Information, production and utility

Economic systems interact with their environment through material and energy use in production and consumption processes and release of waste products. In this paper, we extend the physical perspective to economic processes and treat production and consumption in analogous ways. This analogous treatment is achieved by focusing on information used to describe the change of state of materials, the complexity of the transformation process, and the connection between economic processes and environmental change. The physical model of production presented here provides a quantitative framework for exploring the role of technological change in an economic system that is treated explicitly as part of the ecosystem.