Social Entropy - Entropy of Society?
Entropy tells us that highly ordered systems are improbable and that increasing order has decreasing probability. Emergent systems are patterns of organization that emerge from complexity or multiplicity. Complexity is somewhat relative and subjective since it depends entirely on your frame of reference. If society could be described as emergent, it might also be defined as being more complex than the sum of it's parts. Additionally, society could be defined as having increasing order. There are many aspects of today's society that require increasing levels of complexity or order, some examples of which are; the Internet, Communications, Building Structures, Financial Systems and Government.
So as society increases in complexity and order, the probability it will spontaneously begin to disorder itself begins to become increasingly likely. This does not mean it will spontaneously decompose to a state of total disorder, just that it will begin to disorder itself inevitably.
All civilizations (and to some degree today's modern corporations) go from states of disorder to relatively high states of order and complexity back to disorder again. A pattern that seems to be 'emerging' is that the subsequent civilizations and corporate structures achieve higher states of order and complexity than their predecessors.
It is of academic and practical value to see if entropy and thermodynamic equations can be applied to determine the probability at any given point in time that civilization or a corporate structure will spontaneously enter into a state of inevitable decline. This is being partially explored in thermoeconomics. A person will (or perhaps do) profit immensely from this knowledge, since the financial system is built entirely around predicting growth and declines. While it seems impossible to perform a reductionist approach to something as complex as the financial system, it bears noting that heat, temperature and entropy formulas are fairly well transposed to other systems (such as finance or economics) where the irreducible properties of the system can be defined (i.e. the monads). If this is true, is there a possible (i.e. probable) state of equilibrium for society in general (seems improbable).
Starbucks for example seems to have entered into a state of inevitable decline. Did they reach the probabilistic trigger point for spontaneous, inevitable disorder?


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