Thanks for the illuminating overview. Linking Newtonian mechanics to Enlightenment mistakes that we still pay for -that’s something I’ll remember. But the analysis of the dichotomy between bio-rooted resilience and modern notions of efficiency - that’s even bigger. At 65 and retired I can look back and see the thread of that going way back, so it’s great to get such a coherent and compact elucidation even at this late date. I was a high school teacher and saw first hand how administrative bureaucrats, blind to their own biases and blinkered perception, were determined to satisfy managerial notions of efficiency under circumstances -particularly in inner-city schools - that were bound to frustrate. Glad that’s over but wish I’d read this awhile ago! Cheers!
Interesting read, and you reach for but don’t quite pick up statistical mechanics in opposition to Newtonian.
Information systems which self-organize are statistical ensembles which minimize entropy by encoding (predicting) reality and minimizing energy free energy (dissipation) due to model error.
This is as true for politics and economics as it is for language, ecologies, evolutionary systems, science and religion.
I the nice thing is thermodynamic laws, applying to these systems, are not avoidable. All political systems become disordered, as do language, genetic, economic, and other systems.
Equivalent ensembles which interact with each other which are in contact with each other always move to the same state of disorder.
Systems cannot spontaneously become more ordered in absence of energy.
Systems in isolation always become more disordered in time.
Systems with the least activity approach zero disorder as their activity decreases.
These are mathematically fixed and make it easy to see and generate interesting generalizations about statistician ensembles, like people in a nation, or ideas in science.
Newtonian mechanics makes no accurate predictions of ensembles and certainly fails at cosmic and quantum scales.
Statistical thermodynamics is accurate at all scales and levels of complexity.
“A living organism uses resources and information to maintain itself. Living organisms use a series of Maxwell’s Demon-like algorithms that select-in what maintains the organism and selects-out (including expel) what is hostile to doing so, thereby creating entropy-resisting stability. Ageing is a decline in capacity to resist entropy. Death represent a dramatic increase in entropy through massive loss of information plus the cessation of resistance to entropy that we call decay and putrefaction.”
This seems to lead back to Samo Burja’s distinctions between live and dead players. (Also a physicist I note.)
We agree. The Newtonian (Clockwork Orange) style view of life did hamper things.
Do read on the Friston Free Energy principle if you haven’t, it’s an echo of those statements. I haven’t found a self-organizing system which doesn’t embody it, or couldn’t be modeled like it, which shocked me to the core.
When your model of reality is too high in error (surprised too often), you can’t sustain the processes needed to maintain the prediction system and you merge with your environment - entropic equilibrium, death.
The average of error (surprise) over time is entropy. Self-perpetuating information systems (genetic systems, language, political) use energy to export entropy to maintain a high-accuracy surprise-free model that allows them to bind energy, or they merge with their environment.
Statistical mechanics, not Newtonian. I always found it amusing that Verlinde’s emergent gravity and trans pain over their mind not modeling their body correctly, and the fall of the USSR all had the same underlying statistical mechanics system describing them.
And materially Verlinde’s entropic gravity refuted Newtonian mechanics entirely! Wasn’t true for people, and wasn’t true for mass either.
So, I read it. Not an easy read. I do notice that it seems to be building theory on theory, though that might be because it is outside my area of familiarity.
"Systems cannot spontaneously become more ordered in absence of energy."
Human organizations are driven by energy flows (which are not constant), they are not in any kind of statistical equilibrium (entropic). This is as coarse an error as applying Newtonian physics to social phenomenon.
it’s the opposite, for systems of people or political views they either become more disordered in time (isolated systems) or they exchange energy with their environment and can become more organized.
You are correct there are many sources of energy in ensembles.
Human society does not function like a physical/mechanical system. This is precisely the conceit that Lorenzo is attacking. Doesn't matter if you trace from Newton or Boltzmann.
Oh it does precisely operate as a statistical system, not mechanical. Perhaps that’s the confusion the fact exists much to the chagrin of most people. Information diffuses through human systems like gases mixing, In epidemiology, humans operate perfectly like particles in an ensemble; which is the whole point behind Boltzmann.
Evolution is a statistical phenomenon (not mechanical) and evolution of language, politics, science, religion, all manner of human institutions operates under rules of evolution.
It’s humans who refuse to believe that human evolution in a wide variety of information contexts who refuse Darwin. Evolution is an effect of entropic increase.
Evolutionary drift is measurable, and serves as a remarkably accurate clock, humans mutate 200-400 base units each generation… the evolution and diffusion of language, the most human of activity can be measured and tracked like smog drift on a sunny LA afternoon working its way along the valley.
Actually, migration can break political orders. That is one of the costs that economists do not figure in their analysis, despite a Nobel-memorial economic historian pointing out that that is precisely what happened to the US in 1860.
Incorporation can increase dynamism. That seems to be why steppe/forest pastoralists became increasingly dominant over North China over time. But it has to be active positive-sum incorporation, not negligent festering (the UK) or increasing pressure along faultlines (US 1860; Lebanon 1975; France, UK, US, Canada now.).
