Entropy Economics - How Life Would Design an Economy
Designing for Regenerative Systems
Traditional economics, despite its complexity, still relies on a dangerously simple idea: that the economy can grow forever, as long as we manage supply, demand, and incentives. But nature tells a different story — one ruled not by markets, but by entropy.
This chapter reframes economics through the lens of Biogenics, proposing that if we want a sustainable future, we should design economies like living systems: to grow regeneratively, repair constantly, and operate within the planet's energy boundaries.
This isn’t just green economics. It’s entropy-aware design — a way of understanding life, energy, and value that sees regeneration not as charity, but as a structural necessity.
What Is Entropy, Really?
Entropy is often misunderstood as “disorder,” but it’s more accurately the measure of energy that becomes unavailable to do useful work. Every system — from a cell to a city — leaks energy. And the more complex the system, the more entropy it produces unless it has a way to reorganise itself.
Living systems excel at this. They don’t eliminate entropy — they counteract it by organising, repairing, and regenerating themselves. They absorb low-entropy energy (like sunlight), use it to build and sustain structure, and dispose of waste in a way that supports future viability. This is the core of biotropy: life’s intrinsic bias toward persistence through pattern, repair, and renewal — even amid entropy’s influence.
Biogenic economics asks: what would happen if we designed our economies to do the same?
What Is Biotropy?
Biotropy is life’s quiet bias toward persistence.
It’s not a force or a law — it’s a pattern: the tendency of living systems to resist entropy through organisation, renewal, and repair. In a universe that naturally drifts toward disorder, biotropy is how life pushes back — not by fighting decay head-on, but by learning to dance with it. Forests do it. Cells do it. Civilisations might too, if they’re paying attention.
The Problem With Current Economics
Our current economic systems are entropically blind. They treat natural resources as infinite, externalities as irrelevant, and waste as someone else’s problem. Growth is measured in output, not in viability. Regeneration is optional — or worse, unprofitable.
But if you think of an economy as a living system, this approach is absurd. No organism can grow forever. No ecosystem survives solely through extraction. And no system endures without feedback and repair.
Under this model, the “health” of the economy becomes disconnected from the health of its support systems — energy, materials, ecosystems, people. We build more and move faster but damage the foundations beneath us.
Toward an Entropic Understanding of Value
In Entropy Economics, value isn’t just price. It’s structural persistence — the ability of a system to maintain coherence over time while resisting decay.
This changes the way we see cost and benefit:
A product that’s cheap but accelerates entropy (pollution, waste, extraction) isn’t valuable — it’s fragile.
A policy that slows growth but increases resilience, biodiversity, or social trust isn’t a sacrifice — it’s an investment.
Regeneration becomes not a side effect of doing good, but a prerequisite for staying viable.
In short: value isn’t what you can extract. It’s what can continue.
The Principles of a Regenerative Economy
Biogenics offers three core principles for building entropy-aware economies:
1. Self-Organisation
Decentralised networks of production and consumption should respond to feedback — ecological, social, and energetic. Think localised agriculture, adaptive energy grids, circular supply chains.
2. Self-Production
The economy must develop its own capacity to sustain itself — including education, health, biodiversity, and infrastructure repair. Systems that only consume without building their own support structures are parasitic.
3. Self-Correction
Built-in feedback loops must regulate harm, identify unsustainable practices, and redirect resources before collapse. This could mean dynamic taxes on pollution, open ecological accounting, or AI systems modelling planetary thresholds in real time.
These aren’t add-ons. They are the minimum structure for a system to remain alive.
Examples of Regenerative Design in Practice
This isn’t hypothetical. Early forms of entropy-aware design already exist:
Circular economies that reuse, repair, and repurpose materials.
Degrowth movements that focus on wellbeing, not consumption.
Ecological accounting that tracks natural capital alongside financial capital.
Biosphere-based budgeting that aligns economic planning with planetary boundaries.
Platform cooperatives that distribute value generation and reinvest locally.
These systems recognise that entropy is not an economic inconvenience — it’s the floor we stand on.
Rethinking Growth
The chapter challenges the growth-at-all-costs model. Instead of endless expansion, Biogenics advocates for punctuated growth — surges of development followed by consolidation, integration, and repair. This reflects how ecosystems develop: not in straight lines, but through adaptive cycles.
Healthy systems don’t grow infinitely. They renew.
This doesn’t mean halting progress. It means redefining it — from more stuff to more stability. From GDP to GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator). From faster transactions to deeper relationships.
A Note on Energy
A biogenic economy would take seriously the source and flow of energy.
Fossil fuels are inherently high-entropy — extractive, slow to renew, and ecologically destabilising. Renewable energy, by contrast, better aligns with living systems: distributed, stable, and reliant on cyclic inputs like sunlight, wind, and gravity.
An entropy-aware economic model would measure not just how much energy is used but also how it's sourced, how it's distributed, and how much systemic repair it enables.
Entropy is not the enemy. It’s the reminder that all systems must repair what they degrade.
Economics as If Life Mattered
Ultimately, Entropy Economics isn’t about austerity or asceticism. It’s about designing economies that behave like forests, not factories. That regenerate what they use. That correct what they harm. That survive their own success.
It’s a call to move beyond profit as the measure of prosperity. To focus on what truly matters: coherence, continuity, and care.
Because the question isn’t whether growth is good.
It’s whether the system can still breathe tomorrow.