From Wikipedia:

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, born Nicolae Georgescu (4 February 1906 – 30 October 1994) was a Romanian American mathematician, statistician and economist. He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, where he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen’s work was seminal in establishing ecological economics as an independent academic subdiscipline in economics…

He was a protégé of the renowned economist Joseph Schumpeter. His own protégés included foundational ecological economist Herman E. Daly and Kozo Mayumi who further extended Georgescu-Roegen’s theories on entropy in the study of energy analysis…

The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, described by the Library Journal as “…a great seminal work that challenges economic analysis”, is a wide-ranging technical and philosophical exposition which promotes the case that economic activity can not be adequately described without taking into account the implications of second law of thermodynamics. It notes that the discovery of the second law in the mid nineteenth century resulted in the downfall of the mechanistic dogmas of Classical Physics. Whereas the equations of Newton‘s Laws of Motion were symmetrical with respect to time, the new law introduced the concept of irreversibility. Although the processes of living organisms appear to violate the second law, Schroedinger demonstrated in What is Life? that there is no inconsistency – organisms feed on low-entropy sources of energy to build and preserve their complex structures, and dissipate the energy in a higher entropic state. It argues that social and economic endeavours are an extension of these biological processes and are governed by the same principles.