Migration is precisely two ensembles merging and irresistibly coming into entropic (information theoretic) equilibrium, which always erodes boundaries (the so-called Markov blanket), or partitioning functions between the ensembles.
Large inbound migrations to the UK have destroyed it, unbeknownst to the inhabitants. The disorder introduced to the UK cultural system is irreversible.
I don’t fear for the US because the entropic bath immigrants face today is stupendously large. Japan resists valiantly. France is extremely brittle to foreigners. Swiss and German are really insulated, as are the Dutch. Chinese are impenetrable.
When an economist uses thermodynamic modeling to calculate cultural change and predict persistence of cultural milestones they will win a Nobel.
I have found formulas for businesses, to model KPI’s and see how long they can persist given certain types of market entropy, and operation metrics (error terms). Works beautifully.
I am glad Lorenzo is writing substacks...then I don't have to, and I would not do as good a job anyway.
The more I think about it, when you look at a Japan, or many other nations, the most important predictor of economic success is how people and government behave.
Ergo, a nation's most precious resource is its people, its work-ethic and culture, and government policy.
Yes, even the same ethnic groups can have different economic outcomes---consider North and South Korea. Really bad government can harm a nation. In general, liberal democracy and a large private-sector seem to work best---when the national culture and work-ethic is right.
Why any successful nation feels any onus to accept large-scale immigration is a reasonable question. It is like a gigantic social experiment on the national population, largely without consent, and without knowing the results (and with a general censorship regime on skeptical immigration research or commentary).
Tight labor markets should considered a feature, not a bug, of good macroeconomic policy.
The impetus to mass migration right now is probably not that different to the impetus in America in the 19th century - the need for a labor force. What is different is what Lorenzo points to: our decision makers are blind to the practical effects of serious cultural incompatibility.
What’s interesting is why we can’t import from cultures similar to our own. Another commenter above says that the effects of thermodynamics are relevant to social structures: so, lack of active energy in the structure leads to entropic decay. In order to import a workforce from societies like our own would require societies like our own that are not in an advanced state of entropic decay - unfortunately, it seems, Europe is out of energy; societies that do have energy are culturally incompatible (or at least not easily assimilable to our cultural “specifications”.)
I am not sure why a nation would enter entropy, if it adopted the basic liberal democracy, largely free-market private-sector tack. People always want to make money and scads of people enjoy inventing all manner of products.
I don't have the answers on population decline, if that is what is meant by entropy.
Some of it may be lower living standards due to the cost of housing, education or health care (at least in the US). Some of it is secularism.
I wonder if nations are allowed to depopulate, and labor becomes scarce enough, if, say, South Koreans or Japanese will say to themselves, "There are jobs begging everywhere, housing is cheap, and one salary can support a family. Let's have kids."
Maybe with some cash bonuses for the third child, etc.
I wouldn’t say that the (so called) “entropy” is population decline alone; I also mean the capture of our elites by the very mindset Lorenzo is talking about (and, to be sure, what Iain McGilchrist means by left hemisphere capture). They think society is a static machine amenable to rationalistic and scientistic manipulation (improperly applied Newtonian mechanics, per the article). This inevitably fails because a healthy society must be dynamic. The west generally and Europe especially have lost dynamism as they manage harder and harder, and problems become dumber and less amenable to repair (e.g., America’s federal treasury debt; British multicultural death spiral).
America has a beautifully designed constitution of liberty but our legislative branch is shirking it’s necessary function under it; the constitutional dynamo of the culture and society is wobbling out of control as the executive and judicial branches jockey around the power of the unenumerated administrative “branch” delegated by the Administrative Procedures Act (1937?). The legislative power of the people has been ceded to administrative fiat. Power has become unaccountable, save for periodic presidential elections that feel more and more like last chance opportunities.
Effective feedback/accountability mechanisms can be viewed as anti-entropically putting energy back into the system. If your feedback/accountability mechanisms are in decay and/or being actively sabotaged (which is what the politics of the unaccountable classes are all about) then …
Someone recently wrote a long, well-informed article on the changes in immigration law that resulted in the shift from primarily European nations to almost exclusively third world countries. Pretty sure it's on Substack.
So how will it end? I suspect decline and increasing civil disorder and then the emergence of tribalism, with Europeans finally embracing some form of tribalism themselves; probably wrapped up in nationalism.
I read elsewhere, and quite some time ago, about European political devolution, e.g. Catalonian and Basque separatism, as the natural counterbalance to EU growth (vis-a-vis the member nation-states).
George Friedman points out that "Europe" no longer exists, and never really did, as a single coherent social and political entity [the "glue" of Christianity not quite overcoming the pull of individual Church or temporal political leadership foibles]. The flaws in setting up (or evolving?) the EU from a trade agreement into a "pseudo" government is failing to achieve resilience as it did not really grow out of consent of the governed.
The term "Europe" is probably more helpful for those of us outside of its dominion that those inside it?
Yes, I would doubt you could find anyone, even in Brussels who says of themselves first and foremost "I am European", as would most Americans (who might then add the state they live in or some element of their ethnic heritage).
