About
I am an ex-particle physicist who has worked on projects from proposed NASA Discovery Missions to quantum communication. I wrote two narrative books on a new way to look at economics based on my experiences with finance, prediction markets, and information theory. My current project is a science fiction novel based on the thought experiment of the infinite limit of intelligence, consciousness, and computation — asking the question if these are actually the same thing or, more interestingly, not.
Featured Work
A Random Physicist Takes on Economics
A Random Physicist Takes on Economics is a novella-length critique of economic methodology from an outsider's perspective as well as a proposal for a new way of understanding supply and demand and rational agents as emergent concepts from the complex behavior of real people. After a brief biographical introduction on how he ended up doing economic research, author, blogger and physicist Jason Smith leverages "irrational" random agents and information theory to argue against the modern understanding of ubiquitous economic constructs such as so-called "rational" expectations, prediction markets, and utility maximizing agents using examples consisting of nothing more complicated than Dungeons and Dragons dice sets and pints of blueberries. Sometimes the unrealistic assumptions frequently made by economists about human rationality are found to be unnecessary to produce the same standard economic results. Sometimes "irrational" agents give insight as to why standard economic results fail. In the end, Dr. Smith calls for economists to present more uncertainty and plead greater ignorance when it comes to questions of politics and policy, and for everyone to move beyond zero-sum economic thinking and towards embracing the diversity and complexity of economic systems.
