Essay Abstract

History has shown that humanity works best when freedom is maximized. A topic like "How Should Humanity Steer the Future" requires extreme idealization, and something resembling a statistical mechanics approach, leading to a thermo足dynamic model. Thermodynamics does work only when a system has free energy. We link these different concepts of freedom in this essay. Statistical mechanics treats large numbers of elements, N, and total energy, E. The energy of labor, if not completely controlled by force, is controlled by money, so we will measure energy in dollars. This applies generally to the electrical energy one buys from a power company or to physical work one does on a day-to-day basis. "Steer" is a control concept implying a goal, therefore we formulate two idealized goals and analyze their implications. To be relevant to reality, we address two real goals, argued every day in the world, but simplified to allow analysis.

Author Bio

Edwin Eugene Klingman was a NASA Research Physicist (atomic & molecular). His 1979 PhD dissertation (now published as "The Automatic Theory of Physics"), describes how numbers and math derive from physical reality and how a robot would derive a theory of physics based on pattern recognition and entropy. Founder of three Silicon Valley companies, he holds 33 technology patents and has published two university texts, "Microprocessor Systems Design" Vol I and II. He recently non-linearized the weak field equations of relativity and is attempting to apply this technique to explain anomalies.

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Okay, you should look at the work of Victor Yakovenko. The distribution of income in market economies is certainly not Gaussian; it appears to be a superposition of two distributions, revealing a two-class structure. This is very well supported by the data.

The labor class is characterized by the maximum-entropy distribution, i.e. exponential (for individuals). This would be the result of random exchange, and suggests that when people are living hand-to-mouth, i.e. not accumulating money, all of their money gets traded and, in each bargain, sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, at random.

The capital class is characterized by a power law distribution, which is typical of preferential attachment or rich-get-richer processes. Money attracts money.

The important issue is how much of the total societal income is going into each class. There has been a huge shift in the fraction going to capital (see Piketty) since ~1970. That is the cause of much malaise and stagnation.

    Mark,

    I think that's to misunderstand Gauss. If we ask, 'What is the distribution per capita' we'll get a perfect Gaussian bell curve. It just gets shorter and fatter with reduced disparity. That is the 'important thing' you mention; its a bit too tall and thin.

    Your point should perhaps be that there are then a thousand different questions showing different distributions and giving different information. i.e the power law you mention, of many qualities ('gammalike' as Edwin's PRL ref?).

    Peter

    Edwin,

    Nicely original viewpoint, exceptionally well presented and easy to read as usual.I loved; "Humanity is seen as an N-body system, with 10 N ~10^10. each assumed to have position, momentum, energy, and degrees of freedom." I've thought a lot about degrees of freedom recently, we may have more than we realise (a gyro spinning on an axis still has all 3 axes of rotational freedom, while also orbiting something!!)

    The concept I struggled a bit with was; "Money and energy are interchangeable." Very novel, for me anyway, but I do like novels! I think you argue very well supporting the cases where they are. Certainly giving money to somebody normally represents an exchange of momentum, and what goes around comes around!

    Isn't the Bell curve a cosine curve? I've found it's a ubiquitous part of causal nature.

    Excellent stuff. Well done. I'm sure it'll do well. I hope you'll like mine this year too. I think it's seminal.

    Best wishes

    Peter

      Dear Mark Avrum Gubrud,

      Thank you for reading and commenting on my essay. I agree with you that the resultant "real world" distributions are not simply Gaussian. That is why I state above in the abstract that "extreme idealization" is required for a nine page essay, and I also state that it is "simplified to allow analysis". Further, in the essay on page 4, I note that constraints applied by taxation and transfer payments complicate the analysis but do not inherently change the goal of the distribution policy. You are certainly correct that the real world distribution is not so simple. As noted in my essay this is partly because in the real world capitalism has become "crony capitalism" where corporations and unions and governments collude and are corrupt. That leads, as you say, to malaise and stagnation. And we have not even mentioned the Federal Reserve and banking, which, I note, a number of essays here do mention.

