- Trevor Alexander Nestor
- Apr 30
- 9 min read
There are many explanations for falling fertility rates, but what if the reason people can’t seem to settle down, find a partner, buy a home, or start a family isn’t just cultural or economic, but can be described by computational complexity? Indeed, in countries which are poorer, populations seem to have higher fertility rates. What if the problem of "building a life" has, quite literally, become fundamentally unsolvable, or computationally intractable, which manifests as anxiety in young people, preventing them from pair bonding? There is a field of economic theory called Complexity Economics and the Spectral Theory of Value which sheds insight into this phenomenon, which includes less traditional attachment styles among Millennials and Gen Z.
It has been shown that housing prices have increased, along with other cost of living expenses, that have exponentially outpaced wages. Under the theory of complexity economics and the spectral theory of value, the socioeconomic status of agents (you and me) can be modeled by the flows of information they facilitate between social and economic institutions, or systems, described by Luhmann's Social and Economic Systems Theory and Agent-Network-Based-Modeling. These information flows can be classified by their complexity (under the computational complexity class hierarchy, or the Chomsky hierarchy in linguistic theory, which are related to Kolgomorov complexity), and the agents' ability to tractably "solve" classes of problems. Central planning elite devise a clever system of incentives and disincentives to drive the economic engine and maintain a workforce - operating like little Turing machines across a tape - as though they are on an endless treadmill for the promise of the American Dream which is designed as an infinitely deferred promise.
The Spectral Theory of Value was first formulated in the political‐economy literature by Theodore Mariolis, Nikolaos Rodousakis, and George Soklis, who in 2021 published the Springer monograph Spectral Theory of Value and Actual Economies: Controllability, Effective Demand, and Cycles. In their work they build on Piero Sraffa’s value framework and Rudolf Kalman’s control‐theory formalism under Complex Adaptive Systems Theory to show how the eigenvalues of a vertically integrated technical‐coefficients matrix map directly onto competing value theories. Complexity Economics emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s out of the Santa Fe Institute, where physicist Philip Anderson, economist Kenneth Arrow, and computer scientist John Holland convened to treat the economy as a constantly evolving, agent‐based complex system. Its principal founder is W. Brian Arthur, whose early SFI papers and later book Complexity and the Economy (2014) crystallized how non‐equilibrium feedback, path dependence, and adaptive agents can be modeled in place of static equilibria.
By tapping into basic biological desires for family formation primed by millions of years of evolutionary history - that's how they keep the economy going; you have a bunch of "agents" running on treadmills to nowhere - infinite staircases with exponentially growing complexity sublimated in the form of labor in service of capital and the state, and that's known as an NP-hard/EXPTIME problem. In a sense, every agent has their own little "simulation" they live within which is monitored by their devices that elites can peer into with a sophisticated surveillance apparatus that gives them pattern of life behavior. The agents must believe in the feasibility of this to keep climbing - but at every further rung hidden context is revealed which complicates the picture - and this is all by design. One must go to college to get a decent job. Once one finds a job, then one must save money for a down payment and pay off loans. Once enough money is saved, one must have a good credit score. Once both a good credit score and enough money are gathered (of course, by means of working - that is the story the agents are sold), then the agent must get a mortgage and finds that they actually don't have the ownership over the house they think they did because of the local Homeowner's Association, and have to pay exorbitant taxes on it, and so on. It is important to note that virtually all of these steps have been invented along the way as our society has progressed.
