Paul Ormerod

Paul Ormerod, one of the founding directors of Volterra, is a leading authority in the application of complexity science and advanced statistical techniques to economic phenomena.

 

As well as publishing widely in the academic literature, Paul has authored three best-selling books, with Death of Economics in 1994 and Butterfly Economics in 1998 both published in more than 10 languages. Paul’s third book, Why Most Things Fail, was named a US Business Book of the Year for 2006 by Business Week magazine.

 

Paul is currently a Fellow of the British Academy for the Social Sciences and has recently been appointed a distinguished Professor for the 2007/2008 academic year in the University of Durham’s new Institute of Advanced Study. He is also a regular reviewer for the Times Higher Educational Supplement.

 

Paul presents regularly at a wide range of business and academic events, and has this year been keynote speaker at, for example, the UCLA Lake Arrowhead Conference on Human Complex Systems and the Government of Singapore’s Conference on International Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning and the United Nations Geneva Forum on Disarmament Insight.

 

During the 1980s, Paul was Director of Economics and Deputy MD of Henley Centre for Forecasting, which he helped build into a very successful commercial enterprise owned by the management team. In 1992 Henley Centre sold to WPP Group Plc, a FTSE-100 company. Prior to this, Paul worked as a conventional economic modeller and forecaster at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, and headed the Economic Assessment Unit at the Economist newspaper group from 1980-1982.

 

Paul read Economics at Cambridge University, then took the MPhil in economics and econometrics at Oxford University. He has published over 50 articles and book chapters, on topics including economic methodology, crime, unemployment and social exclusion, business cycles, geo-political risk, social networks and the medieval inquisition.