      But for purposes of this essay, that is not a "two-class structure". That is one class of citizens with a more complex distribution in which some citizens have more money or energy than others. None of these citizens has absolute control over any other citizen. My analysis of "equality" as a policy shows that it leads to true two-class structure, in which one class has total control (totalitarian) of the "mere" citizen, while exempting themselves (the master class, or government) from the laws. That is a real class distinction, not just an unequal distribution of wealth.

      Best regards,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Peter, one of us is very confused.

      As you know, the classical Maxwell-Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energies in thermal equilibrium is n(E)=aExp(-E/T), which is the exponential distribution, not Gaussian. Quantum mechanics modifies this with the Ferm-Dirac and Bose-Einstein distributions, but this seems unlikely to be relevant to economics, Yakovenko's early suggestion that the capital-income fraction be regarded as a "condensate" notwithstanding.

      It is the exponential distribution which is observed for the labor class; for the capital class we observe a power law (also known as Pareto's law), n(E)=be-cE.

      See the first group of papers listed at http://physics.umd.edu/~yakovenk/econophysics/

      Dear Peter,

      Thanks for reading. I see you have, as usual, been making waves, and I look forward to reading your essay. As you been focused lately on Bell, I am particularly interested. And your example of "degrees of freedom" is right on.

      I decided long ago that money is "abstract energy" and, as you see, this fits easily into a statistical thermodynamics formulation. Of course real-world complexities, including corruption, will drastically skew the shapes of the distribution curves, but my major point is that "equality" as a serious policy, is doomed to fail, and is misleading, even fraudulent.

      I hope that this will be studied and understood, and that I'm not simply accused of supporting "things as they are". They are pretty awful right now, but moving toward a totalitarian two-class state will not make them better!

      I do very much look forward to study of your essay and further exchanges with you.

      Have fun,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Mark,

      Having now read your excellent essay, which slices and dices issues based on cultures and beliefs and speaks to both the complexity of the issues and the problem that the answers are unknown, or at least not universally agreed upon. I very much agree that

      "Neither professorships, nor peer-reviewed papers, nor practical experience, nor official status, nor any other credentials are consistently reliable guides to who is right and who is wrong."

      and also that

      "Closure is almost certainly an illusion, or a sign that one has become a partisan, now to be discounted by the other side."

      For example, you state that global warming if not quickly addressed, will cause such havoc that "it is questionable whether humanity will be able to adapt", thus, apparently committing yourself fully to one of the beliefs that may or may not be right.

      Babel, as you say, is here. You show it goes way deeper than language. And since there is no universally agreed-upon answer, many believe that we make the best of it with local autonomy, many experiments conducted in parallel, with Internet and other communications counted on to spread news of both local successes and of local failures.

      You mention "globalized intellectual elites", as if this culture is somehow different from others, but the reality is that more or less closed communications, where political correctness forbids even discussion of taboo topics, and special interest based on the fact that most of such elites are based on tax dollars of "meer" citizens, suggests that these elites deserve no greater consideration than other special interests.

      I live on a ranch one half hour from Stanford, and I associate with both "globalized intellectual elites" and with farmers and ranchers and local folk, and find plenty of "low information voters" in both groups.

      It's a complex situation. You discuss structural fora and crowdsourcing (Wikipedia, etc.) but note that "it is not making decisions for humanity." Yet you also note that scientists and academics often opine outside their expertise, disagree and often disrespect each other's views.

      Your discussion of AI as a possible solution is qualified by 1.) It probably won't live up to technology cultist's expectations, and 2.) It might become a target of distrust, fear and hatred. As I agree with Lorraine Ford, and don't believe such systems will become "sentient", I don't overly worry about the consequences of "if they did so". Eliza has not come very far in fifty years. I certainly agree with you that autonomous weapon systems are bad.

      Your question about "who will control the technology" is a good one. Do I want Google or an IRS-wielding government to control it? The devil or the deep blue sea?

      You end up, as far as I can see, agreeing with me and with Sabine Hossenfelder that, hopefully

      "Ordinary citizens can use personal AI systems to find answers to the questions they ask..." [with emphasis on they.]

