Tuesday 1 February 2022

David Orrell's Feminist Quantum Econ

David Orrell writes in Aeon- 

In her book Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men (2021), the writer Katrine Marçal argues that many useful innovations have failed to catch on because they are deemed ‘too feminine’ by marketers.

But 'marketers' are ignored by entrepreneurs. Men will risk their saving making extremely girly things- e.g. cross your heart bras and tampons and so forth- because they want to get rich.  

A classic example is the wheeled suitcase.

Invented by men and used by men though no doubt women started using them too.  

The wheel was invented in ancient Mesopotamia, however the possibility of attaching it to a case went against the whole idea of men showing off their strength by lugging heavy objects around, which is why wheeled suitcases weren’t a thing until 1972.

Do women really think men want to show off their strength? No. They know from long experience that men are idle sods.  In traditional cultures- e.g. the Kenya of my childhood- the man walks down the street with his hands unencumbered. His wives follow him carrying the groceries and the babies and the kitchen sink. 

Men may well have invented wheels but they also used them wherever it could save them labor- i.e. when Society decided it wasn't cool for a 200 pound man to make his emaciated wife carry everything. 

As Marçal wrote in The Guardian: ‘Gender answers the riddle of why it took 5,000 years for us to put wheels on suitcases.’

Guardian readers might buy that shit. They are all elderly cat people with a deep grudge against penises.  

Quantum is the scientific equivalent of suitcase wheels.

Which were invented by white blokes of ordinary intelligence who, however, better fitted the Thomas Edison stereotype of a practical man who has built a better mouse trap and thus can make a fortune.

By contrast Quantum stuff was very high IQ indeed, but had no direct commercial application, and so smart women and gay dudes and darkies and Chinks and so forth were all welcome to contribute to it. 

The reason this useful innovation hasn’t caught on, or been rolled out, more generally in areas such as economics isn’t because it’s impractical or too hard – it’s because it’s too feminine.

This is nonsense. If ideas from QMT can be profitably applied in Financial Econ or Econometrics then that's exactly what happens.  Orrell himself has made a little money in this way. The problem is that 'Econophysics' cashes out as 'Chartism' and anything which can simulate volatility will be used whether it is hard or mad or merely unfashionable provided it is expected to earn more money than it costs. 

Option pricing models, based on an assumption of efficient markets and which focus on volatility- e.g. Black Scholes- are looking at the behaviour of the error term or 'volatility surface'. It does not matter how this is modelled so as to match what obtains empirically. What is inevitable is that there will be duality between calculation speed and the resource intensitivity of the simulation. But that is an artefact of the model. There is no conjugacy or self-adjointness in the underlying asset class. In essence, all that is happening is a best guess as to how 'netting out' should be done at any given moment. But it is merely a guess. The fact is, there are good reasons why 'Aumann agreement' may not obtain. In other words even people using the same model and with the same priors have reasons to value options differently because their interests differ- i.e. there is agent heterogeneity and thus 'uncorrelated asymmetries' dictating different 'bourgeois strategies'. This could be explained by different 'hedging' and 'income effects'- i.e. the same reasons General equilibriums even without Knightian Uncertainty are 'anything goes'. Thus fintech uncertainty, which is about volatility, is not Knightian. Because of duality regarding calculation speed & complexity, there is something which looks like conjugacy but it is similar to what obtains when deriving supply curves from cost functions or demand curves from implied utility functions. It is merely a matter of the akreibia (grasping after greater precision than the subject matter allows) of the model and has nothing to do with economia- i.e. the proper economic method of dealing with choice under scarcity. No doubt, the dynamics of this type of management, coordinated through the market, has Knightian uncertainty. But this is a coevolved process which is not memoryless. There is a damming up of capacitance diversity. No doubt, there are forgetful functors mapping to any given class of contingent assets. But there are many classes of contingent assets- indeed, by definition, their existence is...wait for it...contingent! If transaction cost and speed is zero, sure, there could be full and faithful functors but, in that case, you would not need language or any type of signaling device. Also evolution would not be a true theory. We would be monads synchronized by an Occassionalist God. 

Obviously, no functor which comes under the rubric of 'co-evolution' can be Abelian, or be otherwise 'intensionally' specifiable, save, perhaps, at the 'end of time'- otherwise there is a better than Godel, teleological, not ontological, proof of God. 

With reference to 'duality' or 'conjugacy' , what is crucial is the notion of 'naturality' or 'non-arbitrariness' or 'canonicity' or 'normal form'. In other words, either this is a field where everybody, no matter how they approach it, would agree that there is some most efficient and productive manner to define its terms or else it is a playground for incontinent pedants and pedagogues smearing themselves with their own shit. 

In other words, either 'intensionality' obtains 'by nature' and we are carving up the world along is joints or as St. Paul puts it 'dividing the word of truth' as God intended or else some stupid Pundits are shitting higher than their arsehole. 

Suppose such 'naturality' or 'canonicity' actually obtained. Then any 'blind' Darwinian process would hit upon it within a few iterations and this would be a 'robust' solution. In other words, even if the thing is 'non-deterministic', we could 'in silico' get 'black boxes' to verify valid solutions very quickly even if the actual proof is in a higher time class. Put another way, though we would not have a 'gnosis' or 'light-box' or  'substantive' theory, still, for any practical purpose, we'd have cheap and cheerful almost 'zero-knowledge' proofs for anything we needed. 

Orrell isn't addressing any of these issues. He is saying 'the reason the unprofitable stuff I do isn't being taken up more widely is because people think it is 'girlie'. Instead of making billions for the hedge fund, it braids its hair and puts on lipstick and then starts kvetching about its period. Clearly, only if more of my useless stuff is done can hedge fund managers show they aint misogynist. They support 'Me Too' and are woke and mindful of the needs of useless types of mathematical masturbation which everybody else dismisses as retarded and like totes 1990s dude.

Or rather, too Female, in a sense to be defined below.

Loosey-goosey shite about how penises are destroying the Universe.  


Now, that assertion will seem ridiculous to many readers for a number of reasons – beginning with the idea that quantum has somehow been ignored or repressed. Quantum physics is widely recognised as being a huge success, and is lauded for its ability to predict and explain the bizarre behaviour of tiny subatomic particles.

Equally we might say that it was bizarre to expect Newton's laws to hold in the realm of the very very small or the very very big.  

For example, quantum physics says that subatomic entities can be in more than one place at the same time (superposition) and show both particle-like behaviours and wave-like behaviours including interference (they can cancel each other out).

What's so strange about that? We would be surprised if the ready at hand heuristics we find useful in our daily life could also be applied on the scale of the very very small or the very very large.  

Something like the position of a particle is inherently indeterminate, and only takes on a definite value when measured through a poorly understood process of wave function collapse.

This is perfectly reasonable. If you are trying to touch something very very small it is likely that your instrument will displace it- precisely because it is so tiny. There may be a scandal for 'Pure Reason' here. There is none for the 'Practical Reason' ordinary people have. 

Particles can also become mysteriously entangled, so that a measurement on one tells us something about an entangled partner, even if it is at the far end of the Universe.

So what? When we do an autopsy on the only kangaroo in our zoo, we are finding out about a large class of animals on the other side of the world. There is no spooky 'action at a distance' here. Similarly, if you happen to bump into a guy from Australia and he tells you about the political situation back home, then in some sense you have acquired knowledge about a distant country whose history and mores may be entirely alien to you. 

The ability to make sense of all this is rightly regarded as one of the triumphs of science.

I can make sense of anything I like. My problem is I can't make good predictions or create cool new tech. QMT is considered a triumph because it has this sort of 'cash value' if only in very arcane fields. On the other hand, if some guys who do QMT have penises then that's a real shame. Penises are very evil. They are destroying the planet by jizzing on everything.  


Everyone also knows that quantum mechanics is both hard and highly counterintuitive, which is why only university graduates in physics and mathematics are typically exposed to it. As one university website once reassured its audience: ‘It’s OK to be a bit baffled by these concepts, since we don’t experience them in our day-to-day lives. It’s only when you look at the tiniest quantum particles – atoms, electrons, photons and the like – that you see intriguing things like superposition and entanglement.’

The same thing might be said by a website dedicated to Feminism or Queer theory. The difference is that the 'baffling' stuff they explore is worthless shite. Indeed, so is Orrell's oeuvre.  


In this view, if quantum ideas haven’t reached a broader audience, that is a good thing, because they would be misunderstood and therefore ripe for abuse.

But nothing can stop me from claiming to have been bitten by a quantum spider from the 33rd dimension which has caused me to acquire the superpower of emitting world historical farts. Thus the law must be changed so that all world leaders have to pay me a lot of money in return for my super-duper quantum farting in their faces. 

As the physicist Sean Carroll stated in his portentously titled book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (2016): ‘No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans – and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas – than quantum mechanics.’

But the history of science has little purchase where Boko Haram or the Taliban rule the roost. It is those nutjobs we should be worrying about. Arguably, Lysenkoism- i.e. a foolish 'Lamarkian' scientific theory- killed more people than any Quantum quack. Eugenics, too, proved to be a horrible idea.  

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek similarly warned of ‘New Age obscurantist appropriations of today’s “hard” sciences which, in order to legitimise their position, invoke the authority of science itself.’ Stand back, social scientists, and leave the heavy lifting to the experts.

Social scientists are welcome to bring in talented mathematicians or computer programmers or whatever to do 'heavy lifting'. But entrepreneurs would do that anyway. That's one reason Bezos is so rich.  In India, we find that political parties do well if they leave a lot of 'heavy lifting' to Prashant Kishore who is good at data diving. 

Quantum economics in particular sounds like ‘physics envy’ taken to its logical conclusion.

No. It sounds like Deepak Chopra's shite.  

Indeed, the assertion that quantum ideas – developed for tiny particles – could have anything to do with human systems such as the economy will seem patently absurd to most physicists. It is well known in physics that quantum effects wash out at larger scales, where classical behaviour dominates.

But since many 'physicists' have penises- or have colleagues who have penises- it follows that they are wrong. Penises are very evil.  

Finally, quantum mechanics isn’t commonly perceived as being feminine.

Which proves it probably has a dick though it may not be jizzing incessantly in your face. Still, dicks are bound to destroy the universe by jizzing all over it sooner or later. That's why you should buy books titled 'Quantum economic methods to stop the universe getting jizzed on to extinction'.  

For one thing, it is the ultimate example of a ‘hard’ reductionist science – it even has ‘mechanics’ in the name. Its ‘founding fathers’ were mostly young men in their 20s.

i.e. had dicks which were constantly jizzing 

In the postwar era it gained much of its funding and prestige from its association with nuclear weapons,

which look like dicks and whose jizz is like radio-active dude! 

which are pretty butch (and are one place where quantum effects don’t wash out).

like the jizz on Monica Lewinsky's dress- right? 

And anyway, science cares about objective results – not things such as gender.

or Queerness. Fuck is wrong with Science? Why can't it become a disabled transgender person or animal of color?  

Indeed, the whole notion of gender is highly contested and the idea that entire scientific disciplines can be assigned gender labels is just unreconstructed, unsophisticated, reductionist nonsense that will offend and repel scientists, feminists and anyone with a brain.

So let's just go ahead and do it anyway. 


So how on earth can it make sense in the electronic pages of this magazine to say that quantum hasn’t caught on because it is too girly?

Coz penises are evil.  

To start with, while quantum ideas certainly caught on in physics, they have had very little influence so far on the way that most people think about the world – apart from musings on things such as quantum healing, and something of a moment back in the 1970s with books such as The Tao of Physics (1975) by Fritjof Capra.

Since there was a market for Quantum quackery back then, why can't Orrell get rich in the same manner? The answer is wikipedia. Even illiterate hooligans like me can tell the guy is writing nonsense.  

Mentioning quantum ideas in polite conversation will see you marked as a phoney or worse.

There speaks the voice of experience! But why not simply say 'not having made billions on Financial Markets is why people think you know shit about Financial Economics'?  

In his definition of what he calls the ‘Intellectual Yet Idiot’, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

who did make some money playing the markets 

includes anyone who ‘has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics’. (Guilty as charged!)

Guilt does not matter. Do you or do you not have a billion dollars in the bank? If not, fuck off.  


Contrast that with the success and general social acceptability of mechanistic thinking, which is part of a Western scientific tradition whose roots extend to ancient Greece, and which has affected the way we think about everything from human psychology to the financial markets.

Penises get erections. That's 'mechanical'- right? This proves Western thinking is totes evil coz it is directly responsible for penises jizzing upon everything and thus extinguishing the universe.  


