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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
A decade after the financial crisis, there is a growing consensus that economics has failed and needs to go back to the drawing board. David Orrell argues that it has been trying to solve the wrong problem all along. Economics sees itself as the science of scarcity. Instead, it should be the science of money (which plays a surprisingly small role in mainstream theory). And money is a substance that turns out to have a quantum nature of its own. Just as physicists learn about matter by studying the exchange of particles at the subatomic level, so economics should begin by analysing the nature of money-based transactions. Quantum Economics therefore starts with the meaning of the phrase 'how much' – or, to use the Latin word, quantum. From quantum physics to the dualistic properties of money, via the emerging areas of quantum finance and quantum cognition, this profoundly important book reveals that quantum economics is to neoclassical economics what quantum physics is to classical physics – a genuine turning point in our understanding.
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Praise for Quantum Economics
‘The word quantum means “how much”. Orrell proposes that money is literally a quantum phenomenon that entangles us in relationships not dissimilar to the particle entanglements of the subatomic domain. Here credit and debit constitute a wave–particle-like duality enmeshing us all in a quantum-weave. Beautifully written, inherently ethical, and often hilarious, this book is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the weird, and getting weirder, world of modern finance.’
Margaret Wertheim, author of Pythagoras’ Trousers and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace
‘As money becomes more digital and diffuse, it also becomes more quantum. In this timely and illuminating book, David Orrell brings us to the frontier of where economics, physics and psychology intersect. You’ll never look at money the same again!’
Dr Parag Khanna, author of Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
‘Reading David Orrell’s Quantum Economics is equivalent to playing a game of 3-D chess against the concept of value itself. The book easily switches between physical, economic and metaphysical conceptions of value, revealing their hidden parallels and paradoxes. The result is at once an explanation of our current economic predicament, a diagnosis of how we got there and a credible guide to the sort of “out of the box” thinking that is likely to get us out of it. After you’ve forgotten about the latest wheeze about the financial crisis, you’ll be returning to this book.’
Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, University of Warwick, and author of Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game
‘Rich with suggestive insights on every page and written in an accessible style, this book will both engage and infuriate its audience. For those of us who feel trapped in the professional cocoons of the like-minded, this book offers a chance to escape from the iron cages we have built.’
Peter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies, Cornell University
‘Forty years ago, I wrote a paper noting in analogy to quantum physics, the order of determining the price and demand for a commodity would change the quantities determined. It is delightful to see a book devoted to exploring another analogy to quantum physics for economics, that money exists in a dual way.
Orrell has explained his ideas in a very lively style, providing the history and a basic explanation of the physics; and goes on to explore the various consequences of this dual nature, which neo-classical economics did not foresee. The book should be read, not only by economists but also by all decision-makers.’
Asghar Qadir, Professor of Physics, National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan
‘On the cusp of an earlier revolution, Karl Marx said all that is solid melts into air and all that is holy is profaned. Constructing a less mechanistic and even more revolutionary science of quantum economics, David Orrell proves it so. Orrell does not dabble in metaphor or metaphysics: he intellectually, persuasively and corrosively transmutates money into a quantum phenomenon. In the process, classical economics is profaned to good effect and a quantum future glimmers as a real possibility.’
James Der Derian, Chair of International Security Studies, University of Sydney
Praise for Economyths
‘A fascinating, funny and wonderfully readable take down of mainstream economics. Read it.’
Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics
‘This is without doubt the best book I’ve read this year, and probably one of the most important books I’ve ever read … Orrell exposes the rotten heart of economics … [S]hould be required reading for every politician and banker. No, make that every voter in the land. This ought to be a real game changer of a book. Read it.’
Brian Clegg, www.popularscience.co.uk
‘Lists 10 crucial assumptions (the economy is simple, fair, stable, etc.) and argues both entertainingly and convincingly that each one is totally at odds with reality. Orrell also suggests that adopting the science of complex systems would radically improve economic policymaking.’
William White, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada (Bloomberg Best Books of 2013)
‘His background allows Orrell to reliably and convincingly question the claim of economics to quasi-scientific objectivity and mathematical accuracy, and expose it as a sales ploy.’
Handelsblatt (Germany)
‘Consistently interesting and enjoyable reading … A wide audience including many non-economists could benefit from reading it.’
International Journal of Social Economics
‘His ten economic myths should be committed to memory.’
Monthly Review (US)
‘[Orrell’s] tone is engagingly curious, drawing on biology and psychology, and his historical view spans more than merely the past few decades. Orrell recommends an interdisciplinary approach to a “new economics”, in which ethics and complexity theory might have a say.’
The Guardian (UK)
‘Required reading for anyone who deals with the economy.’
Obserwator Finansowy (Poland)
‘I urge you all to read [this book]’
New Straits Times (Malaysia)
‘A book that can help you appreciate economics in action, and also help make it less of a voodoo science.’
Business Line (India)
‘A book full of intellectual stimulation.’
Toyo Keizai (Japan)
‘One of the best books I’ve read this year.’
Pressian (Korea)
‘Highly readable and a great introduction to the dynamic thinking used in many natural sciences.’
The Post-Crash Economics Society (UK)
‘Read this book!’
Indonesian Society for Social Transformation
‘Terrible, willfully ignorant, deeply anti-intellectual … there is nothing an interested layman could possibly learn from this book.’
Professor of economics, University of Victoria
‘Just random – sort of like Malcolm Gladwell without the insight.’
Professor of economics, Carleton University
‘Must be good as I’ve had hate mails from economists for writing a positive review of it.’
Brian Clegg
Praise for Truth or Beauty
‘Fascinating … Orrell is an engaging and witty writer, adept at explaining often complicated theories in clear language.’
Ian Critchley, Sunday Times
Praise for The Money Formula (with Paul Wilmott)
‘This book has humor, attitude, clarity, science and common sense; it pulls no punches and takes no prisoners.’
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Praise for The Evolution of Money (with Roman Chlupatý)
‘Perhaps the best book on money I have ever read … A reasonable and benign dictator might demand that those engaged in activities relating to economic management should, as a condition of employment, be compelled to read The Evolution of Money and pass a written examination based on an understanding of its contents.’
Colin Teese, former deputy secretary of the Department of Trade, News Weekly (Australia)
Praise for Soumrak homo economicus (The Twilight of Economic Man, with Tomáš Sedláček and Roman Chlupatý)
‘The reader has the sense of being a silent guest at a smart table talk in which earth-shattering things are discussed.’
Die Welt (Germany)
Quantum Economics
The New Science of Money
David Orrell
For James, Vera, and Lenny
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller
If there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before, how are our brains beguil’d, Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss The second burthen of a former child!
Shakespeare, Sonnet 59
What is economics?
How about this for an exciting definition: economics is the study of transactions involving money.
Obvious, right? Economists talk about money all the time. Everything gets expressed in terms of dollars or euros, yen or yuan. The health of a nation is reduced to how much they produce, as measured by Gross Domestic Product; a person’s value to society is expressed by how much they earn. Economics is about money, everyone knows that.
And yet – if you look at an economics textbook, it turns out that the field is defined a little differently. Most follow the English economist Lionel Robbins, who wrote in 1932 that ‘Economics is a science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.’1 Gregory Mankiw’s widely-used Principles of Economics for example states that ‘Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources.’2 Or as it is sometimes paraphrased, economics is the science of scarcity. No mention of money at all.
And if you read a little further in those same textbooks, you will find that economists do not talk about money all the time – in fact they steer clear of it. Money is used as a metric, but – apart perhaps from chapters to do with basic monetary plumbing – is not considered an important subject in itself. The textbooks are like physics books that use time throughout in equations but never pause to talk about what time is. And both money and the role of the financial sector are usually completely missing from economic models, or paid lip service to.
Economists, it seems, think about money less than most people do: as the former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King observed, ‘Most economists hold conversations in which the word “money” hardly appears at all.’3
Believe it or not, defining economics in terms of money transactions is a rather radical statement. For one thing, it leads to the related question: what is money?
In this case, the accepted answer is to quote Paul Samuelson’s ‘bible’ textbook Economics and say that money is ‘anything that serves as a commonly accepted medium of exchange’ (his emphasis).4 This certainly seems to be a good description of how we use money in the economy. But again, it doesn’t give us a sense of how money attains this special status as a medium of exchange; and it implies that money’s only importance is to act as a passive intermediary for trade. The economy can therefore be viewed as a giant barter system, in which money is nothing more than a veil, a distraction from what really counts. The exciting and sometimes disturbing properties of money, which have fascinated and intrigued its users over millennia, have been largely written out of the story.
This book argues that the textbook definitions – and the economics establishment in general – have it the wrong way round. It makes the case for a new kind of economics, which puts money – and the question how much – at its centre. The time has come to talk about money – and the implications of this simple adjustment promise to be as significant in economics as the quantum revolution was in physics.
Talking about a revolution
People have of course been calling for a revolution in economics for a rather long time – and especially since the financial crisis of 2007–08. In 2008 the physicist and hedge fund manager Jean-Philippe Bouchaud wrote a paper in the journal Nature with the title ‘Economics needs a scientific revolution’.5 In 2014 Ha-Joon Chang and Jonathan Aldred of Cambridge University called for a ‘revolution in the way we teach economics’.6 A number of student groups around the world agreed, releasing their own manifestos demanding a more pluralistic approach from their professors. In 2017 the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council let it be known that it was setting up a network of experts from different disciplines including ‘psychology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, economic history, political science, biology and physics’, whose task it would be to ‘revolutionise’ the field of economics.7 And there have been countless books on the topic, including my own Economyths which called in its final chapter for just such an intervention by non-economists, when it first came out in 2010.8
The reasons for this spirit of revolutionary zeal are clear enough. For the past 150 years mainstream (aka neoclassical) economics has clung to a number of assumptions that are completely at odds with reality – for example, the cute idea that the economy is a self-stabilising machine that maximises utility (i.e. usefulness; the wheels fell off that one a while ago). It fails even in terms of its own scarcity-based definition: with social inequality and environmental degradation at a peak, mainstream economics doesn’t seem up to the task of addressing questions such as how to fairly allocate resources or deal with natural limits.
While there have been many calls for a revolution, though, the exact nature of that revolution is less clear. Critics agree that the foundations of economics are rotten, but there are different views on what should be built in its place. Most think that the field needs more diversity and should be more pluralistic (though as revolutionary demands go this one seems a bit diffuse). Most also agree that the emphasis on economic growth for its own sake needs to be reconciled both with environmental constraints and with fair distribution. Many have pointed out that economic models should incorporate techniques from other areas such as complexity theory, and properly account for the role of the financial sector. And the idea of rational economic man – which forms the core of traditional models – should be replaced with something a little more realistic.
But what if the problems with economics run even deeper? What if the traditional approach has hit a wall, and the field needs to be completely reinvented? What if the problem comes down to our entire way of thinking and talking about the economy?
This book argues that we need to start over from the beginning, by considering the most basic feature of the economy, which is transactions involving money. Rather than treat money as a mere metric, or as an inert medium of exchange, we will show that money has special, contradictory, indeed magical properties which feed into the economy as a whole. We can no more ignore these properties than weather forecasters can ignore the properties of water when making their predictions. Rather than treat people as rational, computer-like agents, with a few tweaks for behavioural effects, as in traditional economics, we will take their complex, multi-faceted behaviour at face value. And instead of seeing the economy as a machine that optimises utility, we will show that it is better described as a complex, connected system with emergent features that reflect the contradictions at its core.
