Paul Ormerod - Against the Grain: Insights from an Economic Contrarian: Insights from an Economic Contrarian

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

The Institute of Economic Affairs

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ISBN 978-0-255-36757-8 (ebk)

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The author

Paul Ormerod is an economist, author and entrepreneur. He is currently a Visiting Professor at University College London (UCL), where he supervises graduate students in machine learning.

Paul read economics at Cambridge and took an MPhil in economics at Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences in 2006, and in 2009 was awarded a DSc honoris causa by the University of Durham for the distinction of his contribution to economics. In addition to economic journals, he has published in journals such as Nature , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B and Evolution and Human Behavior . Paul has published four best-selling books on economics: Death of Economics , Butterfly Economics , Why Most Things Fail and Positive Linking . He has also written for the IEA on many occasions. He was a founder of the Henley Centre for Forecasting Ltd., which the management sold to Martin Sorrells WPP Group in the 1990s.

Foreword

Since 2012 Paul Ormerod has ensured that hundreds of thousands of City A.M. readers are offered a short, sharp espresso shot of morning stimulation on their commute into London.

The original name of Pauls column was Against the Grain . It was a fitting title for a few hundred words that each week has offered an original, contrarian and thought-provoking take on the relationship between economic theory, individuals and policy.

I inherited Paul as a columnist from my predecessors in the editors chair, and though Ive made a few changes to the newspaper in the two and a half years since I started, Im delighted that Pauls column has remained a fixture. Doubtless hed have something to say about the economics of inherited wealth (or privilege, in this instance) but Im immensely grateful that he continues to share his insight and analysis with our readers, even as the pages change around him.

As a newspaper, our main patches of interest are business, finance, economics and politics and in Paul we have a writer who can pull them all together in his own inimitable style. At a time when economic statistics and forecasts can be deployed in support of whatever argument our politicians or Westminster wonks wish to advance, Paul rises above the fray and guides the reader towards a different point of view and a fresh perspective.

A respected academic himself, he has never held back from lambasting the profession for its groupthink or its leftward drift. In doing so he embodies the values of City A.M. , as we strive to question the consensus and hold true to the liberal, free-market values upon which the newspaper was built.

I hope that Paul will stay with us on this journey for years to come, and while we look forward to the columns not yet written, we can now dip into his wisdom at leisure thanks to this timely and important effort to collate his contributions.

The inquisitive reader will be able to find fresh thinking on some of the biggest issues of the day: automation, productivity, growth, the future of capitalism and the rise of artificial intelligence. For intelligence of the old-fashioned variety, I commend this book to you and thank Paul for the immense contribution he has made to City A.M. over the years.

Christian May

Editor-in Chief, City A.M.

January 2018