In Western democracies, economic growth sits at the centre of every policy document, every budget speech, and every campaign promise. More jobs, more consumption, more infrastructure, more everything seems like airtight logic.
Growth lifts people out of poverty, and it funds hospitals and schools.
Growth delivers stability and prosperity.
Economic growth is the answer.
The problem is that growth is thermodynamically aligned with entropy. Every expansion of the economy requires energy capture and dissipation. Every new highway, factory, or data centre channels flows of energy and matter through the system, generating waste heat and disorder.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a physical reality. It states that…
energy naturally spreads out, and the total disorder (entropy) of an isolated system will tend to increase over time.
This principle describes the direction to physical processes where heat flows from hot to cold, gases diffuse to fill space, and ordered systems naturally drift toward disordered states unless energy is added to maintain structure. It reveals that while energy is conserved, its useful form degrades as it disperses.
In everyday terms, you can’t get more work out than the energy you put in; some energy always becomes unavailable for doing work.
Entropy provides the measure of this spreading or dilution of energy. When molecules move, collide, mix and rearrange, they tend to move from concentrated states toward more evenly distributed ones. A cup of hot tea cools because heat energy disperses into the room. A tidy room becomes messy unless effort is applied to keep it ordered. This natural drift toward disorder gives time a direction, often called the arrow of time.
The second law also establishes fundamental limits in energy systems from engines to ecosystems.
No machine can be perfectly efficient because some energy will always be lost as waste heat. Similarly, living organisms must constantly import energy from food or sunlight to maintain their internal order against entropy. The law therefore underpins everything from metabolism and climate to industrial energy use, reminding us that maintaining structure and complexity always has a cost.
So here’s the thing.
Growth does not defy entropy, instead it accelerates it to create the opposite of stability and resilience. Confusing economic expansion with resilience diverts attention from what actually keeps systems alive under pressure.
Counterpoint
But here is what we are told.
When economies stall, societies fracture. When GDP falls, unemployment rises, services fail, and political extremism follows. Growth is stability. Growth is survival. The only rational path forward is to grow the economy until everyone has enough.
It is a story that promises moral clarity and systemic salvation in one package. But in practice, it does not work that way.
Economic systems are not equilibrium machines that return to balance after disturbance. They are dissipative structures held together by continuous energy throughput. What keeps an economy functioning is not whether GDP ticks upward but whether energy sources remain accessible, whether waste sinks can absorb output, and whether supply chains maintain coherence.
Growth does not improve any of these, instead it strains them.
Every percentage point of growth compounds the demand for materials, energy, and ecological capacity. Every efficiency gain triggers rebound effects that increase total consumption. None of this is solved by expanding production further.
You can grow GDP, grow employment, grow every metric that politicians celebrate, and still watch systemic resilience collapse. It’s the poisoned chalice of politics.
Thought Challenge
Map entropy pathways… Choose a recent infrastructure project or policy initiative framed as growth-positive. Trace the energy inputs required to build and maintain it. Document the waste streams generated. Ask yourself what resilience means if the energy subsidy ends.
Resilience vs expansion audit… Select an economic sector and compare two metrics. One measures expansion such as output volume, market capitalisation, employment growth. The other measures resilience such as redundancy in supply chains, capacity to absorb shocks, time to recover after disruption. Which one receives policy attention?
Resistance thinking... Examine how biological, social, and economic systems resist disturbance versus how they expand. A forest resists fire through species diversity and soil moisture retention, not by growing faster. A community resists recession through local production capacity and mutual aid, not by attracting more investment. What does this tell you about stability?
Each exercise sharpens the sceptical instinct. Instead of accepting growth as the universal solution, you learn to ask what actually sustains a system when energy becomes scarce and disturbance becomes routine.
Closing reflection
A mindful sceptic directs attention to the difference between systems that expand and systems that endure… and knows that growth is entropy.
Evidence Support
Georgescu‑Roegen, N. (1971). The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard University Press.
TL;DR... economic activity is an entropic process converting low-entropy energy and materials into high-entropy waste. Georgescu‑Roegen provides the original thermodynamic framing of economics, showing that material and energetic throughput fundamentally determines the limits of economic expansion.
Relevance to insight… the intellectual root of the “growth is entropy” argument. It links economic processes directly to the second law of thermodynamics, establishing that growth always amplifies dissipation and degrades systemic resilience by reducing the stock of accessible low-entropy resources.
Daly, H. E., & Farley, J. (2011). Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (2nd ed.). Island Press.
TL;DR... continuous economic growth undermines ecological stability and social resilience. They integrate systems ecology, steady-state economic models, and empirical data on resource depletion to propose that sustainable economies must decouple well-being from growth.
Relevance to insight… resilience is inversely correlated with throughput intensity. It supports the insight’s assertion that resilience is about systemic recovery and adaptability, not scale or expansion, and that surpassing ecological limits generates fragility rather than stability.
Hall, C. A. S., Lambert, J. G., & Balogh, S. B. (2014). EROI of different fuels and the implications for society. Energy Policy, 64, 141–152.
TL;DR... quantifies the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of major fuel types and explores how declining energy quality constrains societal complexity. It concludes that diminishing EROI leads to systemic fragility, as maintaining growth requires disproportionate energy investment and accelerates entropy production.
Relevance to insight… modern economic growth depends on declining energy returns, leading to rising entropy and decreasing resilience. It shows that societal stability depends more on energy efficiency and system feedback management than on scale of output—directly affirming the insight’s premise.
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., et al. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461(7263), 472–475.
TL;DR... identifies nine planetary boundaries that define Earth’s safe operating space, warning that human economic expansion already exceeds several biophysical thresholds. Crossing these limits leads to irreversible entropy accumulation in climate, hydrological, and biospheric systems.
Relevance to insight… the pursuit of perpetual economic growth drives entropy that destabilises global life-support systems. It empirically supports the insight’s contention that resilience requires constraint, feedback regulation, and adaptation rather than continued expansion.
Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. W. (1972). The Limits to Growth. Club of Rome/MIT Press.
TL;DR... exponential population and industrial growth inevitably lead to ecological collapse due to finite resource constraints and feedback failures. The findings align with thermodynamic laws, showing that expansion amplifies disorder faster than regeneration.
Relevance to insight… classic systems analysis validates the entropy–growth paradox empirically. It connects the biophysical limits of expansion to diminishing resilience and adaptive capacity, providing a macro-scale demonstration that stability depends on feedback moderation, not growth intensity.