All of this will come from analysing the meaning of the simple phrase: how much. Or in Latin, quantum.
A quantum of money
The word ‘quantum’ of course has a lot of history. It was applied by physicists over a century ago to describe another kind of transaction – the exchange of energy between subatomic particles. And it eventually overturned our most basic assumptions about the universe by showing that, instead of a deterministic machine, it was something more complex, entangled, and alive.
Classical or Newtonian physics, of the sort that was accepted orthodoxy in the first years of the twentieth century, was based on the idea that matter was made up of individual atoms that interacted only by bouncing into one another. The motion of these particles could be understood and predicted using deterministic laws. Quantum physics changed all this by showing that quantities such as position and momentum were fundamentally indeterminate, and could only be approximately measured through a process which affected the thing being measured, and which furthermore seemed to some theorists to depend on the choices made by the persons carrying out the measurements. And the states of particles were entangled, so a measurement on one could instantaneously inform an experimenter about the state of another. As physicist David Bohm observed, ‘It is now clear that no mechanical explanation is available, not for the fundamental particles which constitute all matter, inanimate and animate, nor for the cosmos as a whole.’9
One might think that quantum principles and techniques apply only to the subatomic realm, and are of no relevance to our everyday lives – and indeed this was long commonly believed. But in recent years, a number of social scientists working in everything from psychology to business have put ideas from quantum mechanics to new uses in their own fields. The area where quantum mechanics has perhaps its most direct application is in the rather technical area of mathematical finance. As we will see later, many of the key results of that field, such as the equations used by traders to calculate the price of an option (contracts to buy or sell securities at a future date), can be expressed using the mathematics of quantum mechanics. The aim of these researchers is not to prove that finance is quantum in a direct physical sense or somehow reduces to quantum mechanics, but that it has properties which are best modelled using a quantum-inspired methodology. This offers some computational advantages over the usual statistical approach, but also changes the way we think about the financial system, from being a mechanistic system with added randomness, to a world of overlapping alternative possibilities, in which uncertainty is intrinsic to the system rather than an extra added feature.
The emerging fields of quantum cognition and quantum social science, meanwhile, take broader inspiration from quantum mechanics to think about how human beings make decisions and interact with one another.10 While most applications to date have been in psychology or sociology, these findings are also very relevant to the economy. In particular, researchers have shown that many of the behavioural quirks long noted by behavioural economists – such as our tendency to act in a less than rational way when interacting with money – may elude classical logic, but can quite easily be expressed using a version of quantum logic, which allows for effects such as context and interference between incompatible concepts (the cause of cognitive dissonance). As physicist Diederik Aerts notes, ‘People often follow a different way of thinking than the one dictated by classical logic. The mathematics of quantum theory turns out to describe this quite well.’11
Instead of behaving like independent Newtonian particles, as assumed in mainstream neoclassical economics, we are actually closely entangled and engaged in a sort of collective quantum dance. As the feminist theorist (and trained physicist) Karen Barad puts it, ‘Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.’12 We’ll get on to what that means in later chapters – some of which draw heavily on the findings of these scholars and scientists – but the upshot is that rather than being quite as weird and counterintuitive as we have been taught, many aspects of quantum behaviour are actually rather like everyday life (which can also be weird). We have more in common with the subatomic realm than we thought.
Nowhere is this more true than in our dealings with money and our own approach to the commonly-asked financial question how much. This is shown by another theory presented here – dubbed the quantum theory of money and value – which provides the central thread of the book and states that money has a dualistic quantum nature of its own. Money is a way of combining the properties of a number with the properties of an owned thing. The fact that numbers and things are as different as waves and particles in quantum mechanics is what gives money its unique properties. The use of money in transactions is a way of attaching a number (the price) to the fuzzy and indeterminate notion of value. It therefore acts like the measurement process in quantum physics, which assigns a number to the similarly indeterminate properties of a particle.
The act of money creation also finds a direct analogue in the creation of subatomic particles out of the void, as we will discover. One implication is that the information encoded in money is a kind of quantum entanglement device, because its creation always has two sides, debt and credit. And its use also entangles people with each other and with the system as a whole, as anyone with a loan will know. All this will be explored in more detail as we delve into the world of the quantum.
This view of money – which I have previously described for an academic audience in talks, papers and a book – was originally inspired as much by the dualities of ancient Greek philosophy, and the need to explain the emergence of modern cybercurrencies such as bitcoin, as by quantum physics.13 But when combined with quantum finance and quantum social science, each of which were developed independently in different settings and for different ends, the result is what I am calling quantum economics – which is to neoclassical economics what quantum physics was to classical physics.
Don’t mention the quantum
I should address a few concerns here. One is that, since the time quantum mechanics was first invented, it has been treated as a highly esoteric area that can only be understood by experts. Commonly attributed quotes from famous physicists state that quantum mechanics is ‘fundamentally incomprehensible’ (Niels Bohr); ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics’ (Richard Feynman); ‘You don’t understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it’ (John von Neumann). Einstein said it reminded him of ‘the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts’.14 If even such luminaries can’t grasp the meaning of ‘quantum’, then what chance does anyone else have?
