Societal Entropy
I know I’m not the first person to discuss this idea, but it has struck me recently as an idea to think about. A friend of mine and I were discussing ways America has been deteriorating and he mentioned that we need to scrap the old rules and make new rules that apply to the ways society works today. In some ways this makes sense; in others, not so much.
When the country was first founded, there was an enormous amount of energy available to push the country into existence. I suppose that energy was derived from a desire to get away from oppression as well as the entrepreneurial spirit (and other reasons I’m surely leaving out). If we think that entropy has taken its toll on our society over time, we would have less energy available to maintain order and make the changes necessary to keep our society in order. There would be less energy to steer massive systems we have in place from their course headed towards chaos and only make changes on the fringe.
We’ve seen housing bubbles, corporate bailouts, Ponzi schemes and financial crises hit recently that have roots in perverse incentives that once were never considered legitimate moved to acceptance and then resulted in chaos. Our societal entropy allowed for those perverse incentives to be accepted due to the lack of energy needed to maintain working order.
Thoughts?
