Robin Hanson
Robin Hanson
Robin Hanson is an economist and associate professor at George Mason University. He trained as a physicist at Caltech before switching to economics, and his work sits at the intersection of economics, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. He is known for:
- The Elephant in the Brain (with Kevin Simler, 2018) — arguing that most human behavior is driven by hidden status/signaling motives
- Prediction markets — pioneering work on using market mechanisms to aggregate forecasts; he ran early prediction market research at DARPA and has advocated for "futarchy" (governing by prediction markets)
- The Age of Em (2016) — speculative economics of a future where whole brain emulations (uploads) dominate the economy
- Overcoming Bias — his long-running blog on rationality, signaling, and social psychology
His intellectual style is to take an unflattering but plausible hypothesis and follow it to its logical conclusions, regardless of whether the conclusions are comfortable. His original insight about medicine — that we buy it to signal caring rather than to get healthy — became the seed of The Elephant in the Brain.