Distorted Time Preferences and Structural Change in the Energy Industry

The present study is a slightly revised version of my PhD thesis which was accepted at the Economics Department of Dresden University of Technology in July 2008. It has a long and a short history. For it began, as suggested theme, as a fundamental evaluation of evolutionary economics for ecological economics, asking, especially, for what the two ? elds actually constitutes and, eventually, relates. In several years of unfruitful dwelling, however, neither of these two young, non-mainstream ? elds proved as constituted at a fundamental level as yet. Rather, ecological economics, founded at the end of the 1980s as an attempt to combine social and natural s- ence approaches(in particular economics and ecology) to study especially long-run environmental problems in an encompassing manner, has mainly developed into an interdisciplinary research forum on environmental-economicissues. Particularly uni? edbycertainnormativestances sharedwithinits community, it constitutes, well understood, a new discpline of its own right, distinct from economics, with its own scienti? c standards, questions, methodologies and institutions (Baumgartner ¨ and Becker 2005). Modern evolutionaryeconomicson the other hand has been a quarter of a century after its inception with Nelson and Winter (1982) still a mainly h- erogeneousendeavor, linked by a (rather amorphous) common interest in economic “evolution” and a critical stance towards neoclassical mainstream economics, with a certain strength in applied studies on industrial dynamics (Heinzel 2004, 2006).