Perhaps as a result, the word has also long been seen as a marker for pretension, pseudery, or worse. ‘Where misunderstanding dwells’, wrote physicist Sean Carroll in 2016, ‘misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans – and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas – than quantum mechanics.’15 Physicist Murray Gell-Mann devoted an entire chapter of his 1994 book The Quark and the Jaguar to ‘Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle’.16 Economist Paul Samuelson wrote back in 1970: ‘There is really nothing more pathetic than to have an economist or a retired engineer try to force analogies between the concepts of physics and the concepts of economics … and when an economist makes reference to a Heisenberg Principle of [quantum] indeterminacy in the social world, at best this must be regarded as a figure of speech or a play on words, rather than a valid application of the relations of quantum mechanics.’17 (Though this didn’t stop him from later writing a paper on ‘A quantum theory model of economics’ which as Philip Mirowski points out, ‘has nothing whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics’.18)
Speaking as a former project engineer I agree that translating concepts and equations in a literal way from quantum mechanics to economics smacks of physics envy. In my previous books, such as Economyths and The Money Formula (with Paul Wilmott), I have done as much as most people to argue against the idea that economics can be simply transposed from physics. However, metaphor is intrinsic to our thought processes, and neoclassical economics has long been replete with metaphors from Victorian mechanics – one of its founders, Vilfredo Pareto, for example said that ‘pure economics is a sort of mechanics or akin to mechanics’ – so perhaps it is time to expand our mental toolbox.19 As we’ll see, it isn’t just quantum mechanics which has been ‘misused and abused’ – bogus claims for the efficacy of mechanistic economics have probably damaged more lives than things like ‘quantum healing’ – and while it is understandable that physicists are protective of their quantum turf, overly-reactive policing of it is one reason social scientists are stuck in an oddly mechanistic view of the world.
Also, while I did study quantum mechanics and use it in my work (my early career was spent designing superconducting magnets which rely on quantum processes for their function), my intention is not to further mathematicise economics – quite the opposite. Although a number of books and papers cited throughout do take a heavily mathematical approach, the core ideas of the theory proposed here are very simple, and do not require equations or sophisticated jargon. If, as I believe, the money system has quantum properties of its own, then one could imagine a historical scenario where things developed in a different order, and quantum physicists were using economics analogies to explain their crazy ideas (though it is hard to think of physicists being accused of economics envy, or of borrowing from the high prestige of social science).
Some of the remoteness of quantum mechanics has also worn down as the field is increasingly adopted by technologists and featured in the media. For example, the logic circuits of quantum computers – whose design is turning into something of a cottage industry in many countries – rely explicitly on quantum principles to make calculations far faster than a classical computer. And if the price of a financial derivative, such as an option to buy a stock at a future date, can be calculated more rapidly and efficiently using a quantum model running on a quantum computer, then a degree in quantum financial engineering may turn out to be a rather lucrative qualification – a ‘quant’ (short for quantitative finance) degree with bells on.
Quantum processes begin to seem even less remote when we consider the hypothesis advanced by a number of scientists such as the physicist Roger Penrose that the mind itself is a quantum computer.20 While this hypothesis remains controversial, it is consistent with the impression, at least from some interpretations of quantum mechanics, that consciousness seems to be inextricably linked with quantum processes (not to mention the fact that we live in a quantum universe). It is also buttressed by recent findings in quantum biology, which show how quantum effects are exploited in everything from photosynthesis in plants, to navigation by birds.21 If this is the case, then things like quantum cognition begin to seem less like metaphor, as it is usually treated, than physical fact.
I will also argue that, just as understanding quantum physics helps to understand economics, it also works the other way: understanding how money works in the economy makes quantum physics seem a lot more accessible. Consider for example the notion that a particle’s position is described by a probabilistic ‘wave function’ which only ‘collapses’ to a unique value when measured by an observer. That sounds impossibly abstract, until you realise that the price of something like a house is also fundamentally indeterminate, until it ‘collapses’ to a single value when it is sold to a buyer.
The notion of entanglement between particles, where the status of one particle is instantaneously correlated with measurements on its entangled twin, also seems less bizarre when financial contracts such as loans enforce a similar link between creditor and debtor. And the idea that quantum particles move in discrete jumps, rather than continuously, sounds less mysterious and counterintuitive when you compare it to buying something with a credit card at a store, where the money goes out in a single jump rather than draining out in a steady flow like water. When these properties were observed in the behaviour of subatomic particles, they led to the development of quantum mechanics as we now know it – but exactly the same argument can be applied to say that we need a quantum theory of money. Perhaps the main difference is that in quantum mechanics, the underlying explanation for phenomena such as wave function collapse or entanglement is unknown, and the topic of much controversy; while in the economy, these are just what we are used to.
It is sometimes said that, in order to free ourselves from the mechanistic worldview imposed on us by society, we need to familiarise ourselves with the mysteries of quantum physics, which offer a radically different picture.22 But we don’t need a PhD in quantum physics or access to a particle accelerator to accomplish this. We just need to look more closely at money. When we compare quantum physics with our everyday notion of how objects exist and move around it makes no sense; but when we compare it with monetary transactions it all seems rather reasonable. Money therefore has much to tell us about the quantum world. (And perhaps money really does make the world go round.)
The approach here is therefore not so much to use quantum physics as an analogy for social processes, or to assert a direct physical link between the two, but instead to start with the idea that money is a quantum phenomenon in its own right, with its own versions of a measurement process, entanglement, and so on, of which we all have direct experience.23 Nor of course is it to say that the economy obeys immutable laws. A mortgage entangles the debtor and creditor in a formal sense, but a default might be a negotiated process rather than a sudden event. A money object has an exact value within a certain monetary space, but depends on things like locally-enforced laws or norms. One way to interpret this is to say that the money system is our best attempt to engineer a physics-like quantum system; but another, as we will see later, is to say that money is embedded in a larger, more complex social quantum system with competing forms of entanglement. However, the quantum approach was initially adopted in physics, not for abstruse philosophical reasons, but for pragmatic ones, since it was needed in order to mathematically describe physical reality; and from a similarly pragmatic viewpoint I will argue that the more pressing question is not one of how to interpret quantum ideas (a question which is still debated in physics), but of how they can be put to use in economics – and why it took so long for their relevance to be recognised.
