{"id":21419,"date":"2022-02-13T12:57:26","date_gmt":"2022-02-13T20:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=21419"},"modified":"2022-02-13T12:58:04","modified_gmt":"2022-02-13T20:58:04","slug":"a-softer-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2022\/02\/13\/a-softer-economics\/","title":{"rendered":"A SOFTER ECONOMICS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Financial markets are entangled and uncertain. When will economists let go of physics envy to embrace the quantum revolution?Photo by Jeff Hutchens\/Getty<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Orrell<\/a> is an applied mathematician and the author of many books, including Quantum Economics: The New Science of Money<\/em><\/a> (2018) and Quantum Economics and Finance: An Applied Mathematics Introduction<\/em><\/a> (2020). His latest book is Money, Magic, and How to Dismantle a Financial Bomb: Quantum Economics for the Real World<\/em><\/a> (2022). He lives in Toronto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edited by Sam Dresser<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1 February 2022 (aeon.co)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Love Aeon?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Support our work DONATE<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her book<\/a> Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men<\/em> (2021), the writer Katrine Mar\u00e7al argues that many useful innovations have failed to catch on because they are deemed \u2018too feminine\u2019 by marketers. A classic example is the wheeled suitcase. The wheel was invented in ancient Mesopotamia, however the possibility of attaching it to a case went against the whole idea of men showing off their strength by lugging heavy objects around, which is why wheeled suitcases weren\u2019t a thing until 1972. As Mar\u00e7al wrote in The Guardian<\/em>: \u2018Gender answers the riddle of why it took 5,000 years for us to put wheels on suitcases.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quantum is the scientific equivalent of suitcase wheels. The reason this useful innovation hasn\u2019t caught on, or been rolled out, more generally in areas such as economics isn\u2019t because it\u2019s impractical or too hard \u2013 it\u2019s because it\u2019s too feminine. Or rather, too Female, in a sense to be defined below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, that assertion will seem ridiculous to many readers for a number of reasons \u2013 beginning with the idea that quantum has somehow been ignored or repressed. Quantum physics is widely recognised as being a huge success, and is lauded for its ability to predict and explain the bizarre behaviour of tiny subatomic particles. For example, quantum physics says that subatomic entities can be in more than one place at the same time (superposition) and show both particle-like behaviours and wave-like behaviours including interference (they can cancel each other out). Something like the position of a particle is inherently indeterminate, and only takes on a definite value when measured<\/a> through a poorly understood process of wave function collapse. Particles can also become mysteriously entangled, so that a measurement on one tells us something about an entangled partner, even if it is at the far end of the Universe. The ability to make sense of all this is rightly regarded as one of the triumphs of science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone also knows that quantum mechanics is both hard and highly counterintuitive, which is why only university graduates in physics and mathematics are typically exposed to it. As one university website once reassured its audience: \u2018It\u2019s OK to be a bit baffled by these concepts, since we don\u2019t experience them in our day-to-day lives. It\u2019s only when you look at the tiniest quantum particles \u2013 atoms, electrons, photons and the like \u2013 that you see intriguing things like superposition and entanglement.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this view, if quantum ideas haven\u2019t reached a broader audience, that is a good thing, because they would be misunderstood and therefore ripe for abuse. As the physicist Sean Carroll stated in his portentously titled book<\/a> The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself<\/em> (2016): \u2018No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans \u2013 and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas \u2013 than quantum mechanics.\u2019 The philosopher Slavoj \u017di\u017eek similarly warned of \u2018New Age obscurantist appropriations of today\u2019s \u201chard\u201d sciences which, in order to legitimise their position, invoke the authority of science itself.