Russ Roberts

American economist, host of the long-running weekly podcast EconTalk, and President of Shalem College in Jerusalem.

A research fellow associated with Stanford’s Hