Entropy (also known as "disorder")

Many of the smarter people I know are experiencing a vague and ill-defined sense of dread or lack-of-ease regarding the future.

Perhaps the reason they cannot define it or get a grip on it is because what they are sensing is the accelerating disorder in society. Disorder by its nature defies neat-and-tidy definitions. It is like turbulence or the rainfall or Lorenz's Butterfly Effect...it is never twice the same.

The remaking of society (by idiots)

The ghastly thing is that the idiots in the room, the ones who are PROUD of the fact that their minds are unhindered by history or the bloody results of prior attempts, are in control and they are loudly telling us that they are going to redesign society.

"Ok, Boomer. You had your chance and you screwed it up. Now it is our turn."

It is as if electricians threw out the 997 page National Electric Code book and were going to start rewiring buildings based on "this feels right". They dismiss the fact that every "bullet" in the NEC was the result of somebody getting electrocuted or a building  burned down.

It isn't just one or two examples. This mindset seems to be everywhere. But since I owe you some concrete examples, here are a couple:

NYC passed an ordinance that gives non-profits an exclusive, five month window t bid on condemned properties. It also gives those non-profits the authority to match private-party bids after the window and still win the auction.

NYC has a shortage of affordable housing. NYC is highly regulated and landlords are forced to skimp on maintenance.  Tenants file complaints. Property gets condemned.

That property, in theory, could be rehabilitated and returned to the housing stock. In practice, they will let the five months spin off the clock while the homeless will cook meth, crap-and-pee everywhere and burn open fires in the building. If the building hasn't burned down in those five months, it will be hopelessly impaired and must be demoed. In the unlikely event a private party invests the due-diligence and decides to bid on it after the five month period, the non-profits will match their bid and the private party will be "out" all of the time they spent inspecting and planning the property.

The compassionate, welfare-state

High inflation was already baked into the future (even if the Republicans had kept both houses).

The "lesson" of the last election was that politicians who don't address symptoms will not get reelected.

That sets the stage for Universal Basic Income in some form; likely direct deposits to checking accounts or debit cards.

That reduces incentive to work which will throttle the supply side. It will goose the demand side. Those two, when combined, are the recipe for accelerating inflation.

Interest rates will go up. The private economy will stop investing. The public sector will respond with public work projects and it will become impossible to find a foot of steel rebar or a sack of cement. People whose incomes don't track the real rates of inflation will quickly find themselves in abject poverty.

The idiot's response

"There are many kinds of intelligence. There are lots of brilliant people who cannot read or do math." Then they will point out that Einstein was considered an idiot when he was in grade school and that Michael Jordon was cut from his high school varsity basketball team.

"You can't prove that our clean-sheet-of-paper remake won't be better than what we have now."

ERJ's rebuttal

I will concede that random processes can produce improvements. That is the entire basis of the Theory of Evolution.

Random processes can produce output that appears ordered. If you flip a "fair" coin a million times there is about a 75% chance that you will produce at least one string of twenty-straight head or twenty-straight tails. If you have five dice in a cup and shake them out onto a table there is about a 1-in-1300 chance that your first throw will be all ones, or all twos, or all three...or all sixes.

"Maxwell's Demon" predicts that entropy can appear to work in reverse. In theory, I can dump 10 pounds of sugar and 16 pounds of rusty nuts-and-bolts into a tub, shake it, and then pull out three, Purdey Over-and-Under shotguns. All I need is for the little demon to rearrange the iron, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms.

The idiot scoffs. "Shotguns are very complex and there is no way sugar and rusty bolts could randomly order themselves into engraved steel and fine walnut!" 

Which address the point. The global economy is about 40 orders of magnitude more complex than a shotgun. I am vastly more likely to be able to pull those shotguns out of that plastic tub on the first try than a bunch of idiots completely rebuilding the economy based on "feelz" actually improving outcomes for most people.

Random mutations more often result in cancer than in a new race of supermen.