\u2019 Stand back, social scientists, and leave the heavy lifting to the experts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quantum economics in particular sounds like \u2018physics envy\u2019 taken to its logical conclusion. Indeed, the assertion that quantum ideas \u2013 developed for tiny particles \u2013 could have anything to do with human systems such as the economy will seem patently absurd to most physicists. It is well known in physics that quantum effects wash out at larger scales, where classical behaviour dominates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, quantum mechanics isn\u2019t commonly perceived as being feminine. For one thing, it is the ultimate example of a \u2018hard\u2019 reductionist science \u2013 it even has \u2018mechanics\u2019 in the name. Its \u2018founding fathers\u2019 were mostly young men in their 20s. In the postwar era it gained much of its funding and prestige from its association with nuclear weapons, which are pretty butch (and are one place where quantum effects don\u2019t wash out). And anyway, science cares about objective results \u2013 not things such as gender. Indeed, the whole notion of gender is highly contested and the idea that entire scientific disciplines can be assigned gender labels is just unreconstructed, unsophisticated, reductionist nonsense that will offend and repel scientists, feminists and anyone with a brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how on earth can it make sense in the electronic pages of this magazine to say that quantum hasn\u2019t caught on because it is too girly?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To start with, while quantum ideas certainly caught on in physics, they have had very little influence so far on the way that most people think about the world \u2013 apart from musings on things such as quantum healing, and something of a moment back in the 1970s with books such as The Tao of Physics<\/em> (1975) by Fritjof Capra. Mentioning quantum ideas in polite conversation will see you marked as a phoney or worse. In his definition of what he calls the \u2018Intellectual Yet Idiot\u2019, Nassim Nicholas Taleb includes anyone who \u2018has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics\u2019. (Guilty as charged!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contrast that with the success and general social acceptability of mechanistic thinking, which is part of a Western scientific tradition whose roots extend to ancient Greece, and which has affected the way we think about everything from human psychology to the financial markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the political scientist Alexander Wendt has noted<\/a>, for example, the social sciences are based on a number of fundamental assumptions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1) that the elementary units of reality are physical objects (materialism); 2) that larger objects can be reduced to smaller ones (reductionism); 3) that objects behave in law-like ways (determinism); 4) that causation is mechanical and local (mechanism); and 5) that objects exist independent of the subjects who observe them (objectivism?).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In other words, they are based on the cogs and levers of pre-quantum physics. No possibility of superposition or entanglement there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In economics, prices are assumed to be mechanistically determined<\/a> by the \u2018invisible hand\u2019 of global capitalism, where the actions of informed, rational, independent utility-optimising agents \u2013 aka rational economic man \u2013 conspire to drive prices to their optimal level, subject only to occasional \u2018frictions\u2019 or \u2018market failures\u2019, which might slow or impede the process. Markets are seen as being subject to random external perturbations that make them unpredictable, but this is a far cry from the indeterminacy of quantum systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One reason for this lack of uptake, as mentioned above, might be that quantum ideas really are hard for normal people, or at least those without a degree in quantum mechanics, to understand. This is certainly the standard message. Quotes that are commonly, if perhaps apocryphally, attributed to esteemed physicists include the observations that quantum mechanics is \u2018fundamentally incomprehensible\u2019 (Niels Bohr); \u2018If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don\u2019t understand quantum mechanics\u2019 (Richard Feynman); and \u2018You don\u2019t understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it\u2019 (John von Neumann).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, it is more accurate to say that subatomic particles are hard to understand because they\u2019re weird and almost no one has direct experience of them. And it is easy to imagine those men (and they do always seem to be men) saying the same thing about their spouses, or even their pets. \u2018No one truly understands George, my tabby cat. He is a mystery even unto himself.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Physicists tend to confuse their models with reality \u2013 after all, these are the same people who would prefer to believe that most of the Universe has somehow been rendered invisible as \u2018dark matter\u2019 than entertain the rather reasonable idea<\/a> that the problem is with the \u2018law\u2019 of gravity. But in mathematical terms, quantum theory mostly boils down to being just a different form of probability, which is the next simplest after the usual one, and which naturally incorporates effects such as superposition and entanglement. The field of quantum cognition, for example, isn\u2019t about comparing humans to invisible particles; it is about using quantum probability to model the way that decisions are shaped by things such as uncertainty and