US National Debt - Entropy in the 21st century

(image: news.bbc.co.uk) Ridiculous? Incredible? Mind-boggling? Flabbergasting? Indecent? There is probably no single word to help convey all that the obese(!) US national debt figures will eventually mean to humans alive now and to several future generations. So the counter ran out of digits, did it?

Where did it all go? 

We should surely be able to see where - 

- in glass fronted sky-high edifices? 

- And among the debris in Afghanistan and Iraq 

- in over-obese consumers' frames? 

- And in the hollow eyes and malnourished, bloated underbellies of the world's poor children 

- in vulgar luxury infrastructure? 

- And in dried-up, empty farm lands - in over-stuffed homes? 

- And in laid-bare forests 

- in gleaming and overflowing supermarkets? 

- And in grotesque landfills and toxic oceanfills 

Entropy - even as the word occurred in the mind, I felt that this term fills in where other words fail. In the field of thermodynamics, Entropy is "a measure of the partial loss of the ability of a system to perform work due to the effects of irreversibility", to cite just one of many definitions. It is likely that implications of the US national debt will be explained as a kind of entropy. 

Apparently it is - I'm not surprised at this - See Entropy: A new World view. The authors "seek to analyse the world's economic and social structures by using the second law of thermodynamics, that is, the law of entropy. The authors argue that humanity is wasting resources at an increasing rate, and that will lead to the destruction of our civilization, which has happened before on a smaller scale for past empires. The book promotes the use of sustainable energy sources and slow resource consumption as the solution to delay the inevitable: death by entropy".

6 Oct 2022 update: "counter ran out of digits" link from http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ to https://usdebtclock.org/