As the political scientist Alexander Wendt

a Roy Bhaskar level loony 

has noted, for example, the social sciences are based on a number of fundamental assumptions:
1) that the elementary units of reality are physical objects (materialism);

This is not true. The social sciences accept the existence of norms and laws (which are not material) and the possibility of mimesis as well as the possible existence of essentially ontologically dysphoric or wholly soteriological preferences and behaviors to which no physicalist state of the world can be uniquely assigned. 

2) that larger objects can be reduced to smaller ones (reductionism);

Only if the reverse is the case, not otherwise. It is not really the case that we can reduce men to a set of small penises which, nevertheless, run amok jizzing on everything  

3) that objects behave in law-like ways (determinism);

Nope. It is enough for non-deterministic processes to have 'verification' in polynomial time for them to feature in an object oriented ontology.

4) that causation is mechanical and local (mechanism);

But it could be mimetic and non-local. That's why a Bolshevik Revolution in one place suddenly led to similar Leninist parties very quickly emerging in geographically remote regions where the economic 'sub-structure' was very different. 

and 5) that objects exist independent of the subjects who observe them (objectivism?).

In which case revealed preference theory- and thus all modern econ- aint a social science. The truth is the opposite. Under Samuelson, Econ became the Queen of the Social Sciences while this guy Wendt was considered a fucking imbecile.  

In other words, they are based on the cogs and levers of pre-quantum physics.

In which case Absolute Space and Absolute Time existed such that Kantian or Hegelian or Marxist shite had purchase. There could be an 'objective' Weltgeist and History could have a teleology.  

No possibility of superposition or entanglement there.

No. It was possible in a Liebnizian sense. That was always the alternative to Newtonian mechanics. Monadology can feature anything it likes.  


In economics, prices are assumed to be mechanistically determined by the ‘invisible hand’ of global capitalism, where the actions of informed, rational, independent utility-optimising agents – aka rational economic man – conspire to drive prices to their optimal level, subject only to occasional ‘frictions’ or ‘market failures’, which might slow or impede the process.

Alternatively, you could follow Kantorovich and compute 'shadow prices'. The fact is, administered markets existed all over the world where price was determined by fiat. The question was whether the centralized application of  'queuing theory' and 'control theory' and so forth could do a better job than profit driven markets. The answer was- yes, for any given purpose. That's why the Govt. takes over everything during 'total war'. It wasn't till the late Seventies and Eighties that you get things like Gibbard's Revelation Principle and the folk theorem of repeated games (Myerson general feasibility) but those only showed that under certain artificial conditions a non-coercive mechanism could achieve anything a coercive mechanism could do. 

Markets are seen as being subject to random external perturbations that make them unpredictable, but this is a far cry from the indeterminacy of quantum systems.

Markets, by the 'anything goes' theorem, are more, not less, indeterminate than quantum systems. That is why a quantum computer might do useful work- e.g refine notions of 'neighbourhood' and 'distance' for configuration spaces of co-evolved processes-  whereas we'd be foolish to rely on 'prediction markets' as if we lived in an Arrow-Debreu universe. 


One reason for this lack of uptake, as mentioned above, might be that quantum ideas really are hard for normal people, or at least those without a degree in quantum mechanics, to understand.

This is not the case. Ideas which are useful are easy to understand well enough for a purpose which is itself useful.  

This is certainly the standard message.

But it is the equivalent of spam. We don't bother with it. No doubt, some anti-Semites in Hitler's Germany got worked up about 'Jewish' science or 'Nigger' jazz or whatever, but then they got stomped but good.  

Quotes that are commonly, if perhaps apocryphally, attributed to esteemed physicists include the observations that quantum mechanics is ‘fundamentally incomprehensible’ (Niels Bohr); ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics’ (Richard Feynman); and ‘You don’t understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it’ (John von Neumann).

This is true of any useful 'Structural Causal Model' because its 'Tarskian primitives' are 'black boxes'. No doubt, developments in some other field may turn them into 'light boxes' but this immediately means that a better S.C.M has become available- i.e. there is some 'hack' you are not currently using. The problem is that there may be a 'regret minimizing' reason not to use that hack.  


However, it is more accurate to say that subatomic particles are hard to understand because they’re weird and almost no one has direct experience of them.

But atoms and molecules too are very hard to understand which is why Industrial Chemists get paid a lot of money. Indeed, discoveries they make lead to better tech which in turn means better lab instruments and thus better data sets which in turn will drive the pure theory. 

And it is easy to imagine those men (and they do always seem to be men) saying the same thing about their spouses, or even their pets. ‘No one truly understands George, my tabby cat. He is a mystery even unto himself.’

So Orrell admits he is talking nonsense. Cats are as mysterious as quantum particles- indeed Schrodinger's cat is part of QMT.  

Physicists tend to confuse their models with reality –

That is why they get googly eyed about them and then boast about this model they are dating. When will men understand that this is RAPE! Ban penises immediately! They are jizzing over everything and will extinguish the Universe any moment now! 

after all, these are the same people who would prefer to believe that most of the Universe has somehow been rendered invisible as ‘dark matter’ than entertain the rather reasonable idea that the problem is with the ‘law’ of gravity.

Oooh! Orrell is being sarky! These are the same people who refuse to recognize that the 'law' of gravity forbids erections! Why can't men admit that it is wrong to have penises?!  

But in mathematical terms, quantum theory mostly boils down to being just a different form of probability, which is the next simplest after the usual one, and which naturally incorporates effects such as superposition and entanglement.

But this is only because mathematical terms are...urm... mathematical. We may find univalent foundations for a given set of mathematical formalisms but then again we may find that it is not useful to do so.  

The field of quantum cognition, for example, isn’t about comparing humans to invisible particles; it is about using quantum probability to model the way that decisions are shaped by things such as uncertainty and context, as when the way a question is framed or posed affects the answer.

In other words, it is a mathematical system. The question is- whether or not it is useful. QMT is useful. Quantum cognition isn't.  


In fact, the quantum physicist Niels Bohr borrowed the idea of superposition from the late 19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James, who had remarked on the human ability to hold conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time.

