Category Archives: Soapbox

Collaboration and competition

Competition has become a characteristic of many activities in life, whether it is teams vying to win a trophy, universities attempting to be top of a league table, retailers trying to persuade you to buy from them, or politicians seeking power. Natural selection is often cited to demonstrate that competition is ubiquitous in nature and therefore something to be embraced and celebrated as a route to success. However, Suzanne Simard has highlighted that competition is only part of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. It was popularised following the publication of his book ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859; however, Darwin also wrote about the ways in which plants co-operate and collaborate and Simard believes that collaboration is ‘as important, if not more important’ than competition in the development of ecosystems. Trees may have a better chance of adapting to climate change because they are adapting faster than us. A number of mass movements of plants are in progress – the fastest appears to be the northwards migration of white spruce trees in the eastern US which have moved 100 km every decade for the last thirty years. Perhaps it is time to apply some more comprehensive biomimetics to the organisation of society at all levels and consider how greater levels of collaboration rather than competition would help us tackle the challenges facing civilisation.

Sources:

Henry Mance, Lunch with the FT: Suzanne Simard ‘I say to the trees, “I hope I’m helping”‘, FT Weekend, 26 March / 27 March 2022.

James Bridle, The speed of a dandelion, FT Weekend, 2 April / 3 April 2022.

Delaying cataclysmic events might hasten their advent

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In thermodynamics, students are taught to draw a boundary around the system they want to analyse and to decide whether the boundary is open or closed to transfers of mass and energy based on the scenario they want to model. The next step is to balance the energy flows across the boundary with the change in the energy content of the system. This is an application of the first law of thermodynamics which is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Rudolf Clausius is credited with discovering entropy when he realised that when energy flowed as heat across a system boundary it became entropy or disordered energy. For instance, when a steam engine does work and discharges heat to the environment. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy of the universe increases in all real processes. Thermodynamicists are not the only people who draw boundaries and decide whether they are open or closed. Politicians and generals draw national boundaries occasionally and more frequently decide whether they are open or closed to people, goods and capital. After the first world war economists, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, proposed that conflict would be less likely if people, goods and capital could flow freely across national boundaries. These ideas became the principles on which the IMF and World Bank were formed at Bretton Woods in July 1944 in the closing stages of the second world war. Presidents of the USA, since Ronald Reagan, have taken these ideas a step further by unleashing capitalism through deregulation of markets in the belief that markets know best. However, ever-growing capital generates an ever-increasing rate of creation of entropy and disorder in the world [see ‘Existential connection between capitalism and entropy‘ on May 4th 2022] and perhaps attempting to reduce conflict by unfettering capital actually accelerates the descent into chaos and disorder because entropy increases in every transaction.

Sources:

Rana Foroohar, When the market fails us, FT Weekend, 23 April/24 April 2022.

Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in Free Market Era, Oxford: OUP, 2022.

The cataclysmic events referred to in the title are those identified by Thomas Piketty as being the only means by which economic inequality is reduced, i.e., wars and revolutions [see ‘Existential connection between capitalism and entropy‘ on May 4th 2022]. The title was inspired by correspondence from Bob Handscombe with whom I wrote a book entitled ‘The Entropy Vector: Connecting Science and Business‘.

You can only go there in your head

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“Inner space and outer space are similar, aren’t they really? You’re never going to get to the edge of the universe in a spaceship. You might as well try going on a bus. You can only go there in your head.” This is a quote from David Hockney in ‘Spring Cannot Be Cancelled‘ by David Hockney and Martin Gayford. It’s a beautiful book. Full of thought-provoking insights and recent artwork by Hockney painted in Normandy mainly during the pandemic. I read it last month while in the Yorkshire Dales [see ‘Walking the hills‘ on April 13th 2022]. Hockney writes about his need to paint. He finds it utterly absorbing and endlessly sustaining. Gayford compares this need and experience to the work of American psychologist, Mihaly Csiksczentmihalyi [see ‘Slow-motion multi-tasking leads to productive research‘ on September 19, 2018] who wrote about concentration so intense that there is no spare capacity to think about anything else, your self-consciousness disappears and you lose your sense of time leading to a deep sense of happiness and well-being. I cannot paint but I can achieve something approaching a similiar state when I am writing.

Source:

Martin Gayford and David Hockney, Spring cannot be cancelled – David Hockney in Normandy, London: Thames & Hudson, 2021.

Existential connection between capitalism and entropy

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According to Raj Patel and Jason W Moore, in his treatise ‘Das Kapital’ Karl Marx defined capitalism as combining labour power, machines and raw materials to produce commodities that are sold for profit which is re-invested in yet more labour power, machines and raw materials. In other words, capitalism involves processes that produce profit from an economic perspective, and from a thermodynamic perspective produce entropy because the second law of thermodynamics demands that all real processes produce entropy. Thermodynamically, entropy usually takes the form of heat dissipated into the environment which raises the temperature of the environment; however, it can also be interpreted as an increase in the disorder of a system [see ‘Will it all be over soon?’ on November 2^nd, 2016]. The ever-expanding cycle of profit being turned into capital implies that the processes of producing commodities must also become ever larger. The ever-expanding processes of production implies that the rate of generation of entropy also increases with time. If no profit were reinvested in economic processes then the processes would still increase the entropy in the universe but when profit is re-invested and expands the economic processes then the rate of entropy production increases and the entropy in the universe increases exponentially – that’s why the graphs of atmospheric temperature curve upwards at an increasing rate since the industrial revolution. As if that is not bad enough, the French social economist, Thomas Piketty has proposed that the rate of return on capital, “r” is always greater than the rate of growth of the economy, “g” in his famous formula “r>g”. Hence, even with zero economic growth, the rate of return will be above zero and the level of entropy will rise exponentially. Piketty identified inequality as a principal effect of his formula and suggested that only cataclysmic events, such as world wars or revolutions, can reduce inequality. The pessimistic thermodynamicist in me would conclude that an existential cataclysmic event might be the only way that this story ends.

Sources

Raj Patel & Jason W. Moore, A history of the world in seven cheap things, London: Verso, 2018.

Thomas Piketty, A brief history of equality, translated by Steven Rendall, Harvard: Belknap, 2022.

Diane Coyle, Piketty the positive, FT Weekend, 16 April/17 April 2022.

Image: Global average near surface temperature since the pre-industrial period from www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/global-average-near-surface-temperature

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