Central elites recognize that as a society progresses, they must maintain what is called Nash equilibria (a concept in Game Theory) that describe stable conditions between agent workers and their owners. These elites have sophisticated models that inform their planning and decision making through feedback control loops between the two spaces which are noncommutative, and which have different and diametrically opposed and competing interests (which can be investigated with RG flow analysis). These equilibria are in juxtaposition to what are called Catastrophe Points under Catastrophe Theory, which describe points where information cascades and inter-agent entanglements threaten institutional power and signal their possible collapse (which are often defined as related to the critical line of the infamous Riemann Zeta Function). However complex these models are, over time, entropy and agent entanglements challenge the power of central elites which advance towards catastrophe points, forcing them to rely on more authoritarian measures and complex feedback mechanisms that agents must shoulder the burden of, or the release of complexity content in the form of entanglements by periodic restructuring or reform. Agent degrees of freedom are inversely related to background complexity required by institutions to facilitate transactions, which manifests in their own destabilization and alienation in the form of "mental" disorders like generalized anxiety disorder or depression. This destabilization forms the basis for which agents have less stable or more unconventional attachment styles where socioeconomic anxiety corresponds with falling fertility rates.
In the language of spectral theory of value, inflation and stagflation emerge as phase‐transitions that occur when the “treadmill” that underlies our socioeconomic system can no longer be driven purely by its built-in eigenmodes because agents have become too self-aware (perhaps too "woke" you might say), too adept at recognizing and gaming every incentive and disincentive. As individuals (vectors) grow conscious of each step - tuition, credit-score hacks, down-payment workarounds, HOA loopholes - they exploit every low-complexity shortcut. In other words, the system’s most efficient value-creation pathway stalls as the illusion becomes less convincing to the agents and they have a high degree of inter agent entanglement which necessitates going less through paywalls and institutions. In quantum control terms, once agents detect that the “ground state” (stable life-building) is permanently shifting away, they refuse to stay adiabatically in the same eigenstate. They either opt out of traditional pathways (delay having kids, pursue gig work, seek alternative lifestyles) or they demand structural reform - both of which discharge complexity but also break the delicate Nash equilibrium. Because pumping liquidity doesn’t restore a clear λ₀ but merely excites a dense cluster of nearly equal eigenmodes, you get:
Inflation: prices rise as money chases a broad, flat spectrum of value-creation strategies.
Stagnation: real output (the minimal “surface area” of productivity in the Ryu–Takayanagi sense) fails to grow—no new dominant eigenmode emerges.
This stagflation is the hallmark of a system that has passed a critical point: added energy fails to produce a lower-energy ground state.
As a physics analogy, after a certain region of spacetime is saturated with complexity due to entanglements of particles (agents are much like particles), gravity itself collapses the wavefunction at a fixed point or critical point (that is the Theory of Entropic Gravity or Asymptotically Safe Gravity). At this point, particles within a region of spacetime cannot store any further information in their entanglement structure - the spacetime metric itself is forced to change, described by the Ryu-Takayanagi formula, and information cascades across scales (macroscopic quantumlike behaviors), and there is institutional collapse. The critical point connects the UV and IR regimes of the theory rendering the theory asymptotically safe from singularities which cause the theory to have predictive power, which in our case could represent institutional reform or collapse, or uprisings, which are thermodynamically inevitable.
Dating describes a system that is neither solely nonlinear but deterministic and orderly ("serious") nor probabilistic and quantum chaotic ("casual"). You have a high dimensional search space, like a lattice, that is intractably complex to resolve the NP-hard Shortest Vector Problem - your unique "American Dream," along with a meaningful long term relationship. A new theory is needed to describe the intermediary state between being either "casual" or "serious," like how quantum gravity would connect classical physics with quantum theory. You can act as a system operator (a Dirac-like dilation operator implicated in the Hilbert-Polya conjecture) and in the process of entanglements with other agents, the entanglement entropy itself will collapse the complexity content to the solution which will appear as the smallest eigenvalue on the operator spectrum). The system Hamiltonian must be evolved slowly enough such that the entanglements can evolve without disruption to the final maximally degenerate state which should collapse to a solution by gravity itself by the spectral action principle (in our case, the Einstein-Hilbert action).