      So, in the end, I think we see much the same problems and hope for much the same answer.

      Thanks for outlining the problems and suggesting a hopeful solution.

      Best regards,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Hi Edwin,

      It is nice to see someone else taking a statistical mechanics approach. Your Eq.(1) is Jaynes dice problem in my essay Democracy of the dice people.

      I agree with Mark's criticism about the distribution being exponential, not Gaussian, but to me that is a minor point because our primitive models are the same. What I find really interesting is that we come to a similar conclusion about the ultimate distribution from different viewpoints.

      Your approach follows the free energy, while I follow the entropy as a Maxwell demon.

      Best regards,

      Colin

        Dear Colin,

        Thanks for reading and commenting. Having now read your fine essay, I note the following: You start off prioritizing the problems, showing, if nothing else, that some people worry about anything--even the "death of the universe". You then focus on current issues such as the mal-distribution of wealth.

        Your entropy analysis of hot versus cold economy, and the entropic effect of capital concentration is very nicely done. You then use Maxwell's demon to analyze the problem. As you noted, I use "free energy" to analyze the same problem. I think we arrive at similar conclusions. I very much like the attention you pay to "tyranny of the majority". While you note the "influence" of wealth on political systems, I tend to view the entangled nature of government and crony capitalism as one thing.

        You then get into the meat of your analysis based on Jaynes. [Note-my 2013 essay had a page of endnotes devoted to Jaynes.] Your example on page 3 is simply masterful, although it requires considerable study to make sense of it. A helluva lot of information in a 4 x 5 table! [Also like your 'players'-Bob, Carol, Ted, Alice--and Kenny (who hasn't been seen since the last election).]

        Your summary on page 4 is excellent, despite that the numbers in your example are far from transparent (the consequence of having only nine pages to solve the future of humanity.)

        Please note that the distribution says nothing about the freedom of the citizens, only how big a slice of the pie they get. Your treatment of "democratic tyranny" as fascism, and your observation of its inherent instability is very interesting. Your conclusion is also graphically stated--five lifetimes, and your comparison of how short this is by contrasting it with 1664.

        Your epilogue (poor Kenny!) nicely captures Ted's machinations to slowly change the weighting over time. I'm sure you were not referring to, for example, GE, which owned the MSNBC/Obama network and paid no taxes.

        It's very hard to extract the information from tables, so perhaps a Mathematica-type topology could make things more graphic.

        I did not understand whether the ideas underlying this essay are your own, or adapted from your reference [1]. In any case it is a masterful essay, and deserves expansion beyond nine pages. I hope you do very well in the essay contest.

        Best regards,

        Edwin Eugene Klingman

        Dear Edwin,

        Thanks for your kind comments. Jaynes' influence is there with the entropy, but the idea of a Maxwell demon likely comes from recently studying some discarded ideas of Walther Nernst relating to the third law of thermodynamics and cosmology.

        It is reassuring that both our approaches converge on the same outcome.

        Best regards,

        Colin

        Edwin,

        The premise I would take issue with is that money=energy. This system certainly treats it as such, but the fact is that it is an obligation, a contract, a debt. Yet because it functions within this system as value, we naturally edit out the process by which it gains that value and so think of it as intrinsic, not representative. The result being that we now have a system primarily designed to create notational wealth, often at the expense of real value, as we atomize our culture and burn though all physical resources.

        It is the nature of knowledge to make connections, but sometimes we need to keep the differences in mind as well.

        Regards,

        John M

          John,

          Thanks for commenting. I think you are mistaken that money can be only interpreted one way. Sort of like saying that I can only interpret you as an FQXi participant. You also train horses, and perform other functions. Any one of your many possible interpretations can be valid in the proper context. I have read a number of your comments here, and I've read (about 5 years ago) "The Creature from Jeckle Island" and felt like I understood the operation of the Fed (to some degree), but the fact is that I can expend energy or I can spend money to achieve the same result, and in that sense, money is just abstract energy, whatever else it might be. And that allows me to treat it as I did using statistical thermodynamics. It is a valid approach, but that does not exclude other interpretations.