context, as when the way a question is framed or posed affects the answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Physicists are protective of quantum ideas, but often dislike aspects of them at the same time<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, the quantum physicist Niels Bohr borrowed the idea of superposition from the late 19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James, who had remarked on the human ability to hold conflicting<\/a> ideas in our heads at the same time. And the concept of entanglement is hardly foreign to human experience. As \u017di\u017eek also observed<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A fact rarely noticed is that the propositions of quantum physics which defy our common-sense view of material reality strangely echo another domain, that of language, of the symbolic order \u2013 it is as if quantum processes are closer to the universe of language than anything one finds in \u2018nature\u2019, as if, in the quantum universe, the human spirit encounters itself outside itself \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Researchers in the field of \u2018quantum natural language processing\u2019 would agree<\/a>. So somehow we went from quantum physicists adopting words and concepts from social life, to social scientists omitting the same things from their study of social life. As the comedian John Cleese quipped<\/a>: \u2018people like psychologists and biologists have still got physics envy, but it\u2019s envy of Newtonian physics and they haven\u2019t really noticed what\u2019s been happening the last 115 years.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Viewed this way, the concern from physicists that quantum ideas will be \u2018misused and abused\u2019 in the social sciences, to use Carroll\u2019s phrase, seems a little forced. For example, there was little outcry from physicists about what the quantitative analyst Paul Wilmott and I called<\/a> the \u2018industrial-scale abuse of mathematical models\u2019 by the financial sector that led to the crisis of 2007-8. So perhaps the problem is not with the misuse of physics-inspired models, but with worries about quantum ideas in particular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another reason for these concerns seems to be related to a kind of queasiness around quantum ideas in the first place. There is a strange dichotomy at play, where physicists are protective of quantum ideas, but often dislike aspects of them at the same time, and deal with this dislike by adopting a highly formal and abstract way of presenting the subject. Albert Einstein commented<\/a> that the theory reminded him of \u2018the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought\u2019, and spent years trying to show it was wrong or incomplete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More recently, the late physicist Steven Weinberg said in an interview that quantum mechanics \u2018has a number of features we find repulsive \u2026 What I don\u2019t like about quantum mechanics is that it\u2019s a formalism for calculating probabilities that human beings get when they make certain interventions in nature that we call experiments. And a theory should not refer to human beings in its postulates.\u2019 (Perhaps it works better as a model of human beings.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One problem is that, while physicists tend to claim ownership over the interpretation of quantum mathematics, they themselves have never reached a settled interpretation of what it all means. The notion of wave function collapse, for example, leads to all kinds of quandaries, which is why physicists continue to debate it, or come up with alarming alternatives<\/a> such as the Many-Worlds hypothesis where, instead of the wave function collapsing, the Universe splits off into alternative paths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The test for the use of quantum methods in the social sciences is not, then, whether people are just like particles. It is whether, if these methods hadn\u2019t existed, social scientists would have had to invent them. Of course, this suggests another potential explanation for why quantum ideas are not applied outside of physics \u2013 which is that they just don\u2019t work. But there is increasing evidence that they do. And what seems extraordinary, is the fact that for so long they hadn\u2019t even been tried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ifirst wrote about this for Aeon four years ago in an essay<\/a> that made a case for a theory of quantum economics. The idea is that money is best understood as a quantum social technology, with quantum properties of its own. In financial transactions, for example, value can be modelled as a probabilistic wave function which \u2018collapses\u2019 down to an exact number when money is exchanged. When you put your house up for sale, you might have a fuzzy idea of its worth, but the actual price is only determined when a deal is made. An idea that seems bizarre in physics makes perfect sense in economics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Financial contracts such as mortgages and other loans entangle the debtor and the creditor in a fashion that can be modelled using quantum mathematics. The debtor is treated as being in a superposed