Entropy Britain
Entropy is a concept that, like many bits of physics, I don’t really understand. But, even so, I think it might be a useful device for considering the state of Britain.
Entropy is a measure of something like disorder. In physics, it refers to the number of possible arrangements particles can be in while still looking the same.
When closed systems are left sealed off from the outside world, their entropy tends to increase gradually. It cannot decrease without some external source of energy. Generally speaking, high entropy is bad, and tends to happen when things are left alone.
Entropy can be linked to uncertainty; high entropy means more uncertainty about what state things are in. It is a key concept in thermodynamics, where more entropy means less useful energy. In one particular strand of economics, things with high entropy are less valuable, because having low entropy is the result of hard work.
What does this have to do with Britain? Britain is not a physics concept; it is a country, a social construct. How can countries have entropy? Let me try to explain.
What entropy describes is that systems tend to get worse if they’re neglected, with no change or external source of energy to renew them. I think that this describes many aspects of what has gone wrong in Britain — some parts of our society have got stuck and begun to gradually become ineffective. And crucially, having got stuck it is very hard to get them moving again. Entropy cannot be reversed without an injection of energy.
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Let’s consider some examples that look a bit like entropy in the British state. Here are some from my own experience.
For parents of disabled children, there are networks which help to pass down advice on how to seek support for your child — or more accurately, to fight for support. The problem is that this advice tends to go out of date quickly, because the support available keeps retrenching year on year. A child entering the system today will not get the same support as a child with similar needs did a few years ago, and the system goes on getting worse.
The environmental regulator for water in England, the Environment Agency, was for many years unable to adequately maintain its own system for monitoring water. So it had to rely on water companies, which it regulates, self-reporting the quality of the water they look after. This makes it quite hard to regulate effectively.
Educational psychologists, whose role is to devise strategies to help support children with additional educational needs, now spend the vast majority of their time writing Educational and Health Care Plans, which are used to decide how much support children get. As a result, they spend little of their time actually helping children. Demand for support is increasing rapidly, which in turn means they spend even more time assessing.
The root cause of these problems, like many others in the British state, is the same: a lack of funding. For most of the years since 2010, the UK government has undertaken regular spending cuts for the great majority of its services. Often these cuts have been small; sometimes they have been very large, as in the case of local government. But even small cuts, when piled up year after year, begin to degrade services, even in well run organisations. Linked to this is the habit of keeping budgets flat in cash terms, forcing services to absorb inflation and pay increases.
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How about economic growth? In this area, the entropy looks a bit more like a kind of traditionalism. This traditionalism is very obvious in our built fabric, where our housing stock is old and buildings are very rarely replaced, or even modernised. Robert Gordon writes that from 1870 to 1940, a period of extraordinary improvement in living standards in America, only 9% of the housing stock remained in place.
It is not just housing; infrastructure corridors remain where they have always been, no matter if the city in question has outgrown them. Anyone who has played Sim City knows that, as a city grows, you have to demolish some things to improve and expand the city. This is not to deny that heritage is valuable and should be preserved, but a balance has to be struck. The Victorians and the post-war planners committed some serious architectural crimes, but they were part of generations that vastly improved our living standards. At a minimum, we should be open to demolishing and making good some of their great mistakes.
This traditionalism extends to many areas of our economic policy, which feels increasingly backward-looking. Politicians seem to pine for an economy we no longer have, while rejecting many of the successful industries we do have. Universities seen as a problem rather than a huge asset, service niches viewed as not “real” industries.
And our just-in-time fiscal policy does not help growth either. Chancellors have tended to favour freezing tax thresholds or placing taxes where they cause least political pain over taxes that work effectively, leaving our tax system riddled with cliff edges and loop holes.
What I’m describing is a pattern of problems leading to difficult decisions, which are ducked and then lead to more problems and more difficult decisions, which once again are fudged or ducked. As that process continues, things get gradually worse and it gets harder to reverse them.
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Many things that have gone wrong in Britain do not fit with the entropy analogy at all. Britain is certainly not a closed system, and it has been buffeted by a whole series of external shocks (sources of energy from the outside) that have made things worse. Some have been self-inflicted, like Brexit and the Liz Truss mini-budget. Some have been unavoidable, like Covid and the energy crises driven by the invasions of Ukraine and Iran. Nonetheless, Britain often finds itself acutely exposed to these crises because it has so little capacity to respond. The prospect of Britain, uniquely exposed as it is to gas prices, trying to muddle through a second fossil fuel crisis in four years while doing to tackle that exposure could be another case in point.
Although external shocks, both good and bad, matter, there is plenty countries can and must do for themselves. There was a time when economists thought economic growth was almost automatic, exogenous, described as “manna from heaven”. It should now be obvious that is not the case. Economic growth is the result of millions of people constantly overhauling and improving the system: developing new technologies and products, creating new businesses and squeezing out old ones, very gradually making things better. If we take that constant work for granted, or stymie it with barriers, or fail to create the conditions for it to happen, we won’t get economic growth, and things won’t get better.
The same logic goes for our democracy and institutions. They do not endure just because they always have done. We are not forever free from fascism just because we defeated it in 1945; each generation needs its Bonnie Greers or Ted Heaths squashing extremists before they can take root. It is remarkable how easy it is for a political system to collapse if it fails to do this, and how little protection either a constitution or longstanding conventions provide.
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The bit that worries me most, and which feels most in line with the concept of entropy, is how hard it has become to turn things around in Britain. When I ask people who would make excellent civil servants if they have considered becoming one, the answer is usually negative. I think there is a bundle of reasons — including pay — but part of it is a concern they won’t really be able to change things. Many people, myself included, are prepared to accept a bit less pay and a bit more effort and hassle in return for the chance to make things better. Too many of us seem to have lost the belief that is possible, or at least likely enough to justify the trade off.
That lack of belief seems to extend to the top of politics as well. Ministers and senior advisors arrive hoping to pull levers (there are no levers by the way, that’s not how power works) and often seem to end up railing against their own inability to change things. And this is a genuine problem. As the state degrades, it does get harder to do things, even for an extremely capable politician, of which we have many. But the railing against the system has sometimes seemed to end up directed away from things that might actually fix the problem, whether on conflict with the civil service or vague, Panglossian talk about technology.
Entropy is a pretty gloomy concept when you try to apply it to a country, but the first rule of this blog is that it is never a counsel of despair. Britain is not doomed to decline. The country still has many assets, and many millions of people who can do the hard work of bringing order to systems where entropy is high. Most civil servants, business leaders, doctors, nurses, carers, managers, teachers do what they do because they believe they can make things better, given the right tools.
What they need is two things. First, the funding to do things properly, to make systems work again, to gradually rebuild the capacity of the state. Second some sense of direction, which instils belief that things can change, and that the change will make things better. Both of these things need to begin at the top, but they need to embrace the many people involved in turning things around. Things can only get better if you put the effort in.