Had the union succeeded, then the nations themselves may well have dissolved back into their original regions.
I think the EU is a spent force. No longer a meaningful entity. That should accelerate the emergence of nationalism in European states. It is obvious certainly the elites are out to lunch.
Very perceptive framing. I particularly liked the discussion of the "good enough" outcomes of biology, having not been aware of the specific formulation of "satisficing" (although obviously been a witness to that in practice, as we all have). The utopian strain in much social thought needs explaining, because it seems to be intuitive, but observation of reality tells us that there is probably nothing that is more counterintuitive - and the Newtonian mechanics analogy (although it's more than just an analogy, it what is happening, it seems) is very revealing.
While reading this, I got the feeling that the ideas you describe can explain my subconscious unease and sense of dread of an upcoming failure of reliance on the current phase of "artificial intelligence" and its large language models. I've been involved in AI development in the past, as a software developer trying to implement theories of intelligence and seeing their ultimate failures to correctly behave as universal replacements for human thought and behavior. The base concept of artificial intelligence is the attempt to use computation to completely model the biological processes of human thought, with the goal of replacing said thought and thereby the possibility of improving its efficiency, just as engineering has improved the efficiency of mechanical devices that replaced much human physical labor. I'm afraid we're barreling down a road at high speed, attempting to prematurely replace human thought with "large language models" which are incomplete by definition, and prone to conflict with reality, e.g. the disturbing "A.I. art" and the text "hallucinations" the models generate when prompted. These failures cannot be corrected by expanding the models' "training", because ultimately they are not complete models of the complex processes of human thought. Just as Newtonian physics was not a complete model of the universe, and trying to apply it to all problems ultimately fails outside of a restricted problem space, these large language models will ultimately fail to behave as replacements for all human thought, due to the inherent limitations of their design. Useful tools will come from the current research, but they won't be universally applicable, and I fear the bad results from their application before we realize their limits.
My apologies for hijacking your thread, it just struck me that there are parallels between the political ideas you described and the current mad dash to replace us with artificial intelligence.
This is not a hijacking at all, but what I found to be an enlightening wrestling with issues. Once I realised that LLM could be manipulated surprisingly easily, the attempt by the Biden Administration to use debanking to create an AI cartel made a whole lot more sense. It went with their attempt to create an opinion cartel by pressuring social media companies, doing an end-run around the First Amendment.
Thank you, in the past I've tried to avoid completely jumping off the tracks of conversations, but have often derailed! I need to think about your term "opinion cartel", have you written about this concept elsewhere? Seeing the very successful attempts to silence speech unacceptable to the governments in the UK, as well as the use of alternate terms for common ideas, such as "to unalive" for "to kill" to avoid triggering the comment-censoring scripts, I've been posting the comment "Orwell was an optimist." The current attempt to require biometric identification to be allowed to use the Internet is frightening but inevitable. I'm much older than the Internet, and I've seen the net positive effects of unrestricted access to it, many such effects being anathema to governments and to cartels of all kinds. I hope to live long enough to avoid the worst of the possible totalitarian efforts to restrict the Internet, I'm too old to start self-censoring.
"Across history, policy makers regularly balanced efficiency against resilience. The obsession that mainstream Economics has with efficiency—and its consequent downgrading of resilience—has done considerable damage to Western societies."
This is a terrific point that answers something I couldn't figure out about Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - his obsession with efficiency (and his insistence that bureaucrats could deliver more efficiently than the market). I attributed at least some of his deference to bureaucracy as being European (and their quaint notions about such), but there was a deeper bias I wasn't getting.
Creative destruction was actually coined by Werner Sombart; Schumpeter gets the credit because he popularized it. Speaking of gaps, while reading Mises book Bureaucracy, I kept wondering how he could miss what Schumpeter saw - when they were contemporaries. Turns out Schumpeter started in the Austrian school of economics before switching over the to the German historical school. From Mises view, he was a heretic.
The West has become so self critical that we dont seem to ever be able look to our own past. England began an intensive de-democratization process decades ago, but its personal tradition, the path the English took, was, relative to other peoples, deeply lower case "d" democratic with genuinely democratic governance structures that didnt emerge from top down design but from the lived, local self governance done through a variety structures like borough corporations, parish assemblies, common law juries, guild councils, etc. English democracy, like in America, then began to be dismantled after WW2.
The English and their descendants didn’t have to fantasize about a transcendent social mechanic, they practiced political redundancy, feedback structures, and adaptive decentralization long before Hayek (who was a man of the East and who was disdainful of the English tradition)
I recently came across Yoram Harzony’s argument that a moral metaphysic limited to liberty, equality and consent is too impoverished to enforce boundaries or transmit a heritage. There seems to me to be a lot in that. He definitely included Hayek in that critique.
