Our crises are caused by economic entropy
A physicist draws an analogy
I read an article last week about a debate over climate change, and something just clicked. Regardless of your position on climate change, it seems both sides of the debate believe that nuclear energy is the best way to decarbonize and to provide clean, safe, inexpensive energy. So, what's getting in the way of implementing that? Bureaucracy. There is too much regulatory and litigation red tape in the way of building more nuclear power infrastructure the U.S.
That made me think back to an article about the skyrocketing cost of attending university, which has led to the student loan debt crisis. What caused tuition to rise so sharply? Bureaucracy. An article in The New York Times a decade ago noted the role administrative bloat plays in rising tuition costs, and claimed that this increase in educational bureaucracy has had no measurable effect on student outcomes.
The recent murder of the United HealthCare CEO sharpened the debate on what's causing high healthcare costs in the U.S. The main culprit is not "greedy" CEOs and companies. Their profit margins are relatively small at 6%, which is half that of other major corporations. So, what's causing the high cost of healthcare? One major factor is bureaucracy. Administrative costs account for one-third of the difference between the cost of healthcare in the U.S. and in other wealthy countries.
In physics, the word entropy describes (among other things) the amount of useless energy in a system. A system with a lot of entropy is inefficient. That means a lot of energy has been squandered into forms of energy that you don’t want, like heat and noise. Many of the problems that plague the U.S. at every level are the result of something similar, which we can call economic entropy. Administrative bloat absorbs a substantial amount of capital and simply squanders it in the form of economic heat and noise. Anything with a large bureaucracy is going to be a highly inefficient system, and that's the problem that must be fixed.
America is overflowing with capital in terms of money, labor, land, natural resources, and intellectual power. We need to find a way to maximize our efficient use of these things by minimizing the economic entropy.
I agree with you, Sarah.
Being Canadian, I learned that one out of five of us work for the government. Thus, if we were to minimize our bureaucracy akin to that of Javier Milei, the unemployment rate would skyrocket. It's concerning as people have families and themselves to support, but Canada's suffocating from governmental overreach. Many very difficult decisions have to be made, and virtually nobody wants to because no one wants to fall from grace.
It's disheartening.
No doubt, BIGGER is not better--except for BIGGER. Which is why I like the spirit of our country's founding principles that emphasize empowering the individual, not government.
Speaking of which: Imagine the impact of finally discovering a free and limitless power source, what that would do FOR the individual (and against BIGGER), including the devices such a discovery would inspire and produce. Who needs Amazon/Whole Foods, Nuclear Power Plants, or Washington DC?