Professor J. Doyne Farmer
About
Professor J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford. He is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Chief Scientist at Macrocosm.
His current research is in economics, including agent-based modeling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology. His book, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World, was published in 2024.
During the 1980s, Professor Farmer 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.
Expertise
- Clean energy transition - for example, at what rate will wind and solar take over the energy system, and what will it cost?
- Forecasting how fast technologies will drop in cost
- Chaos theory - general questions about chaos and complex systems
- Alternative ways of doing economics, in particular complexity economics
Selected publications
- Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World – J. Doyne Farmer, Allen Lane (2024)
- The need for better statistical testing in data-driven energy technology modelling, Joule (2024)
- Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition. Joule 6, 1–26, 13 Sept (2022)
- The unequal effects of the health–economy trade-off during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Human Behavior (2023)
Media experience
Professor J. Doyne Farmer has given numerous interviews to journalists (including with the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Telegraph, The New York Times, Bloomberg) and featured on many podcasts.
Recent media work
- Is Chaos the Key to Better Economics? (The New York Times, 2024)
- How to Fight Climate Change for a Bargain (The New York Times, 2023)
- Economic Modelling On Clean Energy Was Wildly Inaccurate (RE:TV, 2023)
- Switching to renewable energy could save trillions - study (BBC News, 2022)
- Decarbonising the energy system by 2050 could save the world at least $12 trillion, study finds (Mail Online, 2022)
- Chaos Scientist Finds Hidden Financial Risks That Regulators Miss (Bloomberg, 2019)
