Ouch, this is harsh

Peter Rodd says:
September 10 2025 at 7:59 am
I enjoy all of your posts and have learned much from them. Thank you. The recent posts on quantum economic thinking are very interesting. One question: might the book(s) of the Canadian mathematician David Orrell on quantum economics (and finance) help to inform and advance the discussion do you think?

Best regards from Sydney, Australia

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Richard Murphy says:
September 10 2025 at 8:35 am
David contacted me last night.

The answer is, not a lot. We have looked at this from quite differemt directions, withn his focus being very heavily on money, and there I am not at all sure he draws the right economic conclusions. MMT does not get a mention. He thinks money came out of barter, and it almost certainly did not. And he does not mention accounting, double etry, tax or labour almost at all in what he writes, and that rather misses the economic point for me. I am not dismissing his work but I would describe what I am doing is complementary to it, and not building on it. In fact, until last night I had only read 26 pages of it. I have now read 200 more.

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David Orrell says:
September 10 2025 at 2:58 pm
You wrote of my work that I think “money came out of barter” so first of all I should set the record straight for your readers. The Evolution of Money (2016) stated that “Money did not emerge from barter.” Quantum Economics (2018) said: “schoolyard swaps and the like aside, barter has never played a big role in commerce.” A Brief History of Money (2020): “economies based purely on barter don’t appear to exist, or (probably) ever to have existed.” Money, Magic, … (2022): “Rather than emerging naturally from barter, the money system was a designed social technology that was imposed at the sharp end of a sword, and in many respects was an expression of power.” And so on. On the other hand, I do go into depth on the issues of duality, entanglement, uncertainty, etc. – the connection with wave/particle duality for example got an entire section almost a decade ago in The Evolution of Money.

You also say the focus of my work is “very heavily on money”. Quantum Economics and Finance (2022) does not have a chapter on money. My work over the last five years has focused on practical applications in finance.

Of course you make it clear that you are “not building on” my work or that of others, but are engaging instead with ChatGPT as an interlocutor. Might still be good to check both the facts, and the sources – there is a reason authors have issues with AI: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/10/tech-companies-are-stealing-our-books-music-and-films-for-ai-its-brazen-theft-and-must-be-stopped

Quantum economics and finance is a growing field and as you point out there is much to explore on things like the implications for accounting or policy – areas which you seem eminently qualified to address. As with a quantum system, our approaches can be both different and complimentary – but it might be more interesting and productive to build out from common ground rather than exaggerating differences.

Finally, since your readers seem interested in the relation with physics, this paper might be of interest:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29767032241237547
and for applications to law:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29767032241298302

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Richard Murphy says:
September 10 2025 at 4:09 pm
I have written to David about this issue.

It is not helpful to open a correspondence in this way, and I will not be continuing it in this way as a result.

That said, I know the limitations of ChatGPT, and I am now more familiar with his work then I was on Tuesday morning, as a result of which I now know that I disagree with him on some quite fundamental economic issues, including his apparent failure to recognise that money is always debt and so is essentially metaphysical in nature, and that it consequently has uncertain characteristics until it comes to be spent, that double entry bookkeeping is fundamental the way in which money works, which fact he does not seem to mention in what I have read so far, and that tax, labour and capital don’t seem to appear in any significant way in his book, and all of them appear to be somewhat significant omissions when creating a theory of economics, as he sought to do, perhaps most especially when it comes to tax, which is the essential flipside of money. I am therefore confident that ChatGPT did not reference his material, because if it had I would not have used it, but that it did instead draw on my own ideas, along with arguments on quantum physics, to assist the discussion Jacqueline and I had. I have trained ChatGPT to use my blog as a source, and there are 23,000 posts and more than 7 million words for it to draw from there. That, I think, is what it did — plus quantum ideas from external sources, of course.

Very amusing of course.