“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
I was reminded of Hunter Thompson’s line by a speech from Ravi Menon, former managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, recently in the press.
“The New Geo-Economics in a Quantum World.”
A speech by a distinguished economist from Singapore… that safe harbour of sensible thinking …. and it uses the “Quantum” as its central metaphor? The pros are definitely going weird.
Why does Menon reach for the “quantum” metaphor? Such a promiscuous metaphor. Normally reserved for self-help books.
Menon tells us the reason for “quantum” in the title:
“Quantum mechanics is a way of thinking about complex systems and geoeconomics is a complex system.”
That’s the key sentence of his defence.
He uses metaphor for mood not meaning.
And the speech deals with much weirdness:
the world economy is fragmenting and integrating at the same time, and this isn’t a measurement problem or a case of one trend eventually winning. Both are genuinely true. Trade restrictions at record highs, trade volumes at record highs.
Multilateralism (the machinery of institutions like WTO, IMF, etc) is weakening, while globalization persists. Two things in the same system, moving in opposite directions.
For central bankers and chief economists this is “a realm where the ordinary rules don’t apply”: “Set phasers to stun”.
For Menon, the world has become not merely complicated, but counterintuitive. The only register available for describing counterintuitive-but-real is “quantum”; designed by physics to describe a world that shouldn’t exist.
The quantum metaphor is used to try to make sense of a world that exists in contradiction: the world is getting very strange out there, and quantum is dead strange. Just take Schrödinger’s cat: it’s alive and dead simultaneously, not “we don’t know which.”
This is a world no central banker likes to behold. Menon reaches for a solution.
Quantum also gives Menon a structure: the world is weird: here is a weirdness I can name; therefore, three habits of thought. Superposition, entanglement, uncertainty.
Three real recommendations delivered as an argument rather than a list.
A speech with three unrelated recommendations is a set of notes. A speech where three recommendations fit into one frame is an argument.
There is another dividend to the “quantum” metaphor.
First it gives the economists a way out. Because quantum is all about competing visions both being true. If uncertainty is structural, no one is to blame for failing to see.
Uncertainty absolves the forecaster. Nobody saw 2008 coming, or 2022. But nobody foresaw thirty years of wage stagnation either. The metaphor pardons the first failure and leaves the second standing. Menon didn’t argue for this exemption. It came bundled with the metaphor.
And secondly, quantum mechanics is the science in which observation is participation, where measuring a system alters it.
Of course, this brings us back to Singapore. Quantum is a safe place for the small nation.
It supports the claim that in a system this complex, the ability to read it accurately is itself a form of power. Think Qatar.
Small states with highly developed antennae can punch above their station.
This gives us something real even while getting the physics wrong.
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”