          I'm looking forward to reading your essay and will probably have more to say when I do.

          Best regards,

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

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          • Post #14

          Hi, Edwin,

          I have read your essay, and, as last year, am not up to the math you use, but think I get the drift philosophically. It seems to me that the issues of humanity steering the future are philosophical, but it is good to see analogies being made from different directions as you do for those who get the math. Your summary in plain ol' English, with which I am in almost total agreement, tells me that in general I got the point of your math examples. I especially appreciate your insistence that individual freedom cannot be divorced from individual decision-making. Tyranny can be measured by the level of theft of decision-making by the government from we, the people.

          My "almost" above refers to your comments on page 9 to an "educational fund" to replace welfare. Would not that be replacing one welfare with another? As a friend of mine used to say, public education is welfare education. When we had free-market education, which began to be taken over by government thanks to Horace Mann (got his inspiration from Prussia in the early 1800's, probably the most militarisic nation in the world at the time), we had the most well-educated population in the world. Now, thanks to govt control, look at us. Parents love their children, govt bureaucracies do not.

          So I think that if we would readjust to a free-market education system, the problem of welfare would begin to disappear. Families, churches, and other ngo's would take on both the education and the welfare problem. I do not see that happening without a major spiritual renewal in the American churches, leading to a restoration of the Biblical form of limited government with which we were blessed 1776-89 - the Declaration and Constitution - of, by, and for the people in which the people were sovereign over the government.

          So the steering of the future is, I think, even more than philosophical, a spiritual problem, as outlined in my essay. Who is God? It will be either the real God or it will be a monster civil government, not under the law and grace of God.

          Best wishes, Earle

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            • Post #15

            John, what a master piece! Unfortunately only few souls on Earth can understand you fully. I am one of the few who fully understand the full extend of your idea, because I also embeds thermodynamics as the heart of my KQID( KoGuan Quantum InfoDynamics). Of course at KQID, it is not only about heat/energy flows but also information flows as Shakespearian meme-actorIΨ(CTE)) as the wave function of consciousness, time and energy acting in relativistic Ψ(iτLx,y,z, Lm) hologram Multiverse. Rather than Gaussian bell curve, I would propose the hokey stick curve as the hybrid of your two classes scenario. Most people are equally rich and free unchained from human as well as nature's handcuffs with few extremely rewarded and rich individuals who do works that are breaking and removing those chains that chain us. You correctly made the point that an absolute equality is simply impossible. No energy no flow, and no flow no work. No gradient no flows. Your opening statement is powerful and to the point. You wrote: " How Should Humanity Steer the Future? By allowing maximum individual freedom to pursue dreams and expand horizons. History has shown that humanity works best when freedom is maximized; in fact, the purpose of instituting governments is to maximize individual freedom." Yes, we need a system to maximize freedoms. In mine, I advocated Xuan Yuan Aanti-entropic Operating System 2.0. Yes remarkably we share the same view. I incorporated Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu (around 400B.C)who advocated for-self philosophy and advocated the individual six freedoms and life enjoyment fully here and now:

            Allow the ear to hear what it likes, ~~Do~~

            the eye to see what it likes, ~~Re~~

            the nose to smell what it likes, ~~Mi~~

            the mouth to say what it likes, ~~Fa~~

            the body to enjoy the comforts it likes to have, ~~Sol~~

            and the mind to do what it likes. ~~La~~

            Yes similar to but even more individualistic than that of Epicurus as well as Jefferson. Yes, Chinese believes in and enjoys individual freedoms just like everyone else.

            I rated your essay the highest score that you deserve.

