That is the primary of a brand new collection that shall be revealed every day throughout the remainder of this week.

The primary quantum economics collection after which the ensuing quantum essays might be discovered right here, however from the outset, while we knew the unique ten-part collection that laid the inspiration for concepts on this subject was a place to begin, there was at all times going to be a second collection of essays, primarily based on ideas in quantum biology, which is how and why Jacqueline, my spouse and co-creator of those concepts, had turn into curious about these points within the first place. 

This publish contains the prologue to that collection, which is able to present a deeper reasoning for our considering on what we expect is a key subject with the potential to ship a brand new understanding of the financial system. 

Quantum economics from the angle of quantum biology: the prologue

Economics, like physics earlier than Einstein, has lengthy believed the world behaves in accordance with easy, linear guidelines.  It assumes equilibrium, excellent info, and frictionless trade.  However life isn’t like that, and neither are economies.  They’re open, unstable methods by way of which power flows, typically creatively, typically destructively.

When Einstein proposed that mild was fabricated from photons, that are discrete packets of power, he modified how we understood the bodily world.  Vitality was now not an summary wave; it was embodied, indivisible, and able to transformation solely when absorbed by one thing receptive.  The identical is true of human economies.  The true power inside them isn’t capital or land or cash, however labour within the type of human effort, intelligence, and care.

In what follows, I borrow metaphors from physics and biology to discover this concept.  Labour is handled because the photon; worth because the electron; society because the floor that should soak up each if life is to move.  When that absorption fails, power is wasted, as in mild mirrored from a mirror.  When establishments malfunction or energy is hoarded, worth leaks away like electrons escaping from a damaged chain.  When oxygen – represented on this metaphor as ecology, belief, democracy – is withdrawn, the system suffocates.

This isn’t science pretending to elucidate society.  It’s science used as an analogy to light up the residing, energetic character of financial life and to point out how our present system squanders it.

The metaphors matter as a result of they reveal what mainstream economics hides: that power and objective, not equilibrium, make life potential; that worth is determined by absorption, not extraction; and that waste, with regards to human labour, is not only inefficiency however ethical failure.

The chapters that comply with hint this story: from the discharge of power by way of work, to its diversion into mirrors of hypothesis, to the institutional circuits that maintain or poison the move, and at last to the oxygen that permits renewal.  The query operating by way of all of it is easy however decisive: are we utilizing our power to maintain life, or to destroy it?

The primary full chapter on this collection shall be revealed tomorrow.