  This article derives prognostic expressions for the evolution of globally
aggregated economic wealth, productivity, inflation, technological change,
innovation and growth. The approach is to treat civilization as an open,
non-equilibrium thermodynamic system that dissipates energy and diffuses matter
in order to sustain existing circulations and to further its material growth.
Appealing to a prior result that established a fixed relationship between a
very general representation of global economic wealth and rates of global
primary energy consumption, physically derived expressions for economic
quantities follow. The analysis suggests that wealth can be expressed in terms
of the length density of civilization's networks and the availability of energy
resources. Rates of return on wealth are accelerated by energy reserve
discovery, improvements to human and infrastructure longevity, and a more
common culture, or a lowering of the amount of energy required to diffuse raw
materials into civilization's bulk. According to a logistic equation, rates of
return are slowed by past growth, and if rates of return approach zero, such
"slowing down" makes civilization fragile with respect to externally imposed
network decay. If past technological change has been especially rapid, then
civilization is particularly vulnerable to newly unfavorable conditions that
might force a switch into a mode of accelerating collapse.
