Dr. Russ Roberts
Advisor
Dr. Russ Roberts is the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Russ hosts the weekly podcast EconTalk which has over 700 episodes and consists of hour-long conversations with leading and influential thinkers. Past guests include Milton Friedman, James Heckman, Daron Acemoglu, Thomas Piketty, Angela Duckworth, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Michael Lewis among many others.
His two rap videos on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek, created with filmmaker John Papola, have recieved more than eleven million views on YouTube, have been subtitled in eleven languages, and are used in high school and college classrooms around the world. His animated poem, It’s a Wonderful Loaf, is an ode to the emergent order of our everyday lives. His video series The Numbers Game looks at the challenges of measuring economic progress accurately.
His latest book is Gambling With Other People’s Money: How Perverse Incentives Caused the Financial Crisis. Roberts explores the role that past bailouts played in the risk-taking that led to the financial crisis of 2008. In How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness (Portfolio/Penguin 2014), Roberts takes the lessons from Adam Smith’s little-known masterpiece, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and applies them to modern life.He is also the author of three economic novels teaching economic lessons and ideas through fiction.
A three-time teacher of the year, Roberts has taught at George Mason University, Washington University in St. Louis (where he was the founding director of what is now the Center for Experiential Learning), the University of Rochester, Stanford University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA; a member of the American Philosophical Society; a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the Econometric Society; the Society of Labor Economics; the American Statistical Association; the International Statistical Institute; and the National Academy of Education. He has received numerous honorary degrees, most recently from University College London in 2013, and is a foreign member of Academica Sinica and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He has published over 300 articles and 9 books. His most recent book is The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2014). He is actively engaged in conducting and guiding empirical and theoretical research on skill development, inequality, and social mobility
