Raises doubt about the validity of the impending Third Industrial Revolution based on information and communications technology. Shows using basic science that information, unlike energy, is not physically productive, raising serious doubts over the ability of ICT to raise the standard of living.

This volume incorporates energy into the corpus of economic analysis and develops a new empirical model of production based on the two universal factor inputs - broadly defined energy and broadly defined organization.

Identifying the exclusion of energy as a major oversight in political economy, this study uses basic mechanics and thermodynamics to reexamine the rise of political economy as the science of wealth in the 19th and 20th centuries.