Paul Ormerod is a British economist who has worked in a wide variety of fields.
He is a founder of the economics consultancy Volterra Partners LLP, and remains a partner.
Academically, in the 1980s and 1990s he was a visiting professor of economics at Queen Mary, University of London, and the University of Manchester. Paul was a Distinguished Fellow, Institute of Advanced Study, University of Durham, 2007/08 and a visiting professor in the Anthropology Department at Durham 2010-2013. In 2009 he was awarded a DSc honoris causa by the University of Durham “for the distinction of your contribution to the discipline of economics”. From 2013 to 2018 he was a visiting professor in the Centre for Decision Making Uncertainty at University College London (UCL), and from 2018 he has been a visiting professor in the computer science department at UCL. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Since 2013, Ormerod has written a weekly column for the newspaper City AM and a selection of his pieces was published in 2018 under the title Against the Grain: Insights from an Economic Contrarian.
In 2020 he was appointed as chair of the Rochdale Development Agency, the economic development arm of Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council. In the autumn of 2022 he was appointed chair of Atom Valley Greater Manchester Mayoral Development Zone. Atom Valley is the inspiration of Greater Manchester MayorAndy Burnham, and is an ambitious project to revive the poor boroughs of the north and east of the Greater Manchester city-region by developing a mega-cluster of manufacturing innovation.
He read economics as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, and took the MPhil in economics at the University of Oxford.
Range of interests
Ormerod has worked extensively in the areas of complexity, agent based modelling and the application of machine learning techniques to both macro-economic data and the creation of macro-level emotions from text data. He has published in a very wide range of academic journals with many different collaborators.
Books and monographs
Ormerod has published a number of books and monographs:
^Ormerod, Paul (1 January 2000). Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN978-0-375-40765-9.