Some time ago, I wrote an essay on a partial basic income, with the title "entropy". My colleague and genious Walter Van Trier was immediately enthousiastic when he read it, and asked my why I had chosen this title. By that time, I had already forgotten why. That's how ADHD works. Recently, however, I found a new use for it.
In Belgium, collective bargaining or, more widely, social dialogue, has a long tradition and is strongly institutionalised, but it fails to inspire. To dissect the issue, we could look at it from different points of view:
1. Structure: although some institutions overlap (works councils and OSH-committtees, for instance) and some are rusty (a number of joint committees), there is no lack of coverage, committees are elected democratically and can be formed freely, and there are few obstructions to the functioning of the different bodies.
2. People: there is a strong belief that the representatives of unions and employers federations are hardheaded and antagonistic, missing the willingness to pursue common interests.
3. Groups and trends: the representatives do not entirely act out of free will, but represent conflicting interests and are guided by social trends such as political polarisation.
4. Time: as the system is old and has produced a large number of outputs, in the form of collective bargaining agreements, the breakthroughs have been made and it becomes increasingly harder to further improve the situation - much like looking for the next prime number.
I want to - pun intended - expand on the last factor, because here the law of entropy could be projected on a social trend. When the division of labour is simple, there is order or low entropy. Over time, as the division of labour is more complicated, there could be two views. One is that the invisible hand creates a balance and the economy grows and society prospers. The other is that there is increased chaos or high entropy, e.g. all kinds of working arrangements, exploitation, etc. Social dialogue and collective bargaining have attempted and succeeded in realigning arrangements collectively, putting in 'labour' to restore order. However, entropy depends on the state which is considered. The order that is restored, can be found in microstates (e.g. companies, sectors), not necessarily in the macrostate (the economy, society). Moreover, the order that has been created may even prevent lowering entropy further, because to create order in the macrostate (e.g. give people comparable contracts and working time), the order in a microstate (e.g. a sectoral agreement) would need to be broken down. This could be why time affects social dialogue - and it is indeed not different from ideas about rusty systems (cf. the organicism of Herbert Spencer).
Now I also suggested optimists may believe the invisible hand should never have been guided by social dialogue. This is a hard sell. Theoretically, or hypothetically, if one had infinite tries to redo one's carreer and training, everybody would make the smarter choice. Diminish the number of tries, and we might learn from the experience of others. Increase the speed of change, however, and limit out number of tries to just one, and it becomes clear that the invisible hand is rather erratic and it is well plausible that inferior equilibria prevail for a long time, if not forever. Collective bargaining is learning from the collective experience, and therefore acting collectively to prevent individual mistakes. It is one solution to the time problem, but, as argued above, it also has a limit. It can reach a moderate level of entropy within the macrostate, but needs to be maintained in order to not fall apart again as the division of labour is effectively a process of atomization, creating new possibilities, but destroying existing structures and order.