James, though fundamentally a pragmatist, was compromising with some notion of the Absolute. But QMT doesn't need to do any such thing. It can be relationist 'all the way down' precisely because 'down' is sufficiently defined relationally. Pierce's 'predicaments' or Russell 'Type theory' could remove linguistic confusion- if it paid to do so. The truth is QMT wasn't puzzling for economists. It was just 'local arbitrage' of an 'immaterial' type from the Accountancy point of view. Orrell's mistake is to think 'volatility surfaces' have Legendre transform based micro-foundations. Econ would not be compatible with evolution under Knightian uncertainty if the reverse were the case. In other words, any reductionist program in Econ, to succeed, would need to show why humans don't need any signalling device whatsoever- including language- to communicate. 

And the concept of entanglement is hardly foreign to human experience. As Žižek also observed:
A fact rarely noticed is that the propositions of quantum physics which defy our common-sense view of material reality strangely echo another domain, that of language, of the symbolic order – it is as if quantum processes are closer to the universe of language than anything one finds in ‘nature’, as if, in the quantum universe, the human spirit encounters itself outside itself …

Hegel and Pierce were trying to do the same thing. But Hegel got hung up on the Absolute while Pierce is better seen as wholly about 'cash values'- i.e. local arbitrage- which, obviously, are relative.


Researchers in the field of ‘quantum natural language processing’ would agree.

And we would agree to praise them if they ended up doing something useful.  But that hasn't happened yet.

So somehow we went from quantum physicists adopting words and concepts from social life,

as opposed to the life of barnyard animals 

to social scientists omitting the same things from their study of social life.

till everybody realized these 'social scientists' were more useless than barnyard animals.  Sadly, some of them had gained tenure and thus their Departments became a dumping ground for the victims of 'affirmative action' or the paranoid exponents of 'Grievance Studies'. 

As the comedian John Cleese quipped: ‘people like psychologists and biologists have still got physics envy, but it’s envy of Newtonian physics and they haven’t really noticed what’s been happening the last 115 years.’

Cleese is senile. He was rescued from a career in law by the silliness of his walks.  Fuck would he know about physics?

Viewed this way, the concern from physicists that quantum ideas will be ‘misused and abused’ in the social sciences, to use Carroll’s phrase, seems a little forced.

But physicists- like Smolin- don't mind jumping into the fray themselves. When Graciella Chichilnisky tried to do the reverse, she was- quite mercifully- ignored. No doubt, this was because she does not have a penis. Karen Barad must take action. 

For example, there was little outcry from physicists about what the quantitative analyst Paul Wilmott and I called the ‘industrial-scale abuse of mathematical models’ by the financial sector that led to the crisis of 2007-8.

But Arrow-Debreu securities are not based on Quantum probability. Li's Gaussian copula, which some blamed for the crash, was devised by an actuary with no knowledge of QMT.  

So perhaps the problem is not with the misuse of physics-inspired models, but with worries about quantum ideas in particular.

This simply isn't true. The problem was bad estimators of a classical sort.  

Another reason for these concerns seems to be related to a kind of queasiness around quantum ideas in the first place. There is a strange dichotomy at play, where physicists are protective of quantum ideas, but often dislike aspects of them at the same time, and deal with this dislike by adopting a highly formal and abstract way of presenting the subject. Albert Einstein commented that the theory reminded him of ‘the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought’, and spent years trying to show it was wrong or incomplete.

Einstein wasn't a pragmatist but he made useful contributions to QMT- e.g. Einstein-Bose Condensates, the Einstein-Rosen bridge gedanken etc.. Now we have empirical proof of the Bell inequality, the subject has moved on. Still, the guy definitely had a penis- and penises are just the worst. 


More recently, the late physicist Steven Weinberg said in an interview that quantum mechanics ‘has a number of features we find repulsive … What I don’t like about quantum mechanics is that it’s a formalism for calculating probabilities that human beings get when they make certain interventions in nature that we call experiments.

What's wrong with that? Every type of mechanics adjusts for the human factor in observation. It would be odd if scientists or engineers relied on angels or ghosts in such matters. 

In Econ, there was a similar 'repugnance' re. 'Muth rationality'- viz the notion that humans think what is rational is what all humans will think is 'non arbitrarily' rational. Yet what other type of rationality could human beings- if they evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape- possibly exhibit? Language is a coordination game. Only pragmatics matter and pragmatics, for everything save increasingly meaningless shibboleths or uncorrelated asymmetries, involves 'Schelling focality' of a Muth rational type.

And a theory should not refer to human beings in its postulates.’ (Perhaps it works better as a model of human beings.)

Smart guys who have done useful stuff have a license to talk any sort of bollocks they like. People like me must stick to pointing a finger at assholes who have done nothing useful. 


One problem is that, while physicists tend to claim ownership over the interpretation of quantum mathematics, they themselves have never reached a settled interpretation of what it all means.

Because 'Tarskian primitives' can't have 'settled interpretations' without killing off the underlying research program. 

The notion of wave function collapse, for example, leads to all kinds of quandaries, which is why physicists continue to debate it, or come up with alarming alternatives such as the Many-Worlds hypothesis where, instead of the wave function collapsing, the Universe splits off into alternative paths.

Which we've all been cool with because it features in every sci-fi series since the Eighties.  


The test for the use of quantum methods in the social sciences is not, then, whether people are just like particles. It is whether, if these methods hadn’t existed, social scientists would have had to invent them. Of course, this suggests another potential explanation for why quantum ideas are not applied outside of physics – which is that they just don’t work. But there is increasing evidence that they do. And what seems extraordinary, is the fact that for so long they hadn’t even been tried.

They were tried and found utterly stupid and useless.  


I first wrote about this for Aeon four years ago in an essay that made a case for a theory of quantum economics. The idea is that money is best understood as a quantum social technology, with quantum properties of its own.

This is as stupid and useless as Parikh- who did useful work some decades ago- and his 'Social Software' notion of money.  

In financial transactions, for example, value can be modelled as a probabilistic wave function which ‘collapses’ down to an exact number when money is exchanged.

Nonsense! Value is what the buyer receives. The transaction only goes ahead if there is 'Value discrepancy'- i.e. the seller has less value than the buyer. Once the price is determined, we can calculate the consumer and producer surplus- i.e. how the 'gains from trade' are divided up. This may have changed during the course of the transaction. There could be 'buyer's remorse' because the interest rate has risen of the exchange rate has fallen. Thus the transaction may not be 'super-fair' or 'envy free' etc. This is well researched because what in fact obtain are incomplete contracts and so you have to track surpluses in order to get a handle on the underlying dynamics.  

