research interests
 |
Networks - How people, firms, things are connected to each other, and how different ways in which they are connected have different implications.Complex Systems - How the properties of systems as a whole emerge from the interactions of their component parts. These are systems in which the whole is more than the sum of the parts.‘Rule of thumb’ - decision makers in economics. How we can understand many social and economic questions better if we relax the traditional assumption that decision makers attempt to find the ‘best’ decision. Instead, they appear to use simple rules of thumb to arrive at ‘fairly good’ decisions. |
These three topics are of course related. They draw on work from a wide range of disciplines, such as biology, economics, psychology, maths and statistical physics. Here is an article in Nature on this general topic.
I have also authored three best-selling books. The Death of Economics in 1994 and Butterfly Economics in 1998 have both been published in more than 10 languages. My third book, Why Most Things Fail, was named a US Business Book of the Year for 2006 by Business Week magazine.I wrote the Death of Economics in 1993. But a lot of what I wrote then is relevant to the current crisis. Of course things have moved on, but here is the preface, chapter 1 and a chapter on the pitfalls of economic forecasting.I am a Fellow of the British Academy for the Social Sciences and in the 2007/2008 academic year was a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Durham.I am a director of Volterra Consulting, a London based economics consultancy.I present regularly at a wide range of business and academic events. I have recently been a keynote speaker at, for example, the winter Organizational Science conference, Lake Tahoe CA, the Cultural and Creative Industries conference, Brisbane, the World Conference on Economic Heterogeneous Economic Agents, Warsaw, and the European Social Simulation Association, Brescia. |
 |
Non-research interests
For many years I have been a keen hill walker. A specifically British obsession with hills is to tick off lists of summits, a wide variety is available to suit all sorts. Various lists for England and Wales are here, and I am number 54 on the all-time list of those who have climbed all the 2,000 foot summits in England and Wales.
Scotland is an altogether more serious proposition. Many of the hills are remote, and the climate on many summits is sub-Arctic. On the highest summits, snow can fall on any day of the year. The only month I haven’t encountered snow personally is August! The Scottish Mountaineering Council maintain a list of completers of the 284 3,000 foot mountains, known as Munros.
 |
 |
It gets even more complicated. There are just over 4000 completers of the Munros. But there are also the Munro Tops, also 3,000 foot peaks but not separate mountains. There is no formal definition of the two, and some of the Tops are distinctly harder than the Munros. And there are the ‘Furth of Scotland’, the 3,000 foot peaks of England, Wales and Ireland. Only 193 people have completed the Munros, Tops and Furth since records began in 1901. I am one of them. Sad or merely eccentric?I have been interested in butterflies for a long time, and sometimes I combine this with hill-going. Here is a short note I published in the Entomologist’s Journal and Record of Variation on butterflies in remote parts of the Scottish Highlands. I am a keen cross-country runner and occasional fell runner (running up and down steep hills). I also do a bit of winter climbing in Scotland, though at pretty low climbing grades, and occasionally fish for trout in Scotland. I have supported Rochdale Hornets, the Rugby League team of my home town, for many years. They haven’t won anything since 1922, and here is a statistical analysis of their historical performance. |
Click on the thumbnails to view full size. |
||
 |
 |
|