Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson is an American economist and professor at George Mason University, best known for his work on prediction markets, futarchy, and the Great Filter hypothesis in the context of the Fermi paradox. His intellectual project is characterized by a willingness to apply economic reasoning to domains where it is traditionally considered inappropriate — love, medicine, politics, and the long-term future of civilization.

Hanson's most influential contribution to futurism is the concept of the Great Filter: the observation that the universe appears empty of intelligent life despite the apparent abundance of habitable planets suggests that some step in the development of technological civilization is either extremely improbable or systematically self-terminating. If the filter lies in our past, we are rare survivors. If it lies in our future, we are probably doomed.

His work on prediction markets and futarchy represents an attempt to solve the problem of institutional decision-making by replacing deliberation with information aggregation. The proposal has been criticized as naively technocratic — as assuming that the problems of politics are problems of information rather than problems of power. Hanson's response is characteristically direct: if you have a better mechanism, propose it.