Exactly! And while Hayek never did (likely never wanted to), English civic tradition had solved the problems Harzony mentions long ago by balancing liberty, equality, and consent with a dense web of inherited institutions, borough corporations, parish vestries, guild courts, the common law, locally controlled fiscal bodies, and more so that those principals werent the abstract energies that could just move in any given direction at any time but instead were just deeply woven into bottom up practical governance
Did I miss the reference to Asimov that connects Foundation and a thermodynamic approach to predicting history? Must have been in there somewhere. 😀
Great essay though! One interesting angle is how predictions of the future do two things: the anticipate a future possible world and make extrapolations within that world. Jules Verne, for example, predicted that we could scale up artillery and so launch folk to the moon, and that the artillery piece would be fired close to the equator (the former was wrong, the latter true). Predicting possible worlds is fraught and such predictions are often wrong. Extrapolations within a world can be quite accurate.
I like many ideas in the post. But, I don't see it fair to denounce Newton or his mechanics. It was tremendous accomplishments at the time, that made way to many future discoveries and technologies. The Newton's laws of physics and differential equations were paralleled by much more rigorous Leibnitz calculus. Paving the way to the technological revolution.
And, I don't see attempts to apply mathematical modeling to social fields or economics as wrong either. The method may or may not produce testable results, but it is worth trying.
The issue was and is not in existence of mathematical knowledge or methods, but in ideologs of social 'science' trying to use it as proof of their preconceptions. Very much like 'psychic' schizotypal or charlatan used magnetism, electricity, quantum mechanical entanglement to give some 'scientific' foundations for their nonsense -- that is the ones that bothered to bamboozle more rational followers, rather than sticking to 'spiritual' beyond our understanding 'explanation' for the lowest common denominator.
Thus, viva Newton, Leibnitz, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Einstein, Fisher, Penrose, and the list can go on for volumes.
And, god damn Marx, Boas, Mead, Lewontin, Gould, etc. etc.
P.S. After having posted this note, I thought to look for a good summary, and this student paper I just found provides a nice positive summary of Newton's contribution to English and European industrial revolution (with an institutional emphasis that you may find useful, as it is consilient yet orthogonal with some of the post's points, and followed by a nice reference list). Thus, I added it here: https://www.e-ir.info/2011/08/24/the-industrial-revolution-and-a-newtonian-culture/
Thanks for that paper, it is a great read and a well-supported hypothesis. It connects to points I have made previously about usable knowledge and cultural and institutional barriers to the spread of the same.
My post was, in no way, intended to be a criticism of Newton or his Mechanics, which is why I talked so much of the Myth of Newton. Nor did I mean to critique mathematical modelling as such. There is absolutely a role for maths and modelling in the study of matters social, as there is in matters biological.
The problem is treating people as undifferentiated when there are key ways in which they very much are. Some of the recent work in agent-based modelling is fascinating and hopeful. See J. Doyne Farmer’s ‘Making Sense of Chaos’, which is in the bibliography.
(As an aside, one can argue that perhaps the biggest shift the CCP has made in Chinese culture is how many of its senior members have engineering, scientific or even technical skills background.)
I agree, I misunderstood the post's intent regarding Newton, though I suspect I am not the only one. The passages on the Myth of Newton may be taken as the source of mechanistic view on everything and thus all modern problems, at least it sounded so, but was not intended as such. And yet, even after the third re-read I cannot shake off the feeling that the fault is being placed at Newton's feet (or his laws of motion), thus I am not in agreement with the post's flow of evidence. Though, fair enough, if we have not embraced the Newton's laws of physics or something like it, we could be still in a semi-feudal societies, and would have no modern problems like Wokery. It could have been quite different 350 years, which is historically a blink of an eye.
Having worked with many people, I also sneer at the idea of treating people as undifferentiated blank slate units. Years back I also perceived as hopeful the CCP bringing in people with engineering, scientific, technical skills and even top entrepreneurs. However, their handling of COVID and more recent developments seem to show that the collectivist arctic genetic heritage may be reasserting itself, particularly that the party infrastructure is a catalyst for such direction (contrary to Hsu's optimism). Taiwan may be bucking this trend, however observing my Taiwanese friends, I am not so sure it is the case; perhaps closer ties to the West make it less prominent, however left to their own devices the collectivism may take over.
I would just like to thank my commenters for some very thoughtful, and thought-provoking, comments.
Thanks for the illuminating overview. Linking Newtonian mechanics to Enlightenment mistakes that we still pay for -that’s something I’ll remember. But the analysis of the dichotomy between bio-rooted resilience and modern notions of efficiency - that’s even bigger. At 65 and retired I can look back and see the thread of that going way back, so it’s great to get such a coherent and compact elucidation even at this late date. I was a high school teacher and saw first hand how administrative bureaucrats, blind to their own biases and blinkered perception, were determined to satisfy managerial notions of efficiency under circumstances -particularly in inner-city schools - that were bound to frustrate. Glad that’s over but wish I’d read this awhile ago! Cheers!
Interesting read, and you reach for but don’t quite pick up statistical mechanics in opposition to Newtonian.
Information systems which self-organize are statistical ensembles which minimize entropy by encoding (predicting) reality and minimizing energy free energy (dissipation) due to model error.