state, balanced somewhere between a propensity to honour the debt and a propensity to default. Methods from quantum cognition can handle those phenomena, such as mental interference between incompatible concepts, that first inspired quantum physicists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the argument that quantum effects don\u2019t scale up has no relevance to economics. The idea isn\u2019t that money inherits its quantum properties from subatomic properties, but that its properties can be modelled using quantum mathematics (the aim isn\u2019t to use more maths, just different maths where needed). For example, the creation of money can be expressed using a quantum circuit in a way that captures effects such as uncertainty, power relationships, and so on. The effects of this substance scale up all the time (it\u2019s called the financial system), and, like dark matter, exert a huge pull over the economy that goes undetected by classical approaches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the article immediately attracted fierce criticism, and not just from internet trolls. One respected science writer described the piece on Twitter as \u2018a load of hogwash\u2019. Other physicists piled on to mock the article or accuse me that I had no idea how things like the mathematics of entanglement work (for the record, I am a mathematician, and it\u2019s not that hard). One commenter summarised their feelings like this: \u2018I feel bad for all the professional economists who might come across this nonsensical essay \u2026 Bad writer, bad.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As someone who has long written about and critiqued our use of mathematical models in areas ranging from weather forecasting to particle physics to economics, I am used to receiving robust feedback on my work \u2013 but something about this felt different, like I had crossed a line. So what is it that makes quantum special? What is it that makes physicists so excited about maintaining control over it? And what line had I crossed which made the article so \u2018bad\u2019? The answer, oddly, might have something to do with gender \u2013 not with mine, or anyone else\u2019s, but rather with a classical conception of gender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of my above-mentioned critique of science is that the way we approach the subject is affected by a degree of bias, which can be traced back to the birth of Western philosophy and science in ancient Greece. Greek philosophy was dualistic and also what we would describe as blatantly sexist. The Pythagoreans, for example, saw the Universe as governed by opposing principles, which were divided into Good and Evil, and which included Male versus Female. Women were allowed into the group, but the female archetype was still associated<\/a> with darkness and evil. Plato described women as originating from morally defective souls in Timaeus<\/em>, and he and Aristotle excluded them from their schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The split between genders was tied up, in Greek philosophy, with the split between the real world and abstract ideas. The former was associated in Greek culture with the Female principle, the latter with the Male principle. According to the science writer Margaret Wertheim<\/a>, writing in The New York Times<\/em>: \u2018Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.\u2019 There were no female philosophers to argue against this, because they weren\u2019t admitted to the club.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A performative emphasis on hard objectivity is the scientific equivalent of lugging a heavy suitcase up a flight of stairs<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, science has been dominated by men. In his book The Masculine Birth of Time<\/em>, the 17th-century inventor of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, described the role of science as being to \u2018conquer and subdue [Nature]\u2019 and \u2018storm and occupy her castles and strongholds\u2019. When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, its secretary Henry Oldenburg, a theologian and natural philosopher, defined its aim as being to construct a \u2018Masculine Philosophy\u2019. Women began to be admitted to universities in significant numbers only in the early 20th century, with physics departments among the last to open their doors. As the philosopher Sandra Harding wrote<\/a> in 1986: \u2018Women have been more systematically excluded from doing serious science than from performing any other social activity except, perhaps, frontline warfare.\u2019 With the result, as the physicist and feminist scholar Evelyn Fox Keller put it<\/a> in 1985, that modern science was developed \u2018not by humankind but by men.\u2019 As already mentioned, quantum physics was constructed mostly by a small group of young men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this has affected the way we do science. The philosopher Mary Midgley compiled<\/a> a list of opposites in 1985, reminiscent of the Pythagoreans\u2019 idea of opposing principles, which included:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hard \/ Soft
Reason \/ Feeling, Emotion
Objective \/ Subjective
Quantity \/ Quality
Male \/ Female
