François Roddier, thermodynamics and society

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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 13/02/19, 14:08

136 - Can we predict the future?
François Roddier

This is the title of the first section of chapter 15 of my book on the thermodynamics of evolution. So I've already given my answer to this question: we can predict avalanche weather, but not a particular avalanche. Similarly, we can predict a crisis-prone epoch, but not a particular crisis.

Our understanding of the Earth's atmosphere dynamics, including cyclones and anticyclones, allows us to make realistic weather forecasts, at least in the short term. Similarly, our new understanding of economic cycles, through research such as that of Gerhard Mensch (109 note), or that of historical cycles, thanks to the work of Turchin and Nefedov (90 note), should allow us to predict the evolution human societies on the scale of a few decades. All science progresses by making predictions that are then verified or not by experience. In the case of a human society, the verification of predictions will take time, but that should not prevent us from doing them today, leaving it up to the younger generations to verify them.

If the predictions that follow are correct, this vision will be strengthened and can serve as a basis for a better understanding of human societies. This is of course a statistical forecast. I will talk about probability of crisis as we talk about the probability of rain or good weather. In any case, it is useful to make predictions. These concern the Western countries and more particularly France, knowing that its evolution is intimately linked to that of its neighboring countries.

First of all, it's important to understand that a society does not have a period of its own.. It describes Carnot cycles similar to those of a thermal machine. The more energy it dissipates, the faster the machine turns. Those of my readers who have a lap counter on their car know that the more they press the accelerator the faster their engine runs. The same is true of human societies. The more energy they dissipate, the shorter the cycles they describe. Turchin and Nefedov give examples of historical cycles lasting several centuries. For the historian Giovanni Arrighi (3), our societies today describe "long centuries" of just over one hundred years. This shows that we are dissipating more energy than before. This seems clear if we consider the increasing use we have made of coal and oil.

The figure of Thomas Piketty reproduced on my 118 ticket shows that the European economies collapsed in 1910. It followed the first world war. It is therefore natural to start a new cycle in 1918. It can be broken down into 4 phases of 30 each. According to the nomenclature of Turchin and Nefedof, the first phase, called depression would go from 1918 to 1948. It includes the great depression of 1929. Known as the glorious 30, the expansion phase would go from 1948 to 1978. Then comes the stagflation phase, marked by the coming to power of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in England. This phase extends from 1978 to 2008. The banking crisis of 2008 would mark the beginning of the crisis phase.

As for the first three phases, it is expected that the crisis phase lasts 30 years. It would go from 2008 to 2038. By the middle of this phase, we can expect a significant economic collapse. The Italian Ugo Bardi calls it a cliff of Seneca. Centered on the 2023 year, this collapse could take place towards the end of the present French presidential mandate. However, we will have to wait until the year 2038 to see the end of the crises.

Reproduced here again, the figure of the 117 ticket allows us to provide additional details. A phase of crisis starts from an inegalitarian society in phase of stagflation (top of the figure). Governments try to maintain production, but differences of opinion clash. The high thresholds of the connections of the neural network make any agreement difficult so that the governments become more and more authoritarian (right side of the figure). It follows many conflicts (crises).

As we have seen, economic output is expected to collapse towards the end of the current presidential mandate: it is the fall of the top of the Seneca cliff. A collapse of production implies a regression: we will then observe a return to more traditional practices (see bottom right of the figure). In a world dominated by competition, everyone will rediscover the merits of cooperation. The high thresholds of the neural network connections mean that cooperation will remain difficult to establish, but once it is established, it will persist. Gradually the intensity of the network connections will increase (bottom of the figure), but the high thresholds of the connections will always prevent the network from "percolating". The economy will be down.

It is only in the next phase, the so-called depression phase, that the thresholds will begin to fall, allowing the economy to recover. The society will then become more egalitarian, but this will not happen before 2038. I will not be here to see it, but most of my readers, active today, will be able to check it. If my description corresponds to what they observe, then the theoretical vision presented here will come out of it and an important step will be taken in our understanding of the evolution of our societies.

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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by Janic » 14/02/19, 09:13

a 4 engine somehow time! but not systematically.
The more energy it dissipates, the faster the machine turns.
ship engines are two-stroke and run very slowly for enormous energy consumption because we often confuse total power and torque.
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 14/02/19, 11:06

Janic wrote:a 4 engine somehow time! but not systematically.


Yes a four-stroke engine, the phases cons are not necessarily symmetrical and equal among them.
Regarding the period of crisis, for example, it is possible to cheat, and this is what has been done since 2008 by injecting fictitious liquid assets into the economy to make us believe that there is no crisis. ..but beware of the fall, it will only be bigger.
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 21/02/19, 13:48

Depression and stagflation

It is clear that our governments are not aware of economic cycles. In accordance with the principle of maximum energy dissipation, their goal is to maximize economic growth. This is only possible during a very particular phase of economic cycles: the expansion phase. What to do during the other phases?

