We need a new "Wealth of Nations" that incorporates modern physical concepts into the economic picture. "The Wealth of Planets" is the obvious extension, but it's not a concept that nationalist economics is really ready to embrace, as the natural conclusion is that nation-state borders are highly arbitrary in nature relative to things like primary photosynthetic production, the availability of food supplies and raw materials, etc.
This all becomes a lot clearer if you think about what a human colony on Mars would have to cope with. Assuming importing food from Earth is implausible, there's going to be an obvious limit to how many people each colony can support, determined largely by how much food each colony can produce (which in turn will depend on a robust air and water supply). 20th-century economic models imported from Earth won't make much sense in that situation, regardless of whether they're lefty or righty in nature.
Likely the next major stage in economic thinking will be the adoption of ecological economics, and in the quantitative sense, something like the extension of the thinking of Yale's G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903-1991) on lake ecosystems to the entire human enterprise on planet Earth.
Unfortunately the social sciences and humanities (where economics seems to have found its academic berth, as well as in the business schools) are not going to be willing to adopt this perspective, as it means they'd have to learn biology, chemistry and physics. The alternative is to yank the economics departments out of their comfortable little holes and stick them in the natural sciences division...
The poor economists, just imagine them having to constrain their models in accordance with principles like the conservation of mass and energy...
This all becomes a lot clearer if you think about what a human colony on Mars would have to cope with. Assuming importing food from Earth is implausible, there's going to be an obvious limit to how many people each colony can support, determined largely by how much food each colony can produce (which in turn will depend on a robust air and water supply). 20th-century economic models imported from Earth won't make much sense in that situation, regardless of whether they're lefty or righty in nature.
Likely the next major stage in economic thinking will be the adoption of ecological economics, and in the quantitative sense, something like the extension of the thinking of Yale's G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903-1991) on lake ecosystems to the entire human enterprise on planet Earth.
Unfortunately the social sciences and humanities (where economics seems to have found its academic berth, as well as in the business schools) are not going to be willing to adopt this perspective, as it means they'd have to learn biology, chemistry and physics. The alternative is to yank the economics departments out of their comfortable little holes and stick them in the natural sciences division...
The poor economists, just imagine them having to constrain their models in accordance with principles like the conservation of mass and energy...