Professor J. Doyne Farmer talked to the Financial Times this week about measuring contract volumes to gauge the health of an economy.
“GDP is a poor measure of many things in the economy, yet we fixate on it. There are often large errors and the numbers can take a year or so to settle. And it doesn’t provide us with a measure of a country’s wealth or assets, only the flow of certain forms of economic activity. If you are able to track the flow of all contracts in an economy, I think it would give you a very good indicator of a country’s health.” Professor J. Doyne Farmer
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. His current research is in economics, including agent-based modelling, financial instability and technological progress.