This is as true for politics and economics as it is for language, ecologies, evolutionary systems, science and religion.
I the nice thing is thermodynamic laws, applying to these systems, are not avoidable. All political systems become disordered, as do language, genetic, economic, and other systems.
Equivalent ensembles which interact with each other which are in contact with each other always move to the same state of disorder.
Systems cannot spontaneously become more ordered in absence of energy.
Systems in isolation always become more disordered in time.
Systems with the least activity approach zero disorder as their activity decreases.
These are mathematically fixed and make it easy to see and generate interesting generalizations about statistician ensembles, like people in a nation, or ideas in science.
Newtonian mechanics makes no accurate predictions of ensembles and certainly fails at cosmic and quantum scales.
Statistical thermodynamics is accurate at all scales and levels of complexity.
Fascinating.
In the post, I was mainly interested in the system with varied agents/system without dichotomy.
Accountability/feedback systems in effect put appropriate energy back into the system. I hadn’t thought of it like that, so thank you.
I have made the point that living systems actively resist entropy.
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/the-bureaucratisation-of-dysfunction
“A living organism uses resources and information to maintain itself. Living organisms use a series of Maxwell’s Demon-like algorithms that select-in what maintains the organism and selects-out (including expel) what is hostile to doing so, thereby creating entropy-resisting stability. Ageing is a decline in capacity to resist entropy. Death represent a dramatic increase in entropy through massive loss of information plus the cessation of resistance to entropy that we call decay and putrefaction.”
This seems to lead back to Samo Burja’s distinctions between live and dead players. (Also a physicist I note.)
We agree. The Newtonian (Clockwork Orange) style view of life did hamper things.
Do read on the Friston Free Energy principle if you haven’t, it’s an echo of those statements. I haven’t found a self-organizing system which doesn’t embody it, or couldn’t be modeled like it, which shocked me to the core.
When your model of reality is too high in error (surprised too often), you can’t sustain the processes needed to maintain the prediction system and you merge with your environment - entropic equilibrium, death.
The average of error (surprise) over time is entropy. Self-perpetuating information systems (genetic systems, language, political) use energy to export entropy to maintain a high-accuracy surprise-free model that allows them to bind energy, or they merge with their environment.
Statistical mechanics, not Newtonian. I always found it amusing that Verlinde’s emergent gravity and trans pain over their mind not modeling their body correctly, and the fall of the USSR all had the same underlying statistical mechanics system describing them.
And materially Verlinde’s entropic gravity refuted Newtonian mechanics entirely! Wasn’t true for people, and wasn’t true for mass either.
Found it, will read it with interest.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41001209_Friston_KJ_The_free-energy_principle_a_unified_brain_theory_Nat_Rev_Neurosci_11_127-138
So, I read it. Not an easy read. I do notice that it seems to be building theory on theory, though that might be because it is outside my area of familiarity.
The part to remember is the cost of the model vs cost of surprise, and the average of error over time is entropy
"Systems cannot spontaneously become more ordered in absence of energy."
Human organizations are driven by energy flows (which are not constant), they are not in any kind of statistical equilibrium (entropic). This is as coarse an error as applying Newtonian physics to social phenomenon.
So you agree with me.
Without energy, statistical ensembles (populations, political parties, increase disorder.
Put two populations together and they will assume equilibrium entropy in time (the magic of immigration).
I think I disagree, as the presumption of entropy is that no new energy drives the system.
it’s the opposite, for systems of people or political views they either become more disordered in time (isolated systems) or they exchange energy with their environment and can become more organized.
You are correct there are many sources of energy in ensembles.
Human society does not function like a physical/mechanical system. This is precisely the conceit that Lorenzo is attacking. Doesn't matter if you trace from Newton or Boltzmann.
Oh it does precisely operate as a statistical system, not mechanical. Perhaps that’s the confusion the fact exists much to the chagrin of most people. Information diffuses through human systems like gases mixing, In epidemiology, humans operate perfectly like particles in an ensemble; which is the whole point behind Boltzmann.
Evolution is a statistical phenomenon (not mechanical) and evolution of language, politics, science, religion, all manner of human institutions operates under rules of evolution.
It’s humans who refuse to believe that human evolution in a wide variety of information contexts who refuse Darwin. Evolution is an effect of entropic increase.
Evolutionary drift is measurable, and serves as a remarkably accurate clock, humans mutate 200-400 base units each generation… the evolution and diffusion of language, the most human of activity can be measured and tracked like smog drift on a sunny LA afternoon working its way along the valley.
It’s not mechanistic, it’s statistical.
Actually, migration can break political orders. That is one of the costs that economists do not figure in their analysis, despite a Nobel-memorial economic historian pointing out that that is precisely what happened to the US in 1860.
Incorporation can increase dynamism. That seems to be why steppe/forest pastoralists became increasingly dominant over North China over time. But it has to be active positive-sum incorporation, not negligent festering (the UK) or increasing pressure along faultlines (US 1860; Lebanon 1975; France, UK, US, Canada now.).
