By Paul Ormerod We all know now about the empty roads and deserted shops, all quite contrary to the official announcements before the Games began.  No doubt Transport for London used their massively complicated, expensive models of the transport network to deduce that the system would be under massive strain. But a deceptively simple game […]

By Chris Davies The spectacular spectacular with which Danny Boyle opened the Olympics had many things to recommend it.  But alongside the dazzle, wit and downright eccentricity of the whole thing, there were two aspects of the opening ceremony that led me to reflect on the complexity of social systems. The first was Boyle’s history […]

By Greg Fisher Two weeks ago I attended an All Party Parliamentary Group in Westminster which focused on rebalancing boards of directors to ensure they included more women.  A compelling argument for doing this was presented by Nadhim Zahawi MP, who noted that returns on investments in companies with gender-diverse boards stood at around 11%, […]

By Greg Fisher Recently I got in to a very interesting discussion, which led me to articulate to my interlocutor (and myself!) the difference between Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory.  I thought I’d write this down in the form of a blog article.  I should stress that you should only read further if such technical […]

By Chris Davies The widespread coming-to-prominence of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) school, which was given a little push recently by the sad news of Elinor Ostrom’s death, has brought to the fore the importance of economic structures.  This is surely a good thing: by acknowledging the importance of institutions, formal and informal, the NIE […]