While discussing these concepts with both economists and physicists I soon found that, while many were supportive or at least tolerant, a rather common initial reaction was a visceral resistance to my use of words such as ‘entanglement’ to describe the monetary system that went beyond normal scepticism. One economist insisted I was just introducing new words for things like contracts, as I would know if I had ever taken an economics course, while physicists (who sometimes confuse their equations with the underlying reality) tended to see these as technical terms unique to their own domain, subject to control and quarantine. But John Maynard Keynes for one spoke about ‘economic entanglement’ in 1933 (see page 305), before Schrödinger introduced the physics version in a 1935 paper.24 As physicists Gabriela Barreto Lemos and Kathryn Schaffer noted in a 2018 essay for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, ‘scholars in the arts, humanities, and many interdisciplinary fields now write about the “observer effect” and “entanglement” – technical physics concepts – in work that has a distinctly social or political (that is, not primarily physics-based) emphasis’.* My own use of such terms is intended to carefully relate the money system to the broader findings of quantum social science, not to mention their other meanings in the English language.† And I felt the objections seemed to be more about an instinctual response to some perceived transgression of boundaries on my part than about anything of substance. Words are themselves an entangling device, in physics or in economics, and in binding minds and ideas together they can also define limits and remove flexibility. So while the path of least resistance may have been to stick with neutral language and avoid such conflicts, why ignore the obvious connections? If physicists once felt fit to adopt a particular set of mathematical tools, why shouldn’t social scientists do the same now? More deeply, is there something about quantum behaviour that repels some part of us? As we will see later, there is much to be learned by following these threads, even or especially when they lead to topics that are considered off-limits or even taboo in economics.
Finally, one may reasonably object that economics should not be just about money and finance; it should also be about quality of life, social justice, power, the environment, and so on, none of which lend themselves easily to a monetary description. If quantum economics doesn’t address these issues, then how is it any better than the existing neoclassical approach, which at least claims to be about happiness? Yet I will argue that recognising the importance of money affects how we see all of these things, and that limiting the domain of economics can paradoxically make it more useful and relevant. And while finance employs relatively few people directly, my own motivation for getting involved in economics grew out of a response to the 2007–08 financial crisis which affected the lives of many people, and not just bankers.
The idea of how much – of quantifying value, of putting numbers on the world – goes to the very heart of what economics should be about, which is monetary transactions. Following this thread will reveal new ways of approaching our gravest economic issues including inequality, financial stability, and the environmental crisis, while giving fresh insights into the sources of economic vibrancy and energy. Instead of predicting an economy that is efficient, fair, and stable, quantum economics suggests one that is creative but tends towards inequity and instability – rather like the world we live in.
Quantum knitting
The aim of this book is to look at a very simple question – what we mean in economics by the expression how much. Following the spirit, but not the letter, of quantum physics, we start with the small and knit our way out to form a cohesive whole. The goal of the book is not to present a new vision of society or expand human consciousness – as desirable as those may be – but to make economics smaller but more grounded and realistic. The book is divided into two parts. The first part, Quantum Money, begins by tracing the history of quantum physics from its discovery at the start of the twentieth century, and explaining some of its key principles. We then relate these findings to the dualistic properties of money, a substance which is as important to the economy as water is to life. We show how money is produced in the modern economy; and reveal how the banking system exploits the magical properties of money to produce wealth, especially for the bankers.
In the second part, The Quantum Economy, we expand the picture to include the economy as a whole. We first delve into the field of quantitative finance. As we’ll see, the equations behind these derivatives grew out of the project to build a nuclear bomb – economists who resist the idea of importing ideas from quantum physics might be surprised to learn that it already happened, if in a rather distorted way – and this connection to quantum mechanics has been rediscovered in recent years by experts working in the area of quantum finance. Similarly, the mathematics of game theory, which underlies much of mainstream economic theory, assumes rational behaviour; but rather than acting as individual atoms when making financial decisions, we behave more like members of an entangled complex system, and operate according to a kind of quantum logic which resonates in interesting ways with the quantum properties of money. We will see that many key aspects of the economy emerge as the product of our quantum money system. The book concludes by drawing these ideas into recommendations for the reform of economics.
Along the way we will explore topics including:
Money. During the gold standard, money was thought to be a real thing, while today it is more commonly seen as a number representing virtual government-backed debt, except for cybercurrencies which don’t quite fit with either picture. We will show that money is both real and virtual, in the same way that light is both particle and wave.
Value. Classical economists such as Adam Smith believed that money was measuring labour, neoclassical economists that it measures utility. According to quantum economics, money is measuring – money, which is a form of information.
Pricing. In conventional theory, prices are thought to be determined by imaginary supply and demand curves, which – as we’ll see – have no empirical backing. Quantum economics shows that price is an uncertain property which is in a sense created through transactions – just as a particle’s position or momentum is inherently indeterminate until measured. This has implications for areas such as quantitative finance, but also for the dynamics of things like the price of your house or the value of your pension.
Debt. Mainstream economics treats debt as something that comes out in the wash – what one person owes, another is owed, so they cancel out. According to quantum economics, though, debt is a force that entangles people, institutions, and the financial system as a whole in ways that are difficult to understand and potentially destructive. This is a concern, given that global debt is now estimated at over $200 trillion.25
Risk. Mainstream theory assumes that markets are stable, efficient, and self-correcting. Quantum economics shows that none of these assumptions stand up, which means that the risk models currently taught in universities and business schools, and relied upon by businesses and financial institutions, are not fit for purpose (as many guessed after the last crisis). We need to update our approach to handling risk.
