Ayres, Robert U.
Robert U. Ayres, an American physicist noted for his theories of the role of thermodynamics in the economic process. He is a known critic of standard economic growth theory, and is among the founders of the fields of ecological economics and industrial ecology. In Resources, Environment, and Economics (1978) he describes the inconsistency of the closed, cyclic model of standard economics with the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the low-entropy matter and energy that enter the economic process as useful raw materials must ultimately leave the process and return to nature as high-entropy wastes. He performed many of the first detailed empirical analyses of mass balances for specific materials in the U.S. economy, and developed formal theoretical and empirical models that explicitly accounted for the role of energy in technological change in the U.S. economy.
At various times he has acted as a consultant to the White House, National Goals Commission, Office of Management and Budget, Transport Canada, OECD, Statistics Canada, and numerous UN agencies. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Ventana Corporation (Venture Capital Fund), and set up and ran for several years the innovative program on Technology, Economy and Society at IIASA, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxemburg Austria.
Academic Background
- 1958, PhD, Mathematical Physics, Kings College, University of London
- 1956, MS, Physics, University of Maryland
- 1954, BA, BS, University of Chicago
Selected Books by Robert Ayres
- Industrial Metabolism, Tokyo: UNU Press, 1994
- Information, Entropy and Progress: A New Evolutionary Paradigm, AIP Press, 1994.
- Industrial Ecology: Toward Closing the Materials Cycle (with L.W. Ayres), Edward Elgar, 1996
- Turning Point: The End of the Growth Paradigm, Earthscan, 1997
- Handbook of Indusrtrial Ecology. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2002
