Quantum Economics: Economics redefined by reality

Chapter1:Quantum economics

Why write this?

Reality is being redefined by science, not by culture, politics or religion.  Quantum mechanics lies at the core of this process.  It matters to economics in these ways:

•  Economics relies on certainties that may be changed by quantum mechanics.  Free will and rational behaviour are examples.

•  The dismal science is in fact the backward science with reasoning that seems as dated as Newtonian classical mechanics.

•  Basing models upon history, as economics nearly always does, is just sophisticated historical chartism and will not work well if my present is your past or if another course is determined by the particles within us!

•  Human behaviour and consciousness may stem from chemical and quantum mechanical processes with different laws than those assumed in behavioural sciences.

All of this calls into question the certainties of our perceptions of, and the confidence we can have in, the systems we have constructed to manage our existence.  Little escapes this judgement and certainly not economics.

Reasoning

Quantum mechanics, the replacement of Newton’s classical mechanics, fascinates me.  Not being intelligent enough to become a theoretical physicist, I enrolled as a lay student of quantum mechanics in a course that will at least give me some understanding of it and make me able to write simple stuff.  I write about it not as a scientist but as a commentator, much like Dennis Potter seeing familiar reality irreversibly transformed in an NHS ward through the eyes of the Singing Detective.

Pooh-poohed by Einstein as spooky action at a distance, quantum mechanics proved him wrong.  Or rather the Danish school of Bohr, Schroedinger (of cat fame), Heisenberg, and later the Northern Irish physicist, John Stewart Bell, did so and did so decisively¹.

Before delving into what the Danish School (as it is known), proved, first let’s see how quantum mechanics is different from other human creative endeavours.  The human creativity invested in the theories of quantum mechanics is, I think greater than that in other human activity – including most forms of art.  This is because the breadth of the vision that underlay, for example, Superpositioning, Entanglement, and Wave or Field theory was breath-taking as hypotheses and visions of the universe before they were proven scientifically true.  And quantum mechanics is superior in that it is observed science; quantum theories only ultimately stand if they match scientific observations.  In contrast, characters in a great novelist’s work will stand whether they match the real world or not, as many of Dostoyevsky’s, Austen’s and Dicken’s characters for example do not.  Similarly in economics, the variables like R*, U*, G* that populate the policy landscape are not merely unproven but entirely unobservable.  That is an inferior form of science if it is