Clarity \/ Mystery<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Midgley commented that the list served for scientists as a \u2018mental map \u2026 marked only with the general direction \u201ckeep to the left\u201d\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A similarly performative emphasis on hard objectivity \u2013 the scientific equivalent of lugging a heavy suitcase up a flight of stairs, while sweating profusely and wearing a rictus grin \u2013 is seen even in the social sciences, which take their cues from physics. In 1913, the psychologist John B Watson wrote<\/a>: \u2018Psychology, as the behaviourist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science \u2026 it can dispense with consciousness in a psychological sense.\u2019 A century later, the political scientist Alexander Wendt noted<\/a> that \u2018in most of contemporary social science there seems to be a \u201ctaboo\u201d on subjectivity\u2019, which is odd given that social relations are surely based largely on subjective factors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Economics seems to be something of an extreme case, and remains, as the sociologist Elaine Coburn observed<\/a> in 2016, \u2018remarkably \u201cpre-feminist\u201d\u2019. According to the economics professor Veronika Dolar: \u2018there\u2019s a strong case to be made that economics is the worst academic field in which to be a woman.\u2019 One recent study<\/a> used data science to analyse the gender gap, and concluded that the discipline was best described as \u2018a crushing and unrewarding environment for female economists\u2019. Not much of an advance over the ancient Greeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mainstream economists, as the political economists Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan noted<\/a> in 2021, see their field as \u2018the \u201chardest\u201d social science of all\u2019, which again has shaped the way it is practised. The feminist economist Julie A Nelson wrote in 1996 that: \u2018Analytical methods associated with detachment, mathematical reasoning, formality, and abstraction have cultural associations that are positive and masculine, in contrast with methods associated with connectedness, verbal reasoning, informality, and concrete detail, which are culturally considered feminine.\u2019 And yet most mainstream economists would reject the idea that their discipline has been shaped by such factors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider, for example, the paper<\/a> from 2020 in which the Nobel Memorial prize-winning economist George Akerlof puzzled over the question of why economics \u2018gives rewards that favour the \u201chard\u201d and disfavour the \u201csoft\u201d\u2019. There is an entire section titled \u2018Reasons for Bias toward Hard\u2019, which manages to avoid the obvious one, namely association with a certain kind of masculinity. Indeed, his piece does not even mention words such as \u2018women\u2019, \u2018female\u2019 or \u2018gender\u2019. Obviously, he had never read Midgley, who had already explained how the map worked 35 years earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, I should again point out (and I feel my audience shrinking as I type \u2013 bad writer, bad) that this argument, raised in previous books, about the ongoing influence of ancient archetypes on modern science, doesn\u2019t elicit a unanimously positive response; one physicist even worried that it was intended as a joke on the reader, which I can assure you is not the case (though humour is a help). Perhaps scientists see themselves as truth seekers who are free of such cultural influences. However the issue does seem especially relevant to the quantum approach \u2013 because quantum mixes hard and soft by design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A defining feature of quantum mechanics, after all, is that it looks hard, but the picture that it paints of reality is soft and fuzzy. In many respects it isn\u2019t a hard science, but a soft science. A wave equation, for example, looks hard when it is written out as a mathematical formula \u2013 but it is an equation of a wave, which is soft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of atoms being hard and independent \u2013 as the feminist theologian Catherine Keller notes, there is a strong correspondence between the \u2018separate, impenetrable\u2019 Newtonian atom and the male sense of self \u2013 they are indeterminate and entangled. Instead of predictive certainty, we have the uncertainty principle. If quantum mechanics had been invented, and its evolution and interpretation shaped, mostly by women instead of those young men \u2013 if its \u2018founding fathers\u2019 had been \u2018founding mothers\u2019 \u2013 we would be calling it the most feminist theory ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quantum is therefore a soft science dressed up to look hard. When male physicists first stumbled upon these \u2018soft\u2019 quantum properties of matter, it is unsurprising that, rather than embrace their classically defined feminine side, they reacted by adopting a hardcore mathematical approach summed up later by the physicist David Mermin as the direction<\/a> to \u2018Shut up and calculate!\u2019 Which, to non-physicists, reads like: \u2018Keep away \u2013 this is much too hard!