Apart from the crisis phases to which I will return, there is a simple stagnation of the economy. This occurs in two very different cases that many economists tend to confuse: the phases of depression and the phases of stagflation.

The case of the depression phases is today best understood thanks to the analysis made by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. The explanation is very simple. The phases of depression follow the phases of crisis, as the depression of 1929 followed the first world war. A simple examination of the figure of the 107 note, reproduced here, shows that the economic demand is strong but, at least initially, the supply is weak.

Keynes's explanation is that, traumatized by the crises that preceded, investors are reluctant to invest their money in new developments that they still consider risky. The remedy proposed by Keynes is to encourage investors, particularly through government actions. This so-called Keynesian policy facilitated the transition from the pre-war depression phase to the expansion phase observed after the last world war.

Since 1978, the economy is stagnating again. Some economists have proposed to re-apply a Keynesian policy, but it soon became clear that it was no longer working. A quick glance at the attached figure shows that the situation is indeed very different. We are no longer in a phase of depression, but in a phase of stagflation. Supply is important, but demand is in free fall. There is no point in encouraging supply: the problem comes from demand.

It continues to decline because a growing portion of wealth is capitalized by a smaller and smaller fraction of society. This is the result of what is called financial capitalism. Wealth accumulates like sand on the sand pile of Per Bak or snow in the mountains. We know how it ends: the pile of sand or snow eventually collapse. This is the crisis phase that we are going through now. Mountaineers say the weather is good for avalanches.
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It is curious to see that our governments, like the economists who advise them, are totally unaware of the processes I have just described. One can only predict the consequences, hence the subject of my previous post.


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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by Ahmed » 21/02/19, 18:59

This time, I unreservedly F. Roddier: this is completely in line with the analyzes that can be done by starting from other explanatory grids. It was at the turn of the 80s that the system began to "slip" and it is there that the financialization of the economy allowed it to survive. You noted in your last message the massive injection of liquidity following the 2008 crisis, which is correct, but it was only an increase of what was already being practiced ...
On his predictions for 2038, it must be considered with caution: it assumes that the shape of the economy as we know it is a form of permanence, which is far from being demonstrated. That said, the movement he describes seems quite plausible, but probably in a context quite different from the usual pattern ...
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 21/02/19, 20:56

Ahmed wrote:You noted in your last message the massive injection of liquidity following the crisis of 2008, which is right, but it was only an increase of what was practiced already ...



I find the parallel with the brain interesting: the current period corresponds to the phase of sleep initiation, but the system injects excitants (artifices * of any kind) to continue to keep the model afloat in order to delay the inevitable depression .
We are therefore facing a form of doping with disastrous consequences, because at this game of junky it will necessarily pay the bill: a nightmarish period (war, terrorism etc ...).



* Financial artefact (CDS, QE etc ...) and political also with the elections of the unspeakable successors of Jacques Chirac.
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by Ahmed » 21/02/19, 22:33

Indeed, it is impossible to cheat permanently with physiology. Thus, it is possible to remove artificially the need for sleep, as long as it does not eliminate the consequences of this lack ... and the more the deficit is important, the more the note is salty.
Few people are aware of the completely artificial character of our "prosperity" and therefore of its eminently precarious character: it is so much more reassuring to attribute it to our particular merits ... However, everything only holds (for a moment) only by bits of string ...
On the one hand, the destitute alone can produce surplus value because of their miserable condition, but which will soon not be enough to fight against more competitive forms of production due to automation, on the other, the poor. provisional "winners" who still are only because they press the button of the synthetic financial drug * which is at the starting point of the cycle of abstract value (it is a form of rentier economy, as at the beginning of capitalism).

* I have perhaps already pointed out, but the process of saturation of the space being completed, there remained only the time to colonize by anticipation of impossible future gains, only intended to compensate for the present deficit.
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by sen-no-sen » 11/03/19, 12:17

138 - The dissipation of energy and the pile of sand of Per Bak

I would like to come back to a notion of essential physics but often very poorly understood by the public, that of dissipation of energy. In everyday language, we often hear about "consumption" of energy. For a physicist, energy is an invariant: it can not be created or lost. So we can not "consume" it. In the place of the verb consume, physicists prefer the verb "dispel": the energy dissipates as the smoke dissipates into the air. She's still here, but she's getting a lot harder to recover.

To better describe the dissipation of energy, physicists have been led to introduce a new concept, that of entropy. To dissipate energy is to produce entropy. We have long compared the notion of entropy with that of disorder. As well as one recovers better his tools in a workshop in order, the same one recovers better the energy in a medium of low entropy.

