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!
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.
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 former was wrong, the latter true). Predicting possible worlds is fraught with and such predictions are often wrong. Extrapolations within a world can be quite accurate.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
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 former was wrong, the latter true). Predicting possible worlds is fraught with 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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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)