Ep. 231: J. Doyne Farmer on Making Sense of Chaos

J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics Programme and Professor of Complex Systems Science at the University of Oxford. He is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Chief Scientist at Macrocosm. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006. His book, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World, was published in 2024. During the 1980s he was an Oppenheimer Fellow and the founder of the Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While a graduate student in the 1970s, he built the first wearable digital computer, which was successfully used to predict the game of roulette. This podcast covers:

• What is chaos theory? COVID, business cycles
• What is complexity science?
• How economists model the economy
• Complexity economics and agent-based modelling
• Predicting economic impact of pandemic
• Using complexity to model financial markets
• Books mentioned: Man’s Place in Nature (de Chardin), The Three-Body Problem (Liu), The Human Use of Human Beings (Wiener)

 

You can find Doyne’s book here and learn more about Macrocosm here.

 

 

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