I’ll have to read more on 1860.
Migration is precisely two ensembles merging and irresistibly coming into entropic (information theoretic) equilibrium, which always erodes boundaries (the so-called Markov blanket), or partitioning functions between the ensembles.
Large inbound migrations to the UK have destroyed it, unbeknownst to the inhabitants. The disorder introduced to the UK cultural system is irreversible.
I don’t fear for the US because the entropic bath immigrants face today is stupendously large. Japan resists valiantly. France is extremely brittle to foreigners. Swiss and German are really insulated, as are the Dutch. Chinese are impenetrable.
When an economist uses thermodynamic modeling to calculate cultural change and predict persistence of cultural milestones they will win a Nobel.
I have found formulas for businesses, to model KPI’s and see how long they can persist given certain types of market entropy, and operation metrics (error terms). Works beautifully.
Weird hobby of course.
I am glad Lorenzo is writing substacks...then I don't have to, and I would not do as good a job anyway.
The more I think about it, when you look at a Japan, or many other nations, the most important predictor of economic success is how people and government behave.
Ergo, a nation's most precious resource is its people, its work-ethic and culture, and government policy.
Yes, even the same ethnic groups can have different economic outcomes---consider North and South Korea. Really bad government can harm a nation. In general, liberal democracy and a large private-sector seem to work best---when the national culture and work-ethic is right.
Why any successful nation feels any onus to accept large-scale immigration is a reasonable question. It is like a gigantic social experiment on the national population, largely without consent, and without knowing the results (and with a general censorship regime on skeptical immigration research or commentary).
Tight labor markets should considered a feature, not a bug, of good macroeconomic policy.
And loose housing markets.
The impetus to mass migration right now is probably not that different to the impetus in America in the 19th century - the need for a labor force. What is different is what Lorenzo points to: our decision makers are blind to the practical effects of serious cultural incompatibility.
What’s interesting is why we can’t import from cultures similar to our own. Another commenter above says that the effects of thermodynamics are relevant to social structures: so, lack of active energy in the structure leads to entropic decay. In order to import a workforce from societies like our own would require societies like our own that are not in an advanced state of entropic decay - unfortunately, it seems, Europe is out of energy; societies that do have energy are culturally incompatible (or at least not easily assimilable to our cultural “specifications”.)
Gotta love Lorenzo - he gets your flow flowing!
Thanks for your comment.
I am not sure why a nation would enter entropy, if it adopted the basic liberal democracy, largely free-market private-sector tack. People always want to make money and scads of people enjoy inventing all manner of products.
I don't have the answers on population decline, if that is what is meant by entropy.
Some of it may be lower living standards due to the cost of housing, education or health care (at least in the US). Some of it is secularism.
I wonder if nations are allowed to depopulate, and labor becomes scarce enough, if, say, South Koreans or Japanese will say to themselves, "There are jobs begging everywhere, housing is cheap, and one salary can support a family. Let's have kids."
Maybe with some cash bonuses for the third child, etc.
I wouldn’t say that the (so called) “entropy” is population decline alone; I also mean the capture of our elites by the very mindset Lorenzo is talking about (and, to be sure, what Iain McGilchrist means by left hemisphere capture). They think society is a static machine amenable to rationalistic and scientistic manipulation (improperly applied Newtonian mechanics, per the article). This inevitably fails because a healthy society must be dynamic. The west generally and Europe especially have lost dynamism as they manage harder and harder, and problems become dumber and less amenable to repair (e.g., America’s federal treasury debt; British multicultural death spiral).
America has a beautifully designed constitution of liberty but our legislative branch is shirking it’s necessary function under it; the constitutional dynamo of the culture and society is wobbling out of control as the executive and judicial branches jockey around the power of the unenumerated administrative “branch” delegated by the Administrative Procedures Act (1937?). The legislative power of the people has been ceded to administrative fiat. Power has become unaccountable, save for periodic presidential elections that feel more and more like last chance opportunities.
I hope I am wrong.
Effective feedback/accountability mechanisms can be viewed as anti-entropically putting energy back into the system. If your feedback/accountability mechanisms are in decay and/or being actively sabotaged (which is what the politics of the unaccountable classes are all about) then …
Someone recently wrote a long, well-informed article on the changes in immigration law that resulted in the shift from primarily European nations to almost exclusively third world countries. Pretty sure it's on Substack.
So how will it end? I suspect decline and increasing civil disorder and then the emergence of tribalism, with Europeans finally embracing some form of tribalism themselves; probably wrapped up in nationalism.
Then a reset I suspect.
I read elsewhere, and quite some time ago, about European political devolution, e.g. Catalonian and Basque separatism, as the natural counterbalance to EU growth (vis-a-vis the member nation-states).
George Friedman points out that "Europe" no longer exists, and never really did, as a single coherent social and political entity [the "glue" of Christianity not quite overcoming the pull of individual Church or temporal political leadership foibles]. The flaws in setting up (or evolving?) the EU from a trade agreement into a "pseudo" government is failing to achieve resilience as it did not really grow out of consent of the governed.
