Predicting future of the Planet with J. Doyne Farmer
Biology. 2025/10/12
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Can economics help us create a sustainable future? Our guest is Doyne Farmer, Director of the Complexity Economics Programme at Oxford University. Trained as a physicist, he’s spent his career studying chaos, complex systems, and prediction, and now applies those ideas to economics, sustainability, and climate change.
In this episode, we’ll talk about why traditional economic models often fail, how complexity economics gives us new tools to understand markets, and what agent-based models and heterogeneity can teach us about the real economy. We’ll look at chaos, business cycles, and equilibrium, and draw surprising parallels between biology, supply chains, and innovation.
About the guest
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Introduction
00:00:12 — The Big Question: Can economics create a sustainable future?
00:00:28 — Meet J. Doyne Farmer: From chaos theory to complexity economics at Oxford
00:01:31 — Why Economics Matters: How 8 billion people rely on invisible systems
00:04:11 — The Global Web: Supply chains as proof of our deep interdependence
00:06:58 — Beyond Classical Models: How complexity economics changes the game
00:10:15 — Simulating the Real Economy: Agents, decisions, and emergent behavior
00:17:31 — Housing Markets Unmasked: Why prices resist equilibrium
00:24:54 — From Physics to Finance: Predicting chaos, roulette, and stock markets
00:30:45 — Business Cycles & Chaos: Why recessions may come from within
00:38:59 — Lessons from Biology: The economy as an evolving ecosystem
00:42:45 — Technology vs Labor: When innovation displaces human work
00:54:05 — The Economics of Sustainability: Overcoming the tragedy of the commons
01:01:44 — Modeling the Energy Future: A global simulation of 30,000 companies
01:06:18 — Proven Successes: Complexity models that outpredict mainstream economics