Simplifying Complexity

J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Baillie Gifford Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. In this episode, Doyne discusses his journey from chaos theory to complexity economics. He shares his experience developing agent-based models for the economy and talks about the importance of multidisciplinary work and applying complexity science principles to economics and climate change. Resources: Purchase ‘Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World’ here Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Continuing from our last episode, we’re joined again by Brooke Harrington, Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and Herbert Chang, Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College. In this episode, Brooke and Herbert explore their research findings on the offshore financial system and discuss why policy interventions to date targeting wealth management have largely failed. They then explore how the findings of their research offer a way forward. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

In today’s episode, we’re joined by Brooke Harrington, Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and Herbert Chang, Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College, to discuss the world of offshore finance. You’ll hear about how using offshore finance is akin to eating at a restaurant and skipping out on the bill, and how Brooke trained to be a wealth manager to better understand how the industry works. Brooke and Herbert then discuss how they used the data from the Panama, Paradise and Pandora Papers to undertake quantitative research into the networks that make offshore finance possible. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

What role do cities play in driving economic progress? In today’s episode, we’re joined by Luis Bettencourt, Professor at the University of Chicago and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, who explains how cities allow us to do something magical - they allow us to specialise. Resources: Luis Bettencourt on Simplifying Complexity - Cities as social reactorsGeoffrey West on Simplifying Complexity - Scaling 3: Why companies die, but cities don't Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

How does a group of molecules transition into something that is life? And what do even mean when we say 'life'? To explore the origin of life, we’re joined again by Sara Walker, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Associate Professor in Earth and Space Exploration and Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

In today’s episode, we continue our conversation with Rory Sutherland, UK Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, where he discusses how our decision making, especially as consumers, while often appearing irrational, is actually the result of us deploying heuristics that have served us well in situations of low trust or when we don't have all the information. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

In today’s episode of Simplifying Complexity, we’re joined by Rory Sutherland. Rory is the UK Vice Chairman of the iconic advertising agency (and inspiration for the television series Madmen) Ogilvy, where he has worked for close to 40 years. In today’s conversation, you’ll hear how Rory became interested in complexity science, how bees build resilience, why short-term rationality can lead to long-term irrationality, and why efficiency is a bad proxy for effectiveness. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Today we're joined by Dmitri Tymoczko, Professor of Music at Princeton University. Dmitri will talk about the geometry and patterns we hear in music, as well as explore its history, particularly from the 1900s onwards. Resources: Spotify playlist of songs mentioned in this episode Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Experts often build models to help predict how systems will behave. But what happens if, instead of asking the experts to build models, we ask laypeople to simply predict outcomes? This is what happens in 'prediction markets'. And it turns out that in some situations, the 'wisdom of the crowd' often outperforms experts' models. To break down what prediction markets are and how they work, we're joined by Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Barnard College at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

We’ve spoken previously on the show about the complexity of the power grid. Today we’re focusing on how it fails, in the form of blackouts, and we're joined again by Seth Blumsack. He'll discuss why blackouts are so difficult to understand, and whether or not it's possible to model them. Seth is a Professor of Energy Policy and Economics and International Affairs in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, co-director of Penn State Center for Energy Law and Policy, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

In our last episode, Neil Johnson explained how there was an underlying power law with a slope of 1.8 that described the number of casualties that occur in wars. Today’s episode digs deeper into where this power law comes from, the route that Neil's research took to explain it, and how the arrival of the internet finally provided the missing datasets required to understand the underlying structure of something seemingly as chaotic as war. Neil is Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

When we think of what caused a certain number of people to die in a specific war, we tend to think about a number of factors. for example, the terrain or political drivers. But what if the number of deaths that occur in a war is actually dictated by something far less obvious? Neil Johnson, Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University, has returned to explain how studying the casualties of war can give us a greater understanding of the causes of war. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Throughout the history of science, the concept of time has changed many times - from Newton and thermodynamic definitions to the weirdness of relativity and quantum mechanics. And as our understanding of life and the universe continues to grow, is it again time to reevaluate how we think about time? To explore this mind-bending idea, we’re joined again by Sara Walker, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Associate Professor in Earth and Space Exploration and Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Hidden in plain sight over our heads, under our feet, and in the walls of our homes and workplaces, is the backbone of modern society: the power grid. To explain how something as seemingly straightforward as the power grid has become one of the greatest socio-technical systems on the planet, we’re joined by Seth Blumsack, Professor of Energy Policy and Economics and International Affairs in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, co-director of Penn State Center for Energy Law and Policy, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Economic policies are often gamed by individuals for personal benefit. In this episode, we explore how this gaming takes place and what economics can do about it. To do that, we're joined again by W. Brian Arthur, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center, formerly Xerox PARC. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

In this series so far, we've applied complexity science to a whole range of systems, particularly those more obvious complex systems like economies or cities. In this episode, we're going to do something a little bit different and apply complexity science to something not so obvious: creativity. To do that, we're joined again by Tyler Marghetis, Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced. Tyler has been on the show before to explore tipping points, and tipping points in jazz music. Today, he wants us to take our traditional approach to what makes someone creative, and pull the camera back. Instead of looking at creativity as what happens inside a person's brain, Tyler wants to explore what happens when we consider creativity through the context of society as a complex, cognitive system. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Today we're joined by Luis Bettencourt, Professor at the University of Chicago, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Luis is going to pull apart how cities work, why they work the way they do, what's good about them, and what's bad about them. He's also going to talk specifically about slums, and the challenges that exist in raising people out of poverty. Resources and links: Simplifying Complexity - Scaling 1: Why do we live longer than mice?Simplifying Complexity - Scaling 2: You and I are fractalsSimplifying Complexity - Scaling 3: Why companies die, but cities don't Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Today, we're going to return to the idea of taking concepts from complexity science and applying them to situations in the real world. In this episode, we're joined again by Melanie Moses, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She's going to share with us about her recent trip to Iceland to study active volcanoes. More specifically, Melanie is going to explain how you can program a swarm of drones to fly in formation and map the CO2 plume of a volcano. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Orit Peleg is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Orit has been on the show before, to discuss how bees work as a complex system. In this episode, we're staying within the animal kingdom, as Orit talks to us about fireflies. In this episode, Orit is going to explain how thousands of fireflies over very significant areas can synchronise their flashing in the night sky. She'll break down the work she has been doing to study this complex system of individual agents and share the lessons we can learn from these fireflies and use them in other applications. For example, what can we learn from these synchronised fireflies that could help us to program a swarm of small robots to work together to lift something? Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

In our last episode, you heard all about economic mobility. In this episode (which is part 2 of our conversation), you're going to hear again from Matthew Jackson, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. We finished the last episode by saying that if you want to increase a child's economic mobility, the factor that has the greatest impact is economic connectedness. In this episode, Matthew is going to talk about economic connectedness in our workplaces, our religious gatherings, and our schools. Resources and links: Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility | NatureSocial capital II: determinants of economic connectedness | NatureVast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich and Poor - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Connect: Simplifying Complexity on TwitterSean Brady on TwitterSean Brady on LinkedInBrady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.