The term "Europe" is probably more helpful for those of us outside of its dominion that those inside it?
Yes, I would doubt you could find anyone, even in Brussels who says of themselves first and foremost "I am European", as would most Americans (who might then add the state they live in or some element of their ethnic heritage).
Had the union succeeded, then the nations themselves may well have dissolved back into their original regions.
I think the EU is a spent force. No longer a meaningful entity. That should accelerate the emergence of nationalism in European states. It is obvious certainly the elites are out to lunch.
Very perceptive framing. I particularly liked the discussion of the "good enough" outcomes of biology, having not been aware of the specific formulation of "satisficing" (although obviously been a witness to that in practice, as we all have). The utopian strain in much social thought needs explaining, because it seems to be intuitive, but observation of reality tells us that there is probably nothing that is more counterintuitive - and the Newtonian mechanics analogy (although it's more than just an analogy, it what is happening, it seems) is very revealing.
While reading this, I got the feeling that the ideas you describe can explain my subconscious unease and sense of dread of an upcoming failure of reliance on the current phase of "artificial intelligence" and its large language models. I've been involved in AI development in the past, as a software developer trying to implement theories of intelligence and seeing their ultimate failures to correctly behave as universal replacements for human thought and behavior. The base concept of artificial intelligence is the attempt to use computation to completely model the biological processes of human thought, with the goal of replacing said thought and thereby the possibility of improving its efficiency, just as engineering has improved the efficiency of mechanical devices that replaced much human physical labor. I'm afraid we're barreling down a road at high speed, attempting to prematurely replace human thought with "large language models" which are incomplete by definition, and prone to conflict with reality, e.g. the disturbing "A.I. art" and the text "hallucinations" the models generate when prompted. These failures cannot be corrected by expanding the models' "training", because ultimately they are not complete models of the complex processes of human thought. Just as Newtonian physics was not a complete model of the universe, and trying to apply it to all problems ultimately fails outside of a restricted problem space, these large language models will ultimately fail to behave as replacements for all human thought, due to the inherent limitations of their design. Useful tools will come from the current research, but they won't be universally applicable, and I fear the bad results from their application before we realize their limits.
My apologies for hijacking your thread, it just struck me that there are parallels between the political ideas you described and the current mad dash to replace us with artificial intelligence.
This is not a hijacking at all, but what I found to be an enlightening wrestling with issues. Once I realised that LLM could be manipulated surprisingly easily, the attempt by the Biden Administration to use debanking to create an AI cartel made a whole lot more sense. It went with their attempt to create an opinion cartel by pressuring social media companies, doing an end-run around the First Amendment.
Thank you, in the past I've tried to avoid completely jumping off the tracks of conversations, but have often derailed! I need to think about your term "opinion cartel", have you written about this concept elsewhere? Seeing the very successful attempts to silence speech unacceptable to the governments in the UK, as well as the use of alternate terms for common ideas, such as "to unalive" for "to kill" to avoid triggering the comment-censoring scripts, I've been posting the comment "Orwell was an optimist." The current attempt to require biometric identification to be allowed to use the Internet is frightening but inevitable. I'm much older than the Internet, and I've seen the net positive effects of unrestricted access to it, many such effects being anathema to governments and to cartels of all kinds. I hope to live long enough to avoid the worst of the possible totalitarian efforts to restrict the Internet, I'm too old to start self-censoring.
I haven’t written directly on opinion cartel. I have discussed some of the dynamcs of such.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/how-institutional-capture-happened
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/in-the-absence-of-reality-testing
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/the-pravda-media-model
Thank you, I'll check them out.
great stuff here.
Great essay, with 5 to 10 very well phrased concepts/ ideas succinctly expressed; too many to highlight here.
But I do intend to copy your essay into MS Word for later reread and highlighting.
"Across history, policy makers regularly balanced efficiency against resilience. The obsession that mainstream Economics has with efficiency—and its consequent downgrading of resilience—has done considerable damage to Western societies."
This is a terrific point that answers something I couldn't figure out about Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - his obsession with efficiency (and his insistence that bureaucrats could deliver more efficiently than the market). I attributed at least some of his deference to bureaucracy as being European (and their quaint notions about such), but there was a deeper bias I wasn't getting.
That Mr Creative Destruction had such a gap in his thinking is very revealing, thank you for that.
Creative destruction was actually coined by Werner Sombart; Schumpeter gets the credit because he popularized it. Speaking of gaps, while reading Mises book Bureaucracy, I kept wondering how he could miss what Schumpeter saw - when they were contemporaries. Turns out Schumpeter started in the Austrian school of economics before switching over the to the German historical school. From Mises view, he was a heretic.
The West has become so self critical that we dont seem to ever be able look to our own past. England began an intensive de-democratization process decades ago, but its personal tradition, the path the English took, was, relative to other peoples, deeply lower case "d" democratic with genuinely democratic governance structures that didnt emerge from top down design but from the lived, local self governance done through a variety structures like borough corporations, parish assemblies, common law juries, guild councils, etc. English democracy, like in America, then began to be dismantled after WW2.
