Doyne Farmer

Doyne Farmer is the author of Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World (August 2024). It has been named a Financial Times 'Best New Book on Economics.' The Wall Street Journal hails it "both a manifesto for a revolution in economics and a memoir of an unusual career." 

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Farmer's scientific approach provides a roadmap for how to do economics better—like any great revolution, from the ground up. His methods have reinvented the field and uncovered new ways to think about and manage complex problems and ideas.

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As Making Sense of Chaos reveals, Farmer thinks and lives outside the box, while often finding himself at the center of many important new ideas. From building the first wearable computer to beat roulette in Las Vegas, to architecting the trading system for the firm that would eventually become part of UBS, to applying financial market strategies to biological systems and eventually helping to found the field of econophysics, his work reflects his extraordinary, interdisciplinary curiosity. 

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At a time when the word "chaos" seems to pop up everywhere, shorthand for a sense of some invisible force of change impossible to understand or control—in politics, the climate, financial markets and societal unrest—Farmer shows that chaos and unpredictability are not one and the same. He proves instead that it is possible to understand complex systems, like the economics of climate change, or technological progress, by identifying their seemingly chaotic internal forces to build bottom-up, agent-based forecasting models.

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To design these sophisticated models, Farmer recently co-founded Macrocosm, where he has started a Climate Policy Laboratory to develop innovative yet practical solutions that may be implemented efficiently into real-world policy.

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Farmer's pursuit to understand the world in all its complexity should inspire those who dare to look beyond the headlines and beneath the surface, make sense of the chaos, and change the systems in which they live.

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Doyne Farmer is the Director of Complexity Economics at the Oxford Martin School's Institute for New Economic Thinking. He is also the Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science at Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and an External Professor at the Sante Fe Institute, the world's leading research center for complex systems science.

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Praise for Making Sense of Chaos: 

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Lawrence Summers, Former Secretary of the Treasury, writes,

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"This book is a real achievement from which I learned a great deal. The economics profession should be much more open to Farmer-type complexity approaches. I hope this book is an inspiration to young scholars from many disciplines concerned with economic questions."

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Tej Parikh of the Financial Times raves,

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"Farmer convincingly argues that by using big data and today’s more powerful computers, we can build more realistic models and simulations of the global economy. . .  Farmer’s vision will undoubtedly be significant in how economics evolves."