Decision-making. Mainstream models assume that consumers make rational decisions, with the occasional adjustment to account for behavioural factors such as ‘bounded rationality’ (i.e. the fact that we make decisions under informational and cognitive limitations).26 Quantum economics admits no such bound, and treats things like emotion and entanglement as integral to the decision-making process.
Finance. Mainstream models downplay or ignore the role of the financial sector, which is one reason financial crises always come as a surprise. Quantum economics puts money in its rightful place at the centre of economics, and offers new tools for understanding the financial system. Only by acknowledging the dynamic and unstable nature of the system can we find ways to better control it. Nowhere is this more true than with the quadrillion dollars’-worth of complex derivatives which hang over the economy.
Inequality. Mainstream economics was inspired by classical thermodynamics and concentrates on optimising average wealth (like the average temperature) instead of its distribution. But the dynamics of money tend towards disequilibrium and asymmetry. This helps to explain why a group of people who could fit into the first-class cabin of a jet now control as much wealth as half the world’s population.27
Happiness. Mainstream economics assumes that people act to optimise their own utility, which leads to maximum societal happiness. Quantum economics draws on the field of quantum game theory to show that the truth is more complicated, in part because people are entangled – and asks whether economics is the best tool for thinking about happiness in the first place.
Environment. As quantum cognition shows, context is important when we take decisions. The inbuilt biases of neoclassical economics have meant that for too long, we have been ignoring the wider environmental context, with very visible effects. Quantum economics points the way to an economics which can, not account for, but make space for fuzzy, uncertain quantities such as the health of ecosystems; while also addressing one of the main contributors to environmental damage, which is our money system.
Ethics. Just as money has been excluded from mainstream economics, so has ethics. One reason is that, as with classical physics, the economy has been treated as an essentially mechanistic system where things like will, volition, and personal responsibility seem to have no role. Another is the fact that, ironically, economics itself has been influenced by money. Quantum economics is the ethical alternative.
Modelling. Orthodox models of the economy used by everyone from economists to central banks to policy-makers are based on a Newtonian, mechanistic view of human interactions and emphasise qualities such as stability, rationality, and efficiency. Quantum economics starts from a different set of assumptions, and leads to models that exploit techniques developed for the study of complex, living systems. A word of warning: this area is new, so while I will concentrate on tested methods, not all of the ideas and techniques described here have been demonstrated yet in an economics context. I will make it clear when that is the case.‡
*
Quantum economics will therefore provide a consistent and much-needed alternative to the mainstream approach: one which is rooted in recent developments in areas such as social science, information theory, and complexity; which radically challenges our most basic assumptions about how the economy works; and which leads to concrete recommendations for the reform of economics. We begin by showing what happened over a century ago, when a physicist working for a lighting company asked how much – and came up with a rather surprising answer.
Notes
1. Robbins, L. (1932), An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London: Macmillan). This has been described as ‘perhaps the most commonly accepted current definition of the subject’ in Backhouse, R.E., and Medema, S. (2009), ‘Retrospectives: On the Definition of Economics’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 23 (1), p. 225; and the ‘dominant definition’ in Keen, S. (2017), ‘Ricardo’s Vice and the Virtues of Industrial Diversity’, American Affairs, 1 (3), pp. 85–98.
2. Mankiw, N.G. (2016), Principles of Economics (8th edn) (Boston, MA: Cengage Learning), p. 4.
3. Martin, F. (2013), Money: The Unauthorised Biography (London: Random House), p. 224.
4. Samuelson, P.A., and Nordhaus, W.D. (2001), Economics (17th edn) (Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill), p. 511.
5. Bouchaud, J.-P. (2008), ‘Economics needs a scientific revolution’, Nature, 455, p. 1181.
6. Chang, H.-J., and Aldred, J. (11 May 2014), ‘After the crash, we need a revolution in the way we teach economics’, The Observer.
7. Economic and Social Research Council (20 April 2017), Innovative new network will ‘revolutionise’ how we study the economy. Retrieved from http://www.esrc.ac.uk/news-events-and-publications/news/news-items/innovative-new-network-will-revolutionise-how-we-study-the-economy/
8. Orrell, D. (2010), Economyths: Ten Ways That Economics Gets It Wrong (London: Icon Books).
9. Bohm, D. (1974), in J. Lewis, Beyond Chance and Necessity (London: Garnstone Press), pp. 128–35.
10. See for example: Busemeyer, J., and Bruza, P. (2012), Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Wendt, A. (2015), Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
11. Quoted in Buchanan, M. (5 September 2011), ‘Quantum minds: Why we think like quarks’, New Scientist.
12. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
13. Orrell, D., and Chlupatý, R. (2016), The Evolution of Money (New York: Columbia University Press). See also Orrell, D. (2016), ‘A quantum theory of money and value’, Economic Thought, 5 (2), pp. 19–36; Orrell, D. (2017), ‘A Quantum Theory of Money and Value, Part 2: The Uncertainty Principle’, Economic Thought, 6 (2), pp. 14–26; and Orrell, D. (2015), Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2015: Money is the Message (Transmediale), retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9olnMFdRIwshkq3nfaF2nBzbFAQRvLmy
14. Letter from Einstein to D. Lipkin, 5 July 1952, Einstein Archives. In: Fine, A. (1996), The Shaky Game (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
15. Carroll, S. (2016), The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (New York: Dutton).
16. Gell-Mann, M. (1994), The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (New York: Freeman).
17. Samuelson, P.A. (11 December 1970), ‘Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics’, Prize Lecture, Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, p. 69.
18. Samuelson, P.A. (1979), ‘A quantum theory model of economics: is the co-ordinating entrepreneur just worth his profit?’, in The collected scientific papers of Paul A. Samuelson (Vol. 4, pp. 104–10) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Mirowski, P. (1989), More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 383.
19. Mirowski, P. (1989), More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 221.
20. Penrose, R. (1989), The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
21. Lambert, N., Chen, Y.-N., Cheng, Y.-C., Li, C.-M., Chen, G.-Y., and Nori, F. (2013), ‘Quantum biology’, Nature Physics, 9 (1), pp. 10–18.
22. See e.g. Zohar, D., and Marshall, I. (1993), The Quantum Society (London: Flamingo), p. 16.
23. For a discussion, see for example: Atmanspacher, H., Römer, H., and Walach, H. (2002), ‘Weak quantum theory: Complementarity and entanglement in physics and beyond’, Foundations of Physics, 32 (3), pp. 379–406.
24. Schrödinger, E. (1935), ‘Discussion of probability relations between separated systems’, Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 31 (4), pp. 555–63. For a more recent discussion of financial entanglement, see: China Center for International Economic Exchanges (11 November 2016), ‘Economic quantum entanglement may subvert the traditional concept of international competition’. Retrieved from: http://english.cciee.org.cn/archiver/ccieeen/UpFile/Files/Default/20161202084100609671.pdf
25. Institute of International Finance (June 2017), Global Debt Monitor. Retrieved from https://www.iif.com/publication/global-debt-monitor/global-debt-monitor-june-2017
26. The expression ‘bounded rationality’ was coined by Herbert A. Simon, who wrote that ‘The first consequence of the principle of bounded rationality is that the intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it.’ Simon, H.A. (1957), Models of Man: Social and Rational (New York: John Wiley), p. 198.
27. Oxfam (16 January 2017), Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world. Retrieved from http://oxf.am/ZLE4.
* ‘Many scientists simply object to the idea that scientific ideas could have meaning outside their original contexts.’ Lemos, G.B., and Schaffer, K. (5 February 2018), ‘Obliterating Thingness: an Introduction to the “What” and the “So What” of Quantum Physics’. Retrieved from: http://www.kathrynschaffer.com/documents/obliterating-thingness.pdf
† As the political scientist – and leader in the area of quantum social science – Alexander Wendt notes: ‘money is not only a perfect illustration, but arguably (along with language) one of the most fundamental “quantum” institutions in all of society.’ Personal communication, 2017.
‡ Readers interested in mathematical details are referred to: ‘Introduction to the mathematics of quantum economics’, available at davidorrell.com/quantumeconomicsmath.pdf
PART 1
QUANTUM MONEY
CHAPTER 1
THE QUANTUM WORLD
The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then.
Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? (1944)
Natura non facit saltum (Nature makes no sudden leaps) Epitaph of Alfred Marshall’s 1890 Principles of Economics.
It remained there until the final edition of 1920
Money, according to the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, is a communication medium that conveys the idea of value. To understand the properties of this remarkable medium, we begin by looking at a different kind of exchange – that of energy between particles. This chapter traces the quantum revolution in physics which began in the early twentieth century, and shows how its findings changed the way we think about things like matter, space, time, causality, and even the economy. As we’ll see, economic transactions have more in common with the quantum world than one might think.
How much? This was the question pondered by the German physicist Max Planck in the late nineteenth century. How much energy is carried by a light beam?
Planck’s employer was the Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology, near Berlin, and his work was sponsored by a local electrical company. Their interest was in getting the most light out of a bulb with the least energy. A first step was to figure out a formula for how much light is produced when you heat something up.
Anyone who has placed a poker in a fire knows that as the metal heats it begins to glow red, then yellow, and then – at very high temperatures – a bluish white. When you turn on a lightbulb the thin filament inside does the same thing, except that it skips quickly to the white.
Scientists at the time knew that light was a wave, and that both the colour and the energy were determined by the frequency (or the closeness of the wave crests).* When something is heated, it emits light at a range of frequencies which depend on the temperature. An object at room temperature emits light in the low-frequency, low-energy infrared range, which is visible only through night-vision goggles. At extremely high temperatures, most of the light is in the invisible, high-frequency, high-energy ultraviolet range, but the object appears to our eyes as white – which is a mix of all frequencies.
The problem was with conventional theory, which predicted that a heated object would always emit light at all frequencies. Since high-frequency waves carry a lot of energy, an implication was that the energy would be channelled into arbitrarily short wavelengths of unlimited power. The question how much was therefore giving a puzzling answer: infinitely much. Instead of warming us, a log fire would vaporise us.
Few people at the time were calling for a revolution in physics. When Planck was contemplating a career in physics, a professor advised him against it, saying that ‘in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes’.1 In 1894 the American physicist and future Nobel laureate Albert Michelson had announced that ‘it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice’.2 And Planck was not setting out to disrupt the field when he found a way in 1901 to model the radiation distribution with a neat formula. He just needed to use a little trick, which was to assume that the energy of light could only be transmitted in discrete units. The energy of one of these units was equal to its frequency multiplied by a new and very small number, denoted h. To name these little parcels of energy, Planck chose the word quanta.
The only problem with this assumption was that it violated the time-honoured principle that Natura non facit saltum: nature makes no sudden leaps. Or as Aristotle put it in Metaphysics, ‘the observed facts show that nature is not a series of episodes, like a bad tragedy’. But as Planck later wrote, he considered it ‘a purely formal assumption … actually I did not think much about it’.3
Thus was launched what became known as the quantum revolution. It took a while for the waves of this revolution to lap onto the shores (let alone the textbooks) of academic economics, but as we’ll see, it promises to have the same effect on that field as it did on physics.
A century after Planck, the Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas, famous for his theory of ‘rational expectations’, echoed Planck’s teacher when he told his audience in 2003: ‘My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.’4 All that remained, it turned out, was to fill a few holes – like the ones left by the great financial crisis that started just a few years later, when the economy took a sudden leap off a cliff. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The colour of their money
While Planck’s quanta may have been intended as just a pragmatic technical fix, they soon proved useful in solving another problem, which had to do with the photoelectric effect. This refers to the tendency of some materials to emit electrons when light is shone on them. Physicists found for example that, if they placed two metal plates close together in an evacuated jar, connected the plates to the opposite poles of a battery, and shone a light on the negatively charged plate, then the light dislodged electrons which raced across to the other, positively charged plate, in the form of a sudden spark.
According again to the classical theory, the energy of the emitted electrons should depend only on the intensity (i.e. brightness) of the light source. Shine a bright light, get a bigger spark. But in practice, it turned out that what really mattered was the colour, or frequency: high-frequency blue light created a bigger spark than low-frequency red light. And each material had a cut-off frequency, below which no amount of light would work. In a 1905 paper – one of a stream of results including his famous formula E=mc2 which would define the new physics – Albert Einstein showed that the photoelectric effect could be explained by use of Planck’s quanta.
According to Einstein’s theory, electrons were emitted when individual quanta of light struck individual atoms. Think of the metal plate as a marketplace of atoms, each selling electrons at a particular price, measured in energy; and think of the quanta of light as being the spending power of individual shoppers. Shining red light onto the plate is like sending a lot of low-budget shoppers into the market. No matter how many there are, if none of them have sufficient cash then no electrons are released – they can look but they cannot buy. High-frequency blue light, on the other hand, is an army of high-spenders. So what counts is not just the number of shoppers (the brightness) but how much each shopper can spend (the colour).
Einstein of course did not use this metaphor, and he gave his paper the careful title ‘On an heuristic† viewpoint concerning the production and transformation of light’. But it was clear that unlike Planck, he saw these light quanta – which later became known as photons – not as mathematical abstractions, but as real things. As he wrote, ‘Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta localized at points in space, moving without dividing and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities.’5
This sounds mysterious when applied to light, but again is similar to the way that we make financial transactions. When you receive your pay packet, there isn’t a little needle which shows the money draining into your account. Instead it goes as a single discrete lump. The same when you use your credit card at a store, or when a bank creates new funds by issuing a loan. And it is impossible to make payments smaller than a certain amount, such as a cent.
Most physicists responded to these new ideas in the same way most mainstream economists react to disruptive ideas today, which was to ignore them totally and hope they went away. But the question how much soon proved useful in solving another problem, which this time went right to the heart of what we mean by things – the atom.
Atomic auction
In the early twentieth century it was understood, at least according to the classical model, that there were two basic kinds of phenomena: waves and particles. Light, for example, was a wave, an electromagnetic perturbation in the ether, which played the role of a background medium through which the wave moved (this substance was later dropped, as discussed below). Objects, on the other hand, were made of atoms, and these in turn were composed of negatively charged electrons circling a small, but heavy, positively-charged nucleus like planets around the Sun. The energy of an electron depended on the radius of its path. The simplest atom, hydrogen, had only one electron, but larger atoms had multiple electrons at different energy levels.
The solar system model, as it was known, did explain a number of features of atoms, for example experimental results which showed that they mostly consisted of empty space. Fire small charged particles at a thin foil, and most pass through as if there were nothing there, while only a few bounce back. Again, though, there were a couple of problems. One was that the model didn’t spell out why atoms of a particular substance, say hydrogen, are identical with one another. What made electrons of different atoms always whizz round at the same radius? An even more serious issue was that, according to classical theory, a circulating electron should immediately radiate away all its energy and crash into the nucleus, like Mars colliding with the Sun.
In 1912 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed a novel solution. If the energy of light was limited to discrete units, as Planck said, then so perhaps was the energy of the electron.6 This would mean that electrons could not have a continuous range of energies, but would be limited to multiples of some lowest base amount. And the reason an electron couldn’t radiate away all its energy was because it could only give it away in lumps, and it couldn’t go to zero. Electrons could gain energy, for example from a passing photon, and move to a higher level; or they could lose energy, by emitting a photon, and go down a level; but the change in energy would again always be a multiple of the base amount. The process was like an auction in which the auctioneer sets a certain base price, and only accepts bids that are multiples of some amount. The price can never go below the minimum, and can only go up in discrete steps.
Evidence that Bohr was on the right track was provided by the fact that his model could help to explain another puzzle. It was known that atoms of different elements emit and absorb light at certain distinct, characteristic frequencies or spectra (this is the basis of spectroscopy, used to determine the chemical makeup of a material). This property was again inconsistent with classical physics, which predicted a continuous spectrum; but starting with the simplest case of hydrogen, Bohr showed that it matched his model rather well. The favoured frequencies just reflected the possible transitions from one energy level to another, as electrons absorbed or released photons.
In Bohr’s model, the analogue solar system picture was therefore replaced with a digital one in which electrons could live only in certain layers arranged in concentric rings around the nucleus. The inner layer could hold at most two electrons. The next layer out could hold a maximum of eight. If the atoms of a particular element had a full outer layer, then that element was chemically stable. Helium, for example, has only two electrons, both in the inner layer. Neon has ten electrons, with two in the inner layer, and eight in the next layer, so again it is a full house. Sodium, however, has eleven electrons, with the extra one in the third layer, and is so reactive that it can explode in contact with water. Chlorine, a poisonous gas, has seventeen electrons – organised as 2-8-7 – so is one short in the third layer. The combination of the two is stable because sodium shares its extra electron with chlorine. This is a useful feature, since otherwise sodium chloride – aka table salt – would presumably be both explosive and poisonous, which would limit its attraction as a seasoning (the taste of salt is an example of an emergent property, which, as discussed later, implies that it is not the same as the sum of its parts).