The English and their descendants didn’t have to fantasize about a transcendent social mechanic, they practiced political redundancy, feedback structures, and adaptive decentralization long before Hayek (who was a man of the East and who was disdainful of the English tradition)
I recently came across Yoram Harzony’s argument that a moral metaphysic limited to liberty, equality and consent is too impoverished to enforce boundaries or transmit a heritage. There seems to me to be a lot in that. He definitely included Hayek in that critique.
Exactly! And while Hayek never did (likely never wanted to), English civic tradition had solved the problems Harzony mentions long ago by balancing liberty, equality, and consent with a dense web of inherited institutions, borough corporations, parish vestries, guild courts, the common law, locally controlled fiscal bodies, and more so that those principals werent the abstract energies that could just move in any given direction at any time but instead were just deeply woven into bottom up practical governance
Did I miss the reference to Asimov that connects Foundation and a thermodynamic approach to predicting history? Must have been in there somewhere. 😀
Great essay though! One interesting angle is how predictions of the future do two things: the anticipate a future possible world and make extrapolations within that world. Jules Verne, for example, predicted that we could scale up artillery and so launch folk to the moon, and that the artillery piece would be fired close to the equator (the former was wrong, the latter true). Predicting possible worlds is fraught and such predictions are often wrong. Extrapolations within a world can be quite accurate.
Forgot that I wrote something on on this: Why we keep misreading disruption https://open.substack.com/pub/thepuzzleanditspieces/p/why-we-keep-misreading-disruption?r=2wvwm&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for your essay, which I found clarifying.
I like many ideas in the post. But, I don't see it fair to denounce Newton or his mechanics. It was tremendous accomplishments at the time, that made way to many future discoveries and technologies. The Newton's laws of physics and differential equations were paralleled by much more rigorous Leibnitz calculus. Paving the way to the technological revolution.
And, I don't see attempts to apply mathematical modeling to social fields or economics as wrong either. The method may or may not produce testable results, but it is worth trying.
The issue was and is not in existence of mathematical knowledge or methods, but in ideologs of social 'science' trying to use it as proof of their preconceptions. Very much like 'psychic' schizotypal or charlatan used magnetism, electricity, quantum mechanical entanglement to give some 'scientific' foundations for their nonsense -- that is the ones that bothered to bamboozle more rational followers, rather than sticking to 'spiritual' beyond our understanding 'explanation' for the lowest common denominator.
Thus, viva Newton, Leibnitz, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Einstein, Fisher, Penrose, and the list can go on for volumes.
And, god damn Marx, Boas, Mead, Lewontin, Gould, etc. etc.
P.S. After having posted this note, I thought to look for a good summary, and this student paper I just found provides a nice positive summary of Newton's contribution to English and European industrial revolution (with an institutional emphasis that you may find useful, as it is consilient yet orthogonal with some of the post's points, and followed by a nice reference list). Thus, I added it here: https://www.e-ir.info/2011/08/24/the-industrial-revolution-and-a-newtonian-culture/
Thanks for that paper, it is a great read and a well-supported hypothesis. It connects to points I have made previously about usable knowledge and cultural and institutional barriers to the spread of the same.
My post was, in no way, intended to be a criticism of Newton or his Mechanics, which is why I talked so much of the Myth of Newton. Nor did I mean to critique mathematical modelling as such. There is absolutely a role for maths and modelling in the study of matters social, as there is in matters biological.
The problem is treating people as undifferentiated when there are key ways in which they very much are. Some of the recent work in agent-based modelling is fascinating and hopeful. See J. Doyne Farmer’s ‘Making Sense of Chaos’, which is in the bibliography.
(As an aside, one can argue that perhaps the biggest shift the CCP has made in Chinese culture is how many of its senior members have engineering, scientific or even technical skills background.)
I agree, I misunderstood the post's intent regarding Newton, though I suspect I am not the only one. The passages on the Myth of Newton may be taken as the source of mechanistic view on everything and thus all modern problems, at least it sounded so, but was not intended as such. And yet, even after the third re-read I cannot shake off the feeling that the fault is being placed at Newton's feet (or his laws of motion), thus I am not in agreement with the post's flow of evidence. Though, fair enough, if we have not embraced the Newton's laws of physics or something like it, we could be still in a semi-feudal societies, and would have no modern problems like Wokery. It could have been quite different 350 years, which is historically a blink of an eye.
Having worked with many people, I also sneer at the idea of treating people as undifferentiated blank slate units. Years back I also perceived as hopeful the CCP bringing in people with engineering, scientific, technical skills and even top entrepreneurs. However, their handling of COVID and more recent developments seem to show that the collectivist arctic genetic heritage may be reasserting itself, particularly that the party infrastructure is a catalyst for such direction (contrary to Hsu's optimism). Taiwan may be bucking this trend, however observing my Taiwanese friends, I am not so sure it is the case; perhaps closer ties to the West make it less prominent, however left to their own devices the collectivism may take over.
Will check 'Making Sense of Chaos'.