Much progress was made in the nineteenth century, when physicists showed the equivalence between entropy production and information loss. We can indeed recover his tools in a messy workshop if we know where they are. In the same way, dissipating energy is losing information about the position and speed of molecules. When this information is lost, the energy is in the form of heat. In general, physicists have shown that erasing information produces heat.

However, a conceptual difficulty remains: what is information? We tend to think that information is what we know, that is, what is memorized in our brain, that is to say, a subjective quantity. Everyone knows today that information can also be stored in a computer, or rather in the part of a computer that is rightly called "memory". The information then becomes an objective quantity, measurable in "bits". Thus, dissipating energy, producing entropy, or erasing information are synonymous expressions.

Let's go back now to the notion of dissipative structure. A dissipative structure self-organizes spontaneously to dissipate energy. This is the case for example of a living being but also of a human society. Physicists say that they decrease their internal entropy to produce entropy. We can also say that they memorize information so that they can then be erased.

An interesting application of these notions is its application to the currency. The one we own is usually stored in a bank account. It then bears the name of capital. To have a capital allows to spend money also called money. To spend money is to erase information on a bank account. This erased information corresponds to what we consume, that is, to the energy that dissipates us. Thus money flows measure the flow of energy dissipated in a society.

We have seen that the Danish physicist Per Bak compares the memorized information to a pile of sand. When the slope of the latter reaches a critical size, we observe the formation of avalanches. These represent information that fades, that is, energy flows that dissipate. Thomas Piketty (1) has shown that, for a century, our societies have been accumulating capital, just as we accumulate sand on a pile of sand. We understand that we arrive today at a time favorable to avalanches, which confirms the conclusion of the previous note.

(1) Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Threshold).


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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by to be chafoin » 11/03/19, 23:20

By the middle of this phase, we can expect a significant economic collapse. The Italian Ugo Bardi calls it a cliff of Seneca. Centered on the 2023 year, this collapse could take place towards the end of the present French presidential mandate. We will have to wait until the year 2038 to see ...
It looks a bit like numerology. Even if we can feel a balance game in history, I do not believe in this kind of theory at all.

Marx, I believe, had analyzed capitalist society as a society advancing by successive crises. Considering the parenthesis of the thirty glorious, I think we could find this rhythm of the liberal period of the end of the XNIXXème century: crises regular all 19, 7 years or more. We can therefore consider that we meet vaguely on this point: we are in a period of strong instability. From there to give these magic numbers!

A question on the term "collapse": what is it for F. Roddier and / or for you? Is a major crisis like the crisis of 29 or a world war a collapse?
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Re: François Roddier, thermodynamics and society




by Ahmed » 12/03/19, 13:38

To be chafoin, you write:
Marx, I believe, had analyzed capitalist society as a society advancing by successive crises.

He even spoke of a permanent crisis! But he also spoke of an internal limit to capitalism, that is, although crises can be overcome victoriously (from the point of view of capital, hence of its possibility of growth), the system is close to what constitutes its ultimate terminal that is logical in nature and can not be exceeded. Indeed, there comes a time when so much human work has been expelled from the manufacturing process that it is no longer possible to value a capital that has become too important to find outlets in proportion to its volume.
Further:
A question on the term "collapse": what is it for F. Roddier and / or for you?

For me, the collapse is not a depletion of resources (even if their rarefaction can play a triggering role), but a blockage of the valuation of the abstract value from which arises an impossibility of the pursuit of real activities.
And:
Is a major crisis like the 29 crisis or a world war a collapse?

In no way! The crisis of 29 corresponds to a crisis resulting from an imbalance between the flow and the stock; in short, despite strong needs (potential flows), it was difficult to raise the financial funds (stock) to establish new industries at the level of productivity required to meet the needs mentioned profitably; state interventionism and financial facilities (Keynesianism) made it possible to overcome this crisis.
The Second World War made it possible to use the enormous productive forces set in motion and which were struggling to find sufficient outlets in the USA; in Europe, the beginning of the conflict results from the choice of the massive rearmament of Germany in order to create value via the absorption of unemployment: after a while, it is necessary to use the armament, otherwise "the tip "no longer works (the" hot "source of production must necessarily have a counterpart to a" cold "source of consumption, otherwise the flow stops and the" machine "stalls).

As a bonus, I answer a question you do not ask ( 8) ): What is 1980 crisis?
The saturation of consumer markets combined with the rise in unemployment (both resulting from increasing productivity) led to a situation of blockage of valuation and a new answer was then found: the rise of the financial industry which would supplement the real industry. This avoided the systemic collapse or war that are the only other two loopholes. However, this solution is not of a lasting nature and only raises the internal contradictions of the system (and the more the contradictions are tall, the more the collapse is inevitable).
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