When you put your house up for sale, you might have a fuzzy idea of its worth,

but you know what value you yourself place on it. This is the 'reserve price'.  

but the actual price is only determined when a deal is made.

And price and quantity are simultaneously determined as is producer and consumer surplus.  

An idea that seems bizarre in physics makes perfect sense in economics.

Classical Physics has a notion of potential and kinetic energy. If there is an interaction these change. If there isn't an interaction these don't change. Similarly you have the value the owner places on the object and the value the potential buyer places on it. If there is a transaction, then these values change. Both may gain a surplus or one may experience remorse because something else in the environment has changed- e.g. interest rates or exchange rates have moved adversely. However, there is no faster than light transmission of information and thus no 'entanglement'. 


Financial contracts such as mortgages and other loans entangle the debtor and the creditor in a fashion that can be modelled using quantum mathematics.

No they don't. Mortgages and other secured loans may be sold on or they may be defaulted upon. There is no entanglement though there may be a mutually beneficial relationship or else one which is acrimonious and adversarial.  

The debtor is treated as being in a superposed state, balanced somewhere between a propensity to honour the debt and a propensity to default.

No he isn't. Either the debtor is a stand-up guy or he is a weasel. You may have to send in the leg-breakers or the bailiffs.  

Methods from quantum cognition can handle those phenomena, such as mental interference between incompatible concepts, that first inspired quantum physicists.

No they can't. You may be confused as to whether the Bank owes you money or you owe the Bank money. After all, that loan they gave you may actually have been suddenly turned by the Nicaraguan horcrux of Schrodinger's neighbor's cat into a deposit in your name. That's why you don't pay your mortgage. Then the Bank forecloses on you. Sad.  


And the argument that quantum effects don’t scale up has no relevance to economics. The idea isn’t that money inherits its quantum properties from subatomic properties, but that its properties can be modelled using quantum mathematics (the aim isn’t to use more maths, just different maths where needed).

Why stop there? Why not use cuntum mathematics such that you call any debt you owe a fucking cunt till it starts crying and... um...it turns into a debt owed to you?

For example, the creation of money can be expressed using a quantum circuit in a way that captures effects such as uncertainty, power relationships, and so on.

Or it can be expressed by a cuntum circuit where, um... you just keeping calling everything a cunt till, um, all your debts turn into mega-billions owed to you by all and sundry 

The effects of this substance scale up all the time (it’s called the financial system),

keep calling the financial system a cunt till...um... it bursts into tears and agrees that everybody should give you all their money and cool shiny stuff.  

and, like dark matter, exert a huge pull over the economy that goes undetected by classical approaches.

That 'huge pull' is tugging me off! Soon I shall jizz in the eye of the Universe!  


Of course, the article immediately attracted fierce criticism, and not just from internet trolls. One respected science writer described the piece on Twitter as ‘a load of hogwash’. Other physicists piled on to mock the article or accuse me that I had no idea how things like the mathematics of entanglement work (for the record, I am a mathematician, and it’s not that hard). One commenter summarised their feelings like this: ‘I feel bad for all the professional economists who might come across this nonsensical essay … Bad writer, bad.’

Why do I get the feeling that Orrell is playing with himself with one hand as he types the above with the other? Masochism works like that- right?  


As someone who has long written about and critiqued our use of mathematical models in areas ranging from weather forecasting to particle physics to economics, I am used to receiving robust feedback on my work – but something about this felt different, like I had crossed a line.

Which is what gives you your jollies- right? How much money have you spent on lube and wet wipes since you started crossing this line?  

So what is it that makes quantum special? What is it that makes physicists so excited about maintaining control over it? And what line had I crossed which made the article so ‘bad’? The answer, oddly, might have something to do with gender – not with mine, or anyone else’s, but rather with a classical conception of gender.

Which holds you to be a stupid cunt. I sympathize. I had to quit Accountancy because of my refusal to ever let the number 6 anywhere near the number 9. This resulted in the bankruptcy of my employer. Everybody called me a stupid cunt and now I can't get a job. Sad.  


Part of my above-mentioned critique of science is that the way we approach the subject is affected by a degree of bias, which can be traced back to the birth of Western philosophy and science in ancient Greece.

Why does Western philosophy have to be so fucking Western? Also, how come the vast majority of White peeps are still White? Everybody knows White peeps- especially if they have a penis- are destroying the Universe. Fuck you ancient Greece! Fuck you very much indeed! 

Greek philosophy was dualistic and also what we would describe as blatantly sexist.

Greeks were White. Also about half of them had dicks. That's just...wrong! 

The Pythagoreans, for example, saw the Universe as governed by opposing principles, which were divided into Good and Evil, and which included Male versus Female. Women were allowed into the group, but the female archetype was still associated with darkness and evil. Plato described women as originating from morally defective souls in Timaeus, and he and Aristotle excluded them from their schools.

But Lord Buddha and Confucius had some nasty things to say about women. Why pretend non-Whites were hippy dippy proto-feminists? 


The split between genders was tied up, in Greek philosophy, with the split between the real world and abstract ideas. The former was associated in Greek culture with the Female principle, the latter with the Male principle.

That's also the Samkhya division between Prakriti and Purusha or the Taoist Yin-Yang szygy.  

According to the science writer Margaret Wertheim, writing in The New York Times: ‘Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.’ There were no female philosophers to argue against this, because they weren’t admitted to the club.

Agnodice did something useful- viz train to be a mid-wife- which is why she wasn't put to death for 'corrupting youth'. Still, she had to lift her skirt and show she didn't have a dick to work the trick.  

Since then, science has been dominated by men.

Because men dominated everything even before.  

In his book The Masculine Birth of Time, the 17th-century inventor of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, described the role of science as being to ‘conquer and subdue [Nature]’ and ‘storm and occupy her castles and strongholds’.

with its dick.  

When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, its secretary Henry Oldenburg, a theologian and natural philosopher, defined its aim as being to construct a ‘Masculine Philosophy’. Women began to be admitted to universities in significant numbers only in the early 20th century, with physics departments among the last to open their doors.

Why did women want to be admitted to universities? The answer is they wanted to do useful work.  

As the philosopher Sandra Harding wrote in 1986: ‘Women have been more systematically excluded from doing serious science than from performing any other social activity except, perhaps, frontline warfare.’

This is not true. Women have been more systematically excluded from impregnating women than from any other social activity.  

