that modern economic science has always benefited from a wide range of ideas and inputs that do not yet belong to the mainstream thinking of the field. This particularly holds true in the environmental crisis we are facing currently. The award would act as an important reminder that scientific breakthroughs invariably involve dealing with ambitious integration challenges.

Ayres also connects to another heterodox and mainstream area of research that has not been yet awarded a Nobel prize, namely innovation and technological change studies, where names such as (in random order) Philippe Aghion, Brian Arthur, Giovanni Dosi, Richard Nelson, and Sidney Wintercome to mind, amongst others. Ayres’s contributions to this area have been varied and can be summarized as undertaking essential tests of consistency of technological solutions with fundamental insights from energy and material physics.