This is the first of a new series that will be published daily during the rest of this week.
The first quantum economics series and then the resulting quantum essays can be found here, but from the outset, whilst we knew the original ten-part series that laid the foundation for ideas on this issue was a starting point, there was always going to be a second series of essays, based on concepts in quantum biology, which is how and why Jacqueline, my wife and co-creator of these ideas, had become interested in these issues in the first place.
This post includes the prologue to that series, which will provide a deeper reasoning for our thinking on what we think is a key issue with the potential to deliver a new understanding of the economy.
Quantum economics from the perspective of quantum biology: the prologue
Economics, like physics before Einstein, has long believed the world behaves according to simple, linear rules. It assumes equilibrium, perfect information, and frictionless exchange. But life is not like that, and neither are economies. They are open, unstable systems through which energy flows, sometimes creatively, sometimes destructively.
When Einstein proposed that light was made of photons, which are discrete packets of energy, he changed how we understood the physical world. Energy was no longer an abstract wave; it was embodied, indivisible, and capable of transformation only when absorbed by something receptive. The same is true of human economies. The real energy within them is not capital or land or money, but labour in the form of human effort, intelligence, and care.
In what follows, I borrow metaphors from physics and biology to explore this idea. Labour is treated as the photon; value as the electron; society as the surface that must absorb both if life is to flow. When that absorption fails, energy is wasted, as in light reflected from a mirror. When institutions malfunction or power is hoarded, value leaks away like electrons escaping from a broken chain. When oxygen - represented in this metaphor as ecology, trust, democracy - is withdrawn, the system suffocates.
This is not science pretending to explain society. It is science used as an analogy to illuminate the living, energetic character of economic life and to show how our current system squanders it.
The metaphors matter because they reveal what mainstream economics hides: that energy and purpose, not equilibrium, make life possible; that value depends on absorption, not extraction; and that waste, when it comes to human labour, is not just inefficiency but moral failure.
The chapters that follow trace this story: from the release of energy through work, to its diversion into mirrors of speculation, to the institutional circuits that sustain or poison the flow, and finally to the oxygen that allows renewal. The question running through it all is simple but decisive: are we using our energy to sustain life, or to destroy it?
The first full chapter in this series will be published tomorrow.
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I love all this but in answer to your question, we seem to have got into the bad habit of mis-directing the energy of life or allowing too few to have it.
If you are an economics expert and Professor in the subject, as you seem to claim, how have you missed basically all of modern economic theory?
Classical economics does assume equilibrium, perfect information and frictionless exchange, but NO real economists use classical theory any more.
Equilibrium has been replaced by dynamic and behavioural models such as DSGE.
Perfect information has been addressed in various forms, including information economics, behaviour theory, game theory, principal-agent models, market/mechanism design to name but some.
The above models also deal with the friction costs in an economy.
Many Nobel prizes have been won for dealing with the exact problems with classical economics, but this seems to have passed you by completely.
It also amused me that whilst you are saying that classical economics is wrong (true but immaterial as its not in use past school level) you then achieve to the labour theory of value in your post, saying labour is the real unit of “energy”.
Yet LTV has long been discredited.
You also seem keen to have a centrally planned and directed economy. How, if economic theories currently available give poor forecasts, are you going to manage to create better outcomes from a planned system? Better guesses?
The only people who claim all this are economists
The rest of academia notes that unless you asusme the things I will be debunking you never get pubished in an economics journal, or get appointed to a department even.
Your claims are totally false.
You might say economosts rigged the market and then delivered the falsehoods to justify doing so.
Not sure where to start.
Economists don’t claim classical economics is right. Which is why newer theories have been developed which deal with many of the issues or treat them in totally new ways. In practice those theories match the real world to a far better degree.
But if you are going to debunk things, it might be worth understanding what theories are actually current in the field and what they actually say and mean.
By the same logic, two of your favourite theories, the Labour Theory or Value and Modern Monetary Theory have both been shown to be deeply flawed. If nothing else, if you argue that classical or Keynesian economics is unsound, then you should also argue that MMT is inherently so as it is underpinned by Keynesian functional finance.
I am also a little disappointed and disturbed that someone claiming to be a Professor in the field of economics seems not to have got past A level standards. Students will certainly be learning modern theory in their first year of undergrad.
Very politely – this is your last comment precisely because you are dissembling (I am being polite).
Rewthinking Economics exists precisley because it is needed to tackle the abusive activity passing itself off as economics is still being taught in our universities – and is as I describe. It teaches low grade mathjs that only woks on the basis I describe and the whiole of macro is based on the assumptions I describe – but maybe you never got that far?
DSGE models (Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) resolve to …. equilibrium.
PS the friction is in their models because they wont resolve.
A better model is System dynamics now used by engineers the world over whilst economists are still stuck in equilibrium. System dynamics models such as Vinsim, Stella and particularly Steve Keens Minsky/Ravel that uses macroeconomic definitions and accounting input in a predator/prey configuration which can model the cycles and so called Great Moderation and subsequent crash in the 2008 GFC.
Perhaps you should read a copy of Debunking Economics by Steve Keen that brings together many of the flaws documented by economists of failing mainstream neoliberal / neoclassical economics that have got us into this mess of austerity, inequality and impoverishment of the lower and middle classes?
Debunking Economics summary for your erudition :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNJSeWlw8a8
45min10s 8 axioms of economic equilibrium 1% chance
https://tube.childrenshealthdefense.eu/w/da49083e-9742-4b11-bc68-53dcb585d3b9
Thanks
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