A Purely Relational System Tames the Complexity of Financial Education

Abstract

We show how the worldline or 4D history of a financial investment, like a business, can be encoded within the bounds of a purely relational or closed-dynamical system (Barbour, 1996), see Fig. 1. The system’s macroscopic aspect is a continuously curved path while the microscopic scale is described by 12 superpositioned and time-reversible Nows called double-entries; the pixels of financial information. The structure is consistent with Mach’s principle of background independence, Schrödinger’s superposition (Schrödinger, 1935) and the Wheeler-Dewitt equation (Dewitt, 1967). It condenses thousands of pages of financial information into a single diagram of potentially evolving relations, see Fig. 2. This allows people to learn in less than 24 hours what would normally take at least 1 year with the traditional alternative (Pacioli, 1494). Results are based on solid empirical data. The new map may help alleviate the problem of financial literacy: two in every three adults worldwide are financially illiterate (GFLEC, 2014).

Keywords: shape dynamics, closed-dynamical systems, double-entry information, financial education