Gabriel Lozada nsIn economic thermodynamics, Gabriel Alfredo Lozada (1959-) is an American economist noted for his 1999 to 2005 ideas to promote what seems to be Roegen-Daly school and or material entropy ideas about how entropy change, not free energy change, is behind economic processes.

Overview

In 1999, Lozada, in his Economics, Entropy, and the Environment, co-written with Thomas Beard, in which the included a chapter entitled “An Economists’ Primer on Thermodynamics”, wherein they seem to grease the wheel of ideas to allow for digestion of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.

In 2005, Lozada, in his “Entropy, Free Energy, Work, and other Thermodynamic Variables in Economics”, interestingly, Lozada takes aim at American geologist Stephen Gillett’s effort to apply Gibbs free energy concepts in economics (in place of the Roegen-Daly school concept of "low entropy"), but in the end, following a rather incongruous and haphazard attempt at derivation and argument, concludes, in what seems to be in complete ignorance of the nearly 300-year history of chemical thermodynamics, that: [2]

“It is not free energy change, which in general determines the direction of spontaneous change, but entropy change. It is shown that changes in free energy as traditionally defined are not, in general, related to the amount of work a system can perform. Free energy is not related to economic value. It is unclear how free energy could have any economic importance.”

Correctly, Lozada would be wise to heed the following words of American physical chemist Thomas Wallace, who in his 2009 appendix section "Fundamentals of Thermodynamics Applied to Socioeconomics", states as a matter of scientific fact: [3]

“The spontaneity of a thermodynamic process is measured by its free energy change, ΔG, and is mathematically represented at constant temperature as ΔG = ΔH – TΔS. For a process to be spontaneous and irreversible, its free energy change is required to be a negative quantity. The system undergoes change as a result of, and at the expense of, free energy. The thermodynamic parameter free energy represents the fundamental driving force in nature and determines whether physical and chemical processes conducted by nature and society will take place.”

Here, without going into too much detail, Lozada is an example of an economist attempting to teach physical chemistry, having no prior training, and as a result he seems to be completely in the dark of the fact that German physicist Hermann Helmholtz, in his 1882 “On the Thermodynamics of Chemical Processes”, famously proved that free energy is the driving force of chemical processes, thus disproving the Thomsen-Berthelot principle. The general issue seems to be that Lozada’s underlying agenda is to justify the now-defunct 1971 material entropy theory of Romanian mathematician Nicholas Georgescu.

Education
Lozada completed his PhD in 1987 with a dissertation on “Equilibrium in Exhaustible Resource Industries” in economics at Stanford University. Currently he is an economics professor at the University of Utah.

References
1. Beard, Thomas R. and Lozada, Gabriel A. (1999). Economics, Entropy, and the Environment: the Extraordinary Economics of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (ch. 5: An Economists Primer on Thermodynamics, pgs. 83-98 (Ѻ); ch. 6: Thermodynamics and Georgescu-Roegen’s Economics, pgs. 99-119). Edward Elgar Publishing.
2. (a) Lozada, Gabriel A. (2005). “Entropy, Free Energy, Work, and other Thermodynamic Variables in Economics”, Ecological Economics, 56: 71-78.
(b) Gillett, Stephen L., (2005a). “Entropy and its misuse, I. Energy, free and otherwise” (abs). Ecological Economics (received Jan 2002), 56, 58–70.
(c) Gillett, Stephen L. (2005b). “Entropy and its misuse, II. Matter matters less. Ecological Economics.
3. Wallace, Thomas P. (2009). Wealth, Energy, and Human Values: the Dynamics of Decaying Civilizations from Ancient Greece to America (§A: The Fundamentals of Thermodynamics Applied to Socioeconomics, pgs. 469-90). AuthorHouse.

Further reading
● Mirowski, Philip. (2001). Review of T. Beard & G. Lozada, Economics, Entropy and the Environment in Economic Journal, June.
● Lozada, Gabriel. (2004). “Entropy and the Economic Process”, in: Encyclopedia of Energy, Volume 2, 471-78. Elsevier.

External links
Gabriel Lozada (faculty) – University of Utah.
Lozada, Gabriel A. (1959-) – WorldCat Identities.

TDics icon ns