            Best wishes,

            Leo KoGuan

            John, what a master piece! Unfortunately only few souls on Earth can understand you fully. I am one of the few who fully understand the full extend of your idea, because I also embeds thermodynamics as the heart of my KQID( KoGuan Quantum InfoDynamics). Of course at KQID, it is not only about heat/energy flows but also information flows as Shakespearian meme-actorIΨ(CTE)) as the wave function of consciousness, time and energy acting in relativistic Ψ(iτLx,y,z, Lm) hologram Multiverse. Rather than Gaussian bell curve, I would propose the hokey stick curve as the hybrid of your two classes scenario. Most people are equally rich and free unchained from human as well as nature's handcuffs with few extremely rewarded and rich individuals who do works that are breaking and removing those chains that chain us. You correctly made the point that an absolute equality is simply impossible. No energy no flow, and no flow no work. No gradient no flows. Your opening statement is powerful and to the point. You wrote: " How Should Humanity Steer the Future? By allowing maximum individual freedom to pursue dreams and expand horizons. History has shown that humanity works best when freedom is maximized; in fact, the purpose of instituting governments is to maximize individual freedom." Yes, we need a system to maximize freedoms. In mine, I advocated Xuan Yuan Aanti-entropic Operating System 2.0. Yes remarkably we share the same view. I incorporated Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu (around 400B.C)who advocated for-self philosophy and advocated the individual six freedoms and life enjoyment fully here and now:

            Allow the ear to hear what it likes, ~~Do~~

            the eye to see what it likes, ~~Re~~

            the nose to smell what it likes, ~~Mi~~

            the mouth to say what it likes, ~~Fa~~

            the body to enjoy the comforts it likes to have, ~~Sol~~

            and the mind to do what it likes. ~~La~~

            Yes similar to but even more individualistic than that of Epicurus as well as Jefferson. Yes, Chinese believes in and enjoys individual freedoms just like everyone else.

            I rated your essay the highest score that you deserve.

            Best wishes,

            Leo KoGuan

              Edwin,

              It's not that it doesn't very much function as an effective form of energy in economic transactions, but that when we overlook the basis of its value, a wholistically functioning and prosperous economy and simply collectively think of it as an abstract property which allows us a portion of the wealth being generated, we end up with the situation we have today, where the end function of the economy becomes to create and collect as many of these notational obligations as possible, even to the significant and obvious detriment of the underlaying economy on which they are based. The reason asset values only seem to go up, even though the larger economy seems weak isn't because they are increasing in value, but because the value of investment dollars is effectively decreasing. I can tell you, these horses are not bigger, or faster than they used to be, but their prices seem to keep going up, as with lots of other things, from the stock market to high end real estate. Yes inflation is muted in the general economy, but that's because the 1% and the rest of us live in somewhat separate economies. It just goes to show, those at the top really are not as smart as they think they are.

              Regards,

              John

              This issue fits in well with Armin Shirazi's entry. Given the extent to which wrong doing in the financial sector is not punished, regulation is ignored and all problems are solved with more credit. It is somewhat obvious this will only lead to a bigger blow up, but those running the show simply do not have the necessary perspective to do anything more than service their own narrow self interests and so undercut the basis of their power.

              Regards,

              John

              Dear Edwin,

              I find te idea to use the fundamental ideas of thermodynamics to describe humanity and the dynamics of money/energy quite original, and very appropriate for this type of contest. A pleasurable essay.

              You end up concentrating on specific US political issues, in the second part of the text, but some of the problems you mention have rather general validity, and, for example, affect also our society and politicians in Italy.

              With respect to the case of two unequal classes - fig. p. 5,right, yielding a non null dE - I was wondering whether this always creates a large gap between extreme richness and extreme poverty, or a mitigated variant is possible by which both figures are somewhat acceptable, e.g. more rich vs. slightly less rich. In other words, what are the parameters responsible for the width of the gap between the two values of the peaks?

              Given the limited space, you do not expand much about the issue of stability with respect to nonlinear systems [Shultz and Melsa 1967]. Because stability is a requisite, you make it a basic goal. But I tend to support the idea that the instability of the human, non linear system is what makes it creative and unpredictable in its evolution, with emergent phenomena occurring all the time and making our history unique (and hard to steer!).

              Do you see these two viewpoints as mutually exclusive?

              Thank you and best regards

              Tommaso