With the result, as the physicist and feminist scholar Evelyn Fox Keller put it in 1985, that modern science was developed ‘not by humankind but by men.’ As already mentioned, quantum physics was constructed mostly by a small group of young men.

Who were jizzing over everything.  


All of this has affected the way we do science. The philosopher Mary Midgley compiled a list of opposites in 1985, reminiscent of the Pythagoreans’ idea of opposing principles, which included:
Hard / Soft
Reason / Feeling, Emotion
Objective / Subjective
Quantity / Quality
Male / Female
Clarity / Mystery

Midgley commented that the list served for scientists as a ‘mental map … marked only with the general direction “keep to the left”’.

I'm sure Scientists were very grateful for her sage advice.  Sadly she forgot to mention ejaculation/menstruation and throwing a hissy fit anytime someone suggests you'd be the Monica, not the Rachel, on Friends. Actually, that last is unisex, though, in a pinch, I'd settle for Phoebe if the alternative is Ross. 

A similarly performative emphasis on hard objectivity – the scientific equivalent of lugging a heavy suitcase up a flight of stairs, while sweating profusely and wearing a rictus grin –

fuck that for a game for soldiers. Make wifey do it. If she refuses, get in your sweet old Mum. She'll show that work-shy hussy how the thing is done.  

is seen even in the social sciences, which take their cues from physics. In 1913, the psychologist John B Watson wrote: ‘Psychology, as the behaviourist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science … it can dispense with consciousness in a psychological sense.’ A century later, the political scientist Alexander Wendt noted that ‘in most of contemporary social science there seems to be a “taboo” on subjectivity’, which is odd given that social relations are surely based largely on subjective factors.

The same is true in Accountancy. I used to balance the Books by taking account of subjective feelings about how numbers should look pretty but not sluttish. 6 is a pretty number. But if you put 6 next to 9 naughty things happen.  


Economics seems to be something of an extreme case, and remains, as the sociologist Elaine Coburn observed in 2016, ‘remarkably “pre-feminist”’.

Actually, Econ was more misogynist than Maths or Physics because female merit could not be denied. Chichilnisky was initially right to protest against gender inequality in her profession. Sadly, she has gone off the deep end by trying to disprove QMT. But then Hilary Putnam too went down that silly road. 

According to the economics professor Veronika Dolar: ‘there’s a strong case to be made that economics is the worst academic field in which to be a woman.’

So Dolar disagrees with Coburn. Did they pull each other's hair and scratch each other's eyes out? I hope so.  

One recent study used data science to analyse the gender gap, and concluded that the discipline was best described as ‘a crushing and unrewarding environment for female economists’. Not much of an advance over the ancient Greeks.

But academic economics is crushing and unrewarding- unless you are as stupid as shit.  


Mainstream economists, as the political economists Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan

these are two Israelis who have a crazy 'power theory of value' which explains why diamonds are very cheap in countries where those in power want them to be cheap whereas a burger could cost one billion dollars if evil capitalists have their way. The fact is no country- not even some remote island- can maintain a price vector for tradable goods which is wholly out of whack with what obtains globally.  

noted in 2021, see their field as ‘the “hardest” social science of all’, which again has shaped the way it is practised.

Very true. Butch mathematical economists are constantly knocking Bichler and Nitzan down in the playground and stealing their lunch.  

The feminist economist Julie A Nelson wrote in 1996 that: ‘Analytical methods associated with detachment, mathematical reasoning, formality, and abstraction have cultural associations that are positive and masculine, in contrast with methods associated with connectedness, verbal reasoning, informality, and concrete detail, which are culturally considered feminine.’

This is also true of bleeding once a month from your genitals.  

And yet most mainstream economists would reject the idea that their discipline has been shaped by such factors.

Though it is obvious that their discipline hasn't been shaped by mean girls or basic bitches- more's the pity. Why is there no Economics equivalent of 'Legally Blonde II' ? The answer is that smart women raise families and create enterprises and do useful stuff from which everybody benefits.  


Consider, for example, the paper from 2020 in which the Nobel Memorial prize-winning economist George Akerlof puzzled over the question of why economics ‘gives rewards that favour the “hard” and disfavour the “soft”’.

The answer is that Bezos will hire guys with a strong Quantitative PhDs. Econ is market driven- but only if everything else is.  

There is an entire section titled ‘Reasons for Bias toward Hard’, which manages to avoid the obvious one, namely association with a certain kind of masculinity.

Studying Econ will make you well hard so you can keep going all night- thinks nobody at all. At parties, Economists get the left overs from Engineering students. Sad.  

Indeed, his piece does not even mention words such as ‘women’, ‘female’ or ‘gender’. Obviously, he had never read Midgley,

because nobody read that cretin unless they were equally stuck in an academic ghetto 

who had already explained how the map worked 35 years earlier.

Worse than 'mansplaining' is feminist whining about how they don't got dicks and bleed once a month from their pussies and Mummy, you utter bitch!, you really fucked me up didn't you? Also every man I've ever dated had a Mum who did a real number on him. Mums should be abolished. But so long as there are penises, some women will become Mums. Cancel dicks now! Chop them off! Also tell White peeps they need to become Black and disabled and transgender. Fuck you White peeps! Fuck you very much! 


Now, I should again point out (and I feel my audience shrinking as I type – bad writer, bad) that this argument, raised in previous books, about the ongoing influence of ancient archetypes on modern science, doesn’t elicit a unanimously positive response; one physicist even worried that it was intended as a joke on the reader, which I can assure you is not the case (though humour is a help). Perhaps scientists see themselves as truth seekers who are free of such cultural influences. However the issue does seem especially relevant to the quantum approach – because quantum mixes hard and soft by design.

So let's get rid of the hard part- or any bodily part that might get hard and start jizzing all over the place the way those Ancient Greek dicks jizzed all over the place with the result that a significant portion of the world's population is now White. But being White is just wrong! It is dicks which transmit not just Whiteness buy maleness! We've got to get rid of dicks- at least White dicks. 


A defining feature of quantum mechanics, after all, is that it looks hard, but the picture that it paints of reality is soft and fuzzy.

Hiroshima was warm and fuzzy- right? So was Nagasaki.  

In many respects it isn’t a hard science, but a soft science. A wave equation, for example, looks hard when it is written out as a mathematical formula – but it is an equation of a wave, which is soft.

Tsunamis are very soft and sweet. Guys with dicks who call themselves 'scientists' claim that Tsunamis kill people. That's not true at all. Dicks kill people. They surf atop tsunamis and then go around killing innocent brown dudes. Needless to say it is white dicks which are inflicting this type of genocide.  


Instead of atoms being hard and independent – as the feminist theologian Catherine Keller notes, there is a strong correspondence between the ‘separate, impenetrable’ Newtonian atom and the male sense of self – they are indeterminate and entangled.

and give each other multiple orgasms and braid each other's hair and protest against nuclear power plants. 

Instead of predictive certainty, we have the uncertainty principle. If quantum mechanics had been invented, and its evolution and interpretation shaped, mostly by women instead of those young men – if its ‘founding fathers’ had been ‘founding mothers’ – we would be calling it the most feminist theory ever.

But 'feminist theory' means 'stupid shite with which women won't put up'.  


Quantum is therefore a soft science dressed up to look hard.

i.e. it is a butch lesbian who uses motorbike grease on her mohawk. 

When male physicists first stumbled upon these ‘soft’ quantum properties of matter, it is unsurprising that, rather than embrace their classically defined feminine side, they reacted by adopting a hardcore mathematical approach summed up later by the physicist David Mermin as the direction to ‘Shut up and calculate!’ Which, to non-physicists, reads like: ‘Keep away – this is much too hard!’

Emmy Noether's theorem could be said to be 'classically defined' and, because of her gender, feminine. This didn't stop Ward-Takahashi extending it to the quantum realm. Stuff which is very useful may be very hard- or else it may attract the best brains whose work-product ordinary joes like me find hard to comprehend. But for any useful purpose, we can grasp a simplified SCM of the thing. So, thanks to the division of intellectual labor, we get better correlated equilibria. That's all that matters- not whether dicks outnumbered vaginas in a particular field at some point along the way.  


In contrast, the social science version counted women and feminists among its first inventors. Danah Zohar, who trained as a physicist, described how her book The Quantum Self (1990) was inspired in part by her experience of pregnancy and early motherhood: ‘There is something deeply feminine about seeing the self as part of a quantum process.’

But stupid men can do the same thing while wanking! Indeed, they may feel their jizz is getting entangled with a porn-star's pussy because of the Quantum Hall effect. 

Or as the feminist theorist (and trained physicist) Karen Barad put it in her quantum-queer-feminist (if that’s a thing) book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007): ‘Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.’

Which is why abortion must be murder. There can't be any 'right to choose'. There is no woman made pregnant by incestuous rape. This is because no such 'individual' exists. There can't have been a rape victim because it is invidious to distinguish a daughter from her daddy/uncle. Abortion is murder because an individual would have emerged through an entanglement with her mother who, however, has no independent existence.  


The concept of ‘rational economic man’ will be replaced with something a little more uncertain and entangled

and the concept of the 'reasonable man' in jurisprudence will be replaced with the notion that because of 'entanglement' and 'uncertainty', a violent rapist may actually have been the victim of the theft of valuable bodily fluids. No doubt, members of the jury may think this unreasonable. But it is sexist to speak of a 'reasonable man'. We must embrace unreason.  


One of the most obvious features of modern science is that it carries with it the imprint of ancient divisions and biases.

Only if those divisions and biases had survival value and contributed to the inclusive fitness of an oikos.  

And one of the most obvious features of quantum ideas is that they undermine everything that might be considered ‘Hard’ and ‘Male’ about reality according to this (rather dated) scheme.

This is not at all obvious. Feminist theory may have this property. But Feminist Quantum Mechanics has failed. Karen Barad is not considered a practicing physicist any more than Vandana Siva.  

Instead of being clearly defined and firmly independent, both mind and matter are better described as indeterminate and entangled.

To what purpose are they thus 'better described'? Is it not the same purpose as that by which mind and matter are described as emanations of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat?  

Which goes a long way to explain the rather remarkable fact that these quantum tools and ideas, which are designed to analyse such properties, have been effectively kept in their box for more than a century.

Because White dudes got dicks. That's the root of the problem. Get rid of dicks and everything will be as sweet as sweet.  


Of course, the universe is not ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ and nor does it align itself with ancient Greek archetypes.

So, of course, this guy has been babbling nonsense and knows he has been babbling nonsense.  

However, it would be naive to think that the same can be said of the human pursuit of science.

Coz a lot of them science guys are either White or they've got dicks. Dicks are bad.  

In particular, as Barad wrote: ‘It would be ironic to find that the physical sciences, those sciences that have traditionally been most exclusive of women and people of colour, are unmarked by the politics of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other critical social variables.’

In other words, if nutters are allowed to take over useless University Departments because this makes no difference to anybody, then it would be strange indeed to find the same sort of 'intersectionality' shite poisoning the atmosphere in Departments where useful work is done.  

Or to think that the same variables have not affected economics.

Guys with good quantitative skills can get decently paid work even if they did stupid drive-by regressions for their PhDs.  


Over the past few years, interest in applying quantum methods to other fields

which are a byword for being utterly useless 

has grown considerably. Wendt and his colleagues received a grant from the Carnegie Foundation to host a series of ‘quantum bootcamps’ for social scientists.

That was money well-spent- thinks nobody at all.  

These are held at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University,

which warned about the rise of China- right? Wrong. It is wholly useless.  

and taught by an eclectic group, whose specialities include philosophy, psychology, physics, political science and applied mathematics

They also have a guy who teaches Theater.  

(I present a section on quantum economics). And one group that certainly sees potential in quantum ideas is the specialist area of quantitative finance – as evidenced in by the Financial Times headline in 2020: ‘Wall Street Banks Ramp Up Research Into Quantum Finance.’ The excitement is, so far, mostly driven by the potential of using quantum computers, but interest is growing in ‘quantum-native’ applications, based on ideas from quantum economics, which can run on custom quantum circuits. An article in The Economist in 2021 noted that ‘finance bears a striking resemblance to the quantum world’ and concludes: ‘One way or another, finance will catch up.’

But the reverse won't happen. Quarks aren't going to be investing their savings in crypto.  Nor are physicists gonna be calling up Fintech mavens for help with their models. 

