Origins
The origins of quantum economics can be traced back to the works of prominent economists of the past. Quantum economists refer to Adam Smith’s distinction between money and money’s worth promoted in his Wealth of Nations:
| “ | The great wheel of circulation is altogether different from the goods which are circulated by means of it. The revenue of the society consists altogether in those goods, and not in the wheel that circulates them. In computing either the gross or the net revenue of any society, we must always, from their whole annual circulation and goods, deduct the whole value of the money, of which not a single farthing can ever make any part of either. | ” |
| — Adam Smith |
In this passage Adam Smith emphasizes that money is not a product, but the social form of output. Karl Marx too wrote that money is the social form of value:
| “ | In the form of money, all properties of the commodity as exchange value appear as an object distinct from it, as a form of social existence separated from the natural existence of the commidity. | ” |
| — Karl Marx |
Quantum economists refer also to David Ricardo’s idea that commodities cannot measure value because their value fluctuates:
| “ | The only qualities necessary to make a measure of value a perfect one are, that it should itself have value, and that that value should be itself invariable, in the same manner as in a perfect measure of length the measure should have length and that length should be neither liable to be increased or diminished; or in a measure of weight that it should have weight and that such weight should be constant. | ” |
| — David Ricardo |
Léon Walras’s view of money as a purely numerical, adimensional object („Le mot franc est le nom d'une chose qui n'existe pas“) is another element adopted by quantum economists. They also revive Jean-Baptiste Say’s Law, although in a slightly different sense than usually retained. By analyzing the accounting logic of payments and production, quantum economists claim that global supply and global demand are necessarily identical at every instant in time. Quantum economists take inspiration from the capital theory of Eugen Böhm von Bawerk – in particular his work on the relation between capital and time – and to Knut Wicksell and his idea that money is endogenously created by banks. Perhaps the most crucial author to quantum economists is John Maynard Keynes. Bernard Schmitt was inspired by his idea that economic theory ought to integrate the nature of money and the role of banks in a “monetary theory of production”. Keynes noted that money is a spontaneous acknowledgement of debt, which is entered into the bank’s ledger in a two-sided operation. Other Keynesian insights adopted by quantum economists are his choice of the wage unit as the measure of value, as well as his idea that the macroeconomic identities between global demand and global supply, and between saving and investment, are logical identities, rather than equilibrium conditions:
| “ | The prevalence of the idea that savings and investment, taken in their straightforward sense, can differ from one another, is to be explained, I think, by an optical illusion due to regarding an individual depositor’s relation to his bank as being a one-sided transaction, instead of seeing it as the two sided transaction which it actually is. | ” |
| — John Maynard Keynes |
Read more about this topic: Quantum Economics
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
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—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)