Social Entropy of Wealth Accumulation and Resource Impoverishment

Development processes aiming to improve the quality of life and inculcate superiority complex, invariably consume the internal resources and cause their irreversible depletion in the ecosystem. Since ΔH << TΔS, all activities requiring external energy input are entropy-driven. Development activities being exploitative in character will use up available resources, irreversibly transform them (internal energy ΔH into another form and increase the entropy; they reduce the ΔG, the driving force of the system and push the (Earth’s) resources to impoverishment and the unprivileged stakeholders to the poverty line. They additionally induce impoverishment of resources, and alter the order and quality of socio-physicochemical structures. Accordingly the exploiting community skims out as the main beneficiary and emerges as the top of the status pyramid.

Affluence and poverty have assumed new dimensions in that the rich with its entropy-driven manipulative skill is in a better position to transform the resources into available and unavailable forms. Technology has the potential to induce oxidative stress. As such development of the capacity to apply technology sets the driving force ΔG and uses the internal energy ΔH; there is accompanying increase in entropy in the meantime. The lust to avail higher capacity to apply technology and become rich is entropy driven. Going by Forbes data for 2015, it is noted that the race of the rich to become richer has entailed rapid increase of entropy, which in turn has resulted in uneven class structure.

Keywords: resource, wealth accumulation, social entropy, society