\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, the social science version counted women and feminists among its first inventors. Danah Zohar, who trained as a physicist, described how her book The Quantum Self<\/em> (1990) was inspired in part by her experience of pregnancy and early motherhood: \u2018There is something deeply feminine about seeing the self as part of a quantum process.\u2019 Or as the feminist theorist (and trained physicist) Karen Barad put it in her quantum-queer-feminist (if that\u2019s a thing) book<\/a> Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning<\/em> (2007): \u2018Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The concept of \u2018rational economic man\u2019 will be replaced with something a little more uncertain and entangled<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most obvious features of modern science is that it carries with it the imprint of ancient divisions and biases. And one of the most obvious features of quantum ideas is that they undermine everything that might be considered \u2018Hard\u2019 and \u2018Male\u2019 about reality according to this (rather dated) scheme. Instead of being clearly defined and firmly independent, both mind and matter are better described as indeterminate and entangled. Which goes a long way to explain the rather remarkable fact that these quantum tools and ideas, which are designed to analyse such properties, have been effectively kept in their box for more than a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the universe is not \u2018Male\u2019 or \u2018Female\u2019 and nor does it align itself with ancient Greek archetypes. However, it would be naive to think that the same can be said of the human pursuit of science. In particular, as Barad wrote: \u2018It would be ironic to find that the physical sciences, those sciences that have traditionally been most exclusive of women and people of colour, are unmarked by the politics of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other critical social variables.\u2019 Or to think that the same variables have not affected economics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the past few years, interest in applying quantum methods to other fields has grown considerably. Wendt and his colleagues received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to host a series of \u2018quantum bootcamps\u2019 for social scientists. These are held at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University, and taught by an eclectic group, whose specialities include philosophy, psychology, physics, political science and applied mathematics (I present a section on quantum economics). And one group that certainly sees potential in quantum ideas is the specialist area of quantitative finance \u2013 as evidenced in by the Financial Times<\/em> headline in 2020: \u2018Wall Street Banks Ramp Up Research Into Quantum Finance.\u2019 The excitement is, so far, mostly driven by the potential of using quantum computers, but interest is growing in \u2018quantum-native\u2019 applications, based on ideas from quantum economics, which can run on custom quantum circuits. An article in The Economist<\/em> in 2021 noted that \u2018finance bears a striking resemblance to the quantum world\u2019 and concludes: \u2018One way or another, finance will catch up.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real long-term impact of quantum ideas in economics won\u2019t be to help traders make money, but to change the way that we think about the economy by replacing the concept of \u2018rational economic man\u2019, which serves as the atom of the classical model, with something a little more uncertain and entangled. As the former central banker Andrew Sheng told the Bretton Woods Committee, in a report<\/a> commemorating the 75th anniversary of that postwar economic agreement:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A quantum paradigm of finance and the economy is slowly emerging, and its nonlinear, complex nature may help the design of a future global economy and financial architecture \u2026 Financial assets and virtual liabilities have quantum characteristics of entanglement with each other that are not yet fully understood \u2026 All of these developments suggest that using a new \u2018quantum\u2019 imagination, the Bretton Woods framework can be reengineered \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In other words, the time has come to strap quantum wheels onto our models of the economy, and the world. This isn\u2019t hard. It\u2019s the opposite of hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Economics<\/a>Quantum theory<\/a>Mathematics<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Financial markets are entangled and uncertain. When will economists let go of physics envy to embrace the quantum revolution?Photo by Jeff Hutchens\/Getty David Orrell is an applied mathematician and the author of many books, including Quantum Economics: The New Science of Money (2018) and Quantum Economics and Finance: An Applied Mathematics Introduction (2020). His latest… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21419"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21419"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21421,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21419\/revisions\/21421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}