new
Paul has written a new book entitled ‘Positive Linking: How Networks and Incentives Can Revolutionise the World’, which will be launched this summer.
It is based on his Royal Society of Arts pamphlet ‘N squared: public policy and the power of networks’, available here. A podcast of Paul’s talk on this at the RSA in November 2010 is here. There is a Financial Times op-ed piece here.
Here is an introduction to the arguments, and here are some comments from reviews of ‘Why Most Things Fail’
2012
Paul recently spoke at a conference on 21st Century Policy Development. The conference was co-hosted by Synthesis (a Think Tank co-founded by Paul in 2011) and the RSA. Watch Paul's presentation on “Network Effects and the Limits of Incentive-Based Policies” here.
More and more markets have network characteristics in which people are making choices, at least in part, simply on the basis of what other people do. The basic model of choice in economics needs to be radically altered to fit our changing world. The objective attributes of choices are becoming less and less relevant. Especially in financial markets, what matters is the narrative which dominates at any point in time. Facts are capable of being interpreted in many different ways. Here is a talk I gave to the economists at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in Edinburgh on the networked economy.
2011
A completely different approach to behavioural choice is being developed in disciplines outside economics, such as computer science and cultural anthropology. It is empirically successful in explaining two key features of much of the modern social and economic worlds: non-Gaussian outcomes at any point in time and turnover over time in the rankings within the outcomes. But it does so without reference to the attributes of the various alternatives on offer – which is quite shocking to economists. Here is a presentation I gave to the Department of Economics at the University of Amsterdam on the topic.
Here is a general talk I gave to the UK government’s Department of Environment on agent based models and how they are used in practice
I have given several presentations recently on the main theme of my new book. Policy making in the 21st Century needs to be based on the potential power of networks. This is completely different from the prevailing view of the world, in which it is based on incentives.
Here is a presentation I gave to the Institute for Government in London, and here is the Institute's own page on it, including a podcast and video.
Here is a talk I gave to a high powered audience in Washington DC in early October and here is the summary of the entire conference on 'Taming Complexity'
And here is my lecture to the Adelaide Festival of Ideas (Adelaide), and the link to the downloadable MP3.
The FuturICT project to completely reshape the social sciences continues, and a core group of some forty researchers from all over Europe met on Lake Maggiore in early September to take the proposal forwards. Here is my presentation on Grand Challenges in Economics.
At the European Social Simulation Association, I gave examples to the assembled academics of social simulation models I have been working with for which companies or public sector bodies have paid real money to help them solve practical and immediate problems.
Geoff Riley, Head of Economics at Eton, runs some very interesting conferences for sixth formers and their teachers, and here is a talk I gave to a teacher audience on Lessons from the Nobel Laureates.
A Golden Oldie
The Real World Economics journal has evolved into the World Economics Assocation, attracting 4,500 members since its launch in May this year.
The Association is dedicated to intellectual pluralism in economics, so it embraces a wide range of different approaches. I will be on the Editorial Board. And here is a paper I wrote for them in 2001 on ‘economics as social theory’ following their first conference in Cambridge in 2000. The models are very simple, but the basic concepts remain valid.
Over the past decade, this sort of approach has become much more widely used – outside mainstream economics! See, for example, FuturICT.
Setting the economics agenda:
Here is my presentation to FuturICT in Zurich on hard problems in economics.
Here is a paper using evolutionary agent based models to analyse the lethality of terrorist attacks.
Recessions and modelling the business cycle: here is a paper I gave as a keynote at a conference in Kiev marking the 110th birthday of Simon Kuznets. Kuznets was a great economist. He worked out how to measure GDP and did theoretical work on growth, the business cycle and income inequality. But above all, he insisted on empirical evidence.