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been known since the time of Tutenkhamen and another one says it's not known at
all. It's new but it's wrong. So in the end I don't know whether what I'm saying is
something new or something wrong, or what?
Antonio Valero: Do you agree that recycling is one of the solutions?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: Yes, but not maybe what most people mean by
recycling. You know what I said about recycling? What can you recycle? You can
only recycle the “carbojunk”. That means that you can recycle the matter that is
still available but not in a useful form. Broken glass, for example. You can recycle
the glass, you can recycle the material, but when a glass breaks you can't recycle
that glass. There are some small molecules that you can't recycle. So you can
recycle, of course, but there are some people who maintain that you can recycle
completely.
Antonio Valero: And what about production?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: I have written about this too. Production means
time. I was in Rome, at a meeting of the Association of Italian Economists and I
noticed how people who have worked on conservation and discuss the problems of
the conservation of energy confuse the ideas of flows and resources. A lot of people
talk about the problem of resources. But what is output a function of? Labour,
machinery, capital and natural resources. In Economics we can make this substitu-
tion - you can have a farm with more capital and less labour or more labour and
less capital. Or more land and less capital or more capital and less land. This is the
substitution. So they say “If you reduce the resources you can increase the capital”.
But what matters is not substitution but complementarity.
Antonio Valero: What can you tell us about your professional relationships?
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: Listen - three or four times my old professors, my
old colleagues have treated me in a most incredible way. Once I presented a paper
at the International Economics Association in Rome. Only invited speakers were
allowed and you had to submit your paper at least a month in advance for distri-
bution. You personally didn't present your paper. In your discussion you had to
summarise and say what you thought was good about it and what was bad. My
reporter was an economist from Israel, Potemkin. My paper was the first paper,
the opening paper of the Congress. The previous evening we were put together in
the same hotel and had dinner together. Potemkin sat opposite me at table and
talked about all kinds of things - paradise, hell, nice girls, bad men. . .this was his
conversation. And he had to present my paper the next day. He got up and he
said “I cannot summarise or present the content of Professor Georgescu's paper be-
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