Monday, November 30, 2015

Entropy or Progress?

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I recently had to spend a lot of time with an elderly uncle and aunt (and they would probably resent being characterized as ‘elderly’ if they saw this post).  And, while they have more marbles than most citizens have, despite their combined ages of 181 (and you can go right ahead and be insulted, if you want to), they are increasingly resentful about almost every aspect of life.  They were very unhappy about “Gay Marriage,” they’re unhappy with Donald Trump —that actually goes for most of my friends and relatives— and scornful of Bernie Sanders, and critical about the curricula of most schools (they were both teachers in their day), and on and on.

Listening to their rants, night in and night out, I realized that what they’re upset about is that things are being done differently than they were in the seventies.  More drugs in the streets, more teens getting pregnant, more misbehavior in Washington (DC, that is), the News readers on TV aren’t as well informed, stores don’t carry the food items they used to, and so on.

Of course, they’re older, so you expect grumbling about things.  But they grumble about good things, too.  They have a cell phone, but they grumble about features on it that they do not use.  In other words, they grumble about service packages, which are different from the very small selection of service packages that were available in, say, 1980.

The funny thing is that they’re ultra liberal, and their only beef about Bernie Sanders is that he goes off the deep end.  (They think he should be President, and Hillary C. should be Vice President, never mind the political implications of that setup.)  Having a female president is probably one of the newfangled, unproven ideas that they have absolutely no faith in.

But, you see, that is the essence of Conservatism.  Change is bad.  The most intelligent (OK, I’m being judgmental here) conservatives would say that too rapid change is bad, but change is inevitable.

I stumbled on the following insight when trying to endure the endless grumbling of this pair of relatives.  They equate the constant onslaught of newfangled-ness with disorder.

If we only did things the way we’ve got it completely figured out, we wouldn’t have all these snafus.  If we only didn’t have Obamacare, the Health Insurance companies would know exactly how to painlessly rip off their consumers.  (Right now, the ripoffs are painful, and Health Insurance companies are playing a dangerous game.  The lack of transparency of the old insurance system guaranteed a certain amount of immunity from public scrutiny, which is no longer present.  Utility boards are increasingly aware of the profit margins of insurance companies, and one of these fine days, they will see legislation controlling it.)

It was the disorderliness of public life that was at the heart of which initiatives conservatives would support, and which they would not.  The new wave of T-Party conservatives uses the liberals themselves as their compass: if the Democrats want it, it must be bad, which is a lazy way of analyzing political initiatives.  Instead of looking at the problems of society with a view to ameliorating them, conservatives assess legislation based on the merits of whether it will help business (Big Business, because small business cannot afford lobbyists) and whether it will help vilify Democrats.  They have moved away from the principle of does it increase disorder?

Everyone is familiar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

In any isolated system, the total Entropy increases.

Entropy is a mysterious quantity to most people.  I only know to explain it by example.  For instance, if you have a container with every gas molecule in it bouncing about with the exact same speed, its entropy would be zero.  If one molecule goes at a different speed, the entropy increases a little bit.  If all the molecules are zipping around at different speeds, the entropy is huge.

Someone (James Clerk Maxwell) proposed an experiment as follows.

Get a sample of gas into a container divided into two parts, with a door in the middle.  There is a little demon at the door, and he (or she) lets fast molecules pass from one side into the other side (the "fast" side), and lets slow molecules in the fast side into the slow side.  Gradually, over time, the slow side will accumulate the slower molecules, and the fast side will accumulate the faster molecules.

The resulting total entropy will be lower than it was before the demon got to work, because the spread of the speeds in the two halves is less than they used to be.  The gas molecules were disorderly before, and a little more orderly now.  So, in principle, entropy can be lowered, but it involves knowing the speeds of individual molecules, so that the disorderliness can be systematically reduced.  Incidentally, this experiment demonstrates that information is the opposite of entropy, so entropy is a measure of lack of information.

According to Wikipedia, entropy is also a measure of how much heat (or other energy) is present which cannot be made to do work.  As you can imagine, low-temperature heat can't do very much work, even if there's oodles of it lying around, such as in our office-rooms, for instance.  In trying to make the air in my office do some work, I have to do even more work to extract the heat in the first place.

Unfortunately, as the population grows, and other processes take place that cannot be helped, the size of the same old problems we’ve always faced become larger, exacerbated by the extremely wealthy manipulating the laws to keep more of their wealth.  So the government has to feed, clothe and shelter a larger population under the poverty line (some of whom have incredibly large TV sets, to the indignation of conservatives), with lower tax revenues.  Why can’t we feed and clothe them as we did before?

This constant howl about why can’t we do it as we did before?  which the conservatives bring up is disingenuous, because a lot of what conservatives did before was accomplished by fooling with deficits, so that expenses were simply put off until the Democrats were once more in office, and needed to clean up the mess the Republicans had left behind.  The present mess is that Republicans did not put through any major maintenance of public highways and airports and harbors and research facilities, which must now be undertaken with lower tax revenues.  They were hoping that it would take exactly four years for Democrats to confess that they were not up to the job of mucking out the Aegean Stables.

Republicans are not going to be much better at mucking out anything, except their perceived handicaps of Democrats in the Washington bureaucracy.  They can save a few pennies by firing hundreds of career bureaucrats in Washington, but their own young bloods will demand an enormous salary for doing the same jobs, and will do them badly.

What Republicans are best at is creating imaginary crises which they can proceed to solve, such as the fictitious Social Security Crisis, which will probably get solved, if some idiot of the GOP is elected president, by borrowing money from the Veterans Administration, or from some useful part of the budget, and giving it to some conservative think-tank.

Liberals and Democrats do not change things just for the heck of it.  It is necessary to solve ever increasing problems creatively, with ever-decreasing tax revenues.  And, while nobody is watching, even with an inflation rate that is miniscule, businesses everywhere are raising prices, just because they can.  So things change, all in favor of Business, which are the darlings of the GOP!  I will blog very soon about Business.  And it will not be favorable.

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