Paul Ormerod - Böcker

In recent years, the economic analysis of crime has helped increase our understanding of different influences on crime levels. Although economic factors may not cause crime, different economic circumstances can increase or decrease the likelihood that an individual who may feel inclined towards criminal behavior will commit a crime in practice. And incentives, including punishments, do affect crime rates. In a lucid style, accessible to the non-economist and economist alike, the author shows how new developments in economics can be applied to the analysis of criminal behavior and used to draw policy conclusions. These new models take into account and illustrate how individuals interact with each other in social networks. As a result, they lead the author to more realistic conclusions and more informed policy recommendations.

With commentaries by Samuel Brittan and Melanie Powell. In "Happiness, Economics and Public Policy", Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod analyse the economic research that underlies politicians growing preoccupation with measures of 'well-being'. In a lucid and compelling analysis, written for economists and non-economists alike, the authors find that happiness research cannot be used to justify government intervention in the way its proponents suggest. Those who wish governments to take into account measures of well-being when setting policy often point to the fact that increases in income have not led to increases in measured happiness, and thus governments should concentrate on redistribution and improving the quality of life, rather than on allowing people to benefit from economic growth. In fact, measured happiness does not appear to be related to public spending, violent crime, property crime, sexual equality, disability, life expectancy or unemployment either.The stark fact is that, as Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod demonstrate, the difficulties in measuring societys happiness are insurmountable, and policymakers should not claim that they can control and increase happiness through public policy decisions.

In spite of general reductions in government spending, the prime minister has found room in the government's budget to spend money on a major survey of what makes the British people happy. This will be used, in the prime minister's own words, to guide government policy towards improvements in general well-being rather than improvements in national income. But is it really true that government policy has always been orientated towards maximising GDP? Is it true that well-being does not increase as income increases? Is it true that more equal societies are happier societies? Can we really improve well-being through workplace legislation? Is it right to orientate government policy towards the single aim of increasing aggregate well-being across society as. a whole? These questions and many more are tackled by some of the leading intellectuals in the field. Overall, this monograph provides a substantial challenge to those who want to put the explicit pursuit of well-being at the heart of government policy.

Economists and economics have been harshly criticised recently. This book accepts many of the criticisms of conventional theory but argues that the fundamental insights of economics are capable of reinterpretation and reinvention to deal with a host of contemporary concerns – social networks, globalisation, pay inequality, climate change, automation and the growth of `nudge’ policy amongst many others. The author uses his weekly column in the London business newspaper City A.M. to explain new developments in economic thinking and empirical research to a general audience. This book reproduces many of his most provocative columns with accompanying commentary and full references.The author’s witty and informed analysis of events provides an ideal introduction to important ideas for anybody interested in how the modern economy works.

From the best-selling author of The Death of Economics and Butterfly Economics, a ground-breaking look at a truth all too seldom acknowledged: most commercial and public policy ventures will not succeed.Paul Ormerod draws upon recent advances in biology to help us understand the surprising consequences of the Iron Law of Failure. And he shows what strategies corporations, businesses and governments will need to adopt to stand a chance of prospering in a world where only one thing is certain.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Second International ICST Conference on Complex Sciences, COMPLEX 2012, held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA in December 2012. The 29 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers cover aspects on foundations and analysis of complex systems, complex biological systems, complex social systems, complex engineering systems.

The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture the economic realities we observe in the world today - with vested interests getting too often in the way of real advances.Insights into behavioral economics and modern computing techniques have made possible both the integration of larger information sets and the exploration of disequilibrium behavior. The domain-based chapters of this work illustrate how economic theory is the only branch of social sciences which still holds to its old paradigm of an equilibrium science - an assumption that has already been relaxed in all related fields of research in the light of recent advances in complex and dynamical systems theory and relateddata mining.The other chapters give various takes on policy and decision making in this context. Written in nontechnical style throughout, with a mix of tutorial and essay-like contributions, this book will benefit all researchers, scientists, professionals and practitioners interested in learning about the 'thinking in complexity' to understand how socio-economic systems really work.