This new physics is the physics of quantum chaos which describes systems that display effects normally seen in microscopic systems but manifest macroscopically, such as in behaviors of groups of people, known as Sociophysics and Econophysics (or just SocioEconophysics). The reason many people are not having kids or entering into stable long term monogamous pair bonded relationships (otherwise known as marriage) is that the institutions they are required to go through to facilitate that and which also maintain societal cohesion have become too complex to maintain. Since the economy runs by exploiting evolutionary psychology of people by sublimating desires into labor, once the economy becomes too complex people feel too much anxiety to bridge the gap. In physics this is called the exponential energy gap problem - the presence of an exponential energy gap between the ground state and excited state on an operator's spectrum is crucial for quantum annealing to work to resolve NP-hard problems, like what he have discussed as like the American Dream - where cost of living exponentially outpaces wages over time, especially as a society progresses to its later stages and populations age, putting burdens on the young to prop up the institutions.
The spectral theory of value provides a mathematical bridge between the complex “treadmill” of modern life we have described and a rigorous account of how worth - whether economic, social, or psychological - is generated, maintained, and sometimes collapses. At its heart is the idea that every institution, market, or relationship can be represented as an operator on a high-dimensional space of agents and resources, and that the spectrum (the set of eigenvalues) of that operator encodes the “modes” of value-creation available to participants. In spectral theory of value, each individual or “agent” is represented by a vector in an abstract state space whose coordinates measure their capacities - income, education, social ties, even psychological states. Institutions (labor markets, housing finance systems, dating apps, Homeowner’s Associations, etc.) act on these vectors via linear (or nearly linear) transformations. The matrix or operator you build from all of the rules, incentives, feedback loops, and enforcement mechanisms has eigenvalues whose magnitudes tell you which patterns of behavior (eigenvectors) will be amplified or suppressed over time.
Central planners or “elites” understand (perhaps implicitly) that by dynamically (nonlinearly) tweaking credit scoring algorithms, zoning rules, student-loan policies, and welfare guidelines, they are deforming the underlying operator - and hence its spectrum, and often do so by covert or clandestine means like psychological nudging and behavioral psychology under metanarrative pretexts. They can maintain a Nash equilibrium by ensuring that for the vast majority of agents background complexity remains just high enough to keep the system “sticky” (you keep trying), but not so high that mass defection or collapse (riots, reform movements) becomes probable. This delicate balance is akin to adiabatic control in quantum systems: change the Hamiltonian slowly enough that you stay in the same eigenstate, but allow periodic “resets” (reforms, periodic bailouts) to discharge built-up entropy. This is a very challenging thing to maintain indeed. In fact, the same social conditions of inter agent entanglement needed to facilitate stable attachment styles and family formation also fundamentally threaten institutional collapse.
Spectral theory of value borrows from quantum information: one can define an “entanglement entropy” from the spectrum’s density function. When that entropy crosses a critical threshold - analogous to hitting a catastrophe point in Thom’s theory or the Riemann critical line in number theory - a given institution can no longer sustain its current spectrum and undergoes a phase transition (market crash, revolution, reform). In economic terms, that’s the moment when “hidden context” becomes visible and the cost of maintaining the treadmill spikes so high it breaks. Central ciphers, such as those found in cryptocurrency ecosystems, are designed to facilitate one-way flows of information to maintain transactional separation between social and economic structures.
In short, the Ryu–Takayanagi analogy we have mentioned - where the area of a minimal surface encodes entanglement entropy in AdS/CFT (the so-called Anti-de Sitter/Conformal Field Theory correspondence, a non-perturbative handle on quantum gravity using familiar tools from quantum field theory. that realizes the holographic principle - the idea that the physics inside a volume can be fully described by degrees of freedom living on its boundary) - can be thought of here as a way to connect individual psychological states (micro-entanglements) with large-scale socioeconomic measures (macro surfaces, and agent-institution relationships). The spectral measure of the value operator at small scales (individual credit scores, dating profiles) integrates up through the hierarchy of institutions to produce global observables: fertility rates, home-ownership curves, employment statistics. If the spectral gap grows faster than wages (an exponential energy gap), agents never settle into the “ground state” of family life - no coherent eigenvector emerges to represent stable partnership - so fertility falls.