Getting the quanta right in the economy

The economy operates as a measuring device, and it needs measuring units. It obtains measuring units by creating the quant.

For example. The gas tank is a quanta. It is the fundamental unit of account about which gas stations are built. Another quanta is the gas station itself, the tanker truck, the forty foot shipping container, the freight train.

The quantas define transaction sizes, and get them wrong and we have trouble, for example when the median gas tank does not carry the median car the median distance between gas stations. See, the car system fails when the quantas don't match.

We see this every day as economies of scale, everyone use one of the two gas stations at the corner, for example. But a concept called duality allows economists to treat economies of scale as a quantized measuring system. Quantization means that traders can ultimately look at price breaks in a trading range, and when an index goes into a new trading range there has been a discrete shift somewhere in quanta size and transaction rates for the real goods underneath.