The less palatable truth is that Globalization is going into reverse gear. Financial markets are losing salience because States are asserting residuary control rights. The West is on the defensive against a solid Eurasian block comprising China, Russia, Pakistan and, it now appear, Iran as well. Finance is merely a service industry. As 'control rights' revert to the state or as 'compliance costs' increase, Finance will lose salience. Bureaucrats and lawyers and legislators will have more power. 'Know your customer' laws and an increased regulatory burden will mean that Actuaries and Accountants will gain salience over 'quants' and 'rocket-scientists' and people who are pretending they could have made the cut for QMT. As we come out of a liquidity trap and as inflationary expectations mount in a tight job market- there will be no silly money for 'Quantum' hedge-funds and other such chicanery. The big question is whether China can reshape the Global economy. What is certain is that the West will see relative decline over this decade. 


The real long-term impact of quantum ideas in economics won’t be to help traders make money, but to change the way that we think about the economy by replacing the concept of ‘rational economic man’, which serves as the atom of the classical model, with something a little more uncertain and entangled.

Fuck that. It is Xi's patriotic Communist who will provide the template for a new era of conformism in which 'rights activists' and crazy eco-feminists are told to fuck off and get proper jobs tossing burgers- or whatever synthetic shite the powers that be decide is good enough for 'mass man'.  

As the former central banker Andrew Sheng

an Accountant from Malaysia who served in Hong Kong and who has good relations with the Chinese 

told the Bretton Woods Committee, in a report commemorating the 75th anniversary of that postwar economic agreement:
A quantum paradigm of finance and the economy is slowly emerging, and its nonlinear, complex nature may help the design of a future global economy and financial architecture …

But it is Xi, not Sheng who will call the shots. Look what happened to Hong Kong. Look at what is likely to happen in Taiwan.  Paradigms don't mean shit when you capture a declining portion of the gains from trade.  

Financial assets and virtual liabilities have quantum characteristics of entanglement with each other that are not yet fully understood …

says a guy who knows shit about 'quantum characteristics'. This is a Chartered Accountant who trained with Arthur Andersen.  

All of these developments suggest that using a new ‘quantum’ imagination, the Bretton Woods framework can be reengineered …

Sheng is over seventy and has done well for himself. The Chinese aren't gonna suddenly throw him in jail and, as far as I know, he wasn't part of any scam in Malaysia. But, if this elderly guy is talking about quantum shite, you know the thing is as likely to come back as flared trousers and handlebar moustaches.  

In other words, the time has come to strap quantum wheels onto our models of the economy, and the world.

Does this cretin really have a 'model of the economy'? Sure. But only in the sense that I am a super-model when I put on a bikini and suck in my cheeks and push out my tushie while taking a selfie.  Who cares what imaginary wheels Orrell straps on his imaginary suitcase while muttering darkly about dicks jizzing incessantly all over the place, thus threatening to expunge the Universe.  

This isn’t hard. It’s the opposite of hard.

It is as easy as shitting the bed rather than taking the trouble to get to the loo.  

This was my comment on Orrell's article, the good bits of which were deleted for violating 'community guidelines'. 

Economists were aware of the quantum revolution and some mathematicians who contributed to Economics (e.g. Von Neumann) also contributed to Quantum Mechanics. Keynes, in his General Theory, hints that he understands Quantum Uncertainty- but this was a bluff. For open markets, price and quantity are determined simultaneously. For non-market economies one may say there is uncertainty or  'entanglement' between ‘shadow prices’ (because a non-zero function and its Fourier transform cannot both be sharply localizedsuch that it is not possible to determine which general equilibria are on the Pareto frontier. Still, the fact is, Kantorovich got a Nobel because it seemed plausible that ‘networked computers’ could solve the allocation problem. However, at just that time, the ‘anything goes’ theorem as well as the discovery of Race Hazard or Djikstra concurrency, as well as the problems of complexity and computability, gained salience. The result was that econ moved towards (or ought to have) regret minimization (Hanan consistency) and machine learning and mechanism design etc. Some Socialists in the seventies did try to suggest that only Kantorovich’s approach would work for some obscure Quantum Mechanical reason. But they were talking nonsense- e.g. https://socioproctology.blogspot.com/2018/01/asghar-qadirs-crazy-quantum-economics.html

However dirigiste Gaullists were also jumping on this bandwagon of nonsense- e.g. https://socioproctology.blogspot.com/2018/01/bernard-schmitt-quantum-macroeconomics.html.

On the other hand in the field of ‘Chrematistics’ - i.e. ‘Finance’- as opposed to Economics (which is about the efficient allocation of scarce resources rather than just getting super-rich) it is quite true that ideas from Q.M were useful- e.g. ‘negative probabilities’ and ‘Parrando games’. But they were also mischievous. However, it was because Arrow Debreu securities neglected Knightian Uncertainty (which means states of the world are not known and can’t have a probability distribution. This has nothing to do with Quantum uncertainty) they turned into ‘Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction’. But this was always obvious. Sadly the incentives were lacking for people in the Finance sector to guard against catastrophic risk. Thus the problem was ‘mechanism design’, not some Quantum quackery.

I have previously discussed an article by this author-https://socioproctology.blogspot.com/2019/04/david-orrells-quantum-economics-as-next.html. It appears he is now trying to align himself with Feminism. However, for older people, the way he commences his essay is problematic. The fact is men invented the shopping trolley and the ‘granny caddy’ and the suitcase on wheels precisely because men were used to having wheeled methods of transportation in their work-places. The increasing popularity of air-travel meant that they put wheels on suitcases because they saw that it was no longer convenient to load suitcases onto trolleys kept for that purpose at the airport. Moreover, budget airlines had taken to charging per item of luggage. It is certainly possible that some silly people in marketing or advertising said something foolish about wheels being ‘girly’. But men don’t listen to silly people of that sort. They saw that jet pilots and airline pilots- rugged square jawed men- had their nifty little luggage caddies and wanted the same thing for themselves. You can still show off your muscles lifting them out of the boot. Blue Collar Man likes gizmos with wheels- and bluetooth. Wifey may object to this on aesthetic grounds but then she too gets in on the action.

Are economists currently using q.m.t? In some applications- yes. It can pay for itself. But there is no point saying ‘Males are ruining the planet because they are Newtonian. They should read my book and then braid each other’s hair while dispensing gratuitous rape counselling. I tell you I feel raped when women look at me and objectify my body! Also, it turns out my crypto nest egg is worth nothing! Boo hoo! Toxic masculinity has destroyed my life!’

No comments: