Quantum Economics

David Orrell ()
Additional contact information
David Orrell: Systems Forecasting, Toronto, Canada

Economic Thought, 2018, vol. 7, issue 2, 63 - 81

Abstract: A decade after the financial crisis, there is a growing consensus that the neoclassical approach to economics has failed, and that new approaches are needed. This paper argues that economics has been trying to solve the wrong problem. Economics sees itself as the science of scarcity, but instead it should be the science of money. Just as physicists' ideas about quantum matter were formed by studying the exchange of particles at the subatomic level, so economics should begin by analysing the properties of money-based transactions, which like quantum entities have a fundamentally dualistic nature. By building on ideas from quantum money, quantum finance and quantum social science, this paper shows that the economy is an archetypal example of a quantum social system, complete with its own versions of measurement uncertainty, entanglement, and so on. This leads to a proposal for a quantum economics, which is to neoclassical economics what quantum physics is to classical physics.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://et.worldeconomicsassociation.org/papers/quantum-economics/ (text/html)
http://et.worldeconomicsassociation.org/files/2018/11/WEA-ET-7-2-Orrell.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wea:econth:v:7:y:2018:i:2:p:63

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Thought is currently edited by Kyla Rushman

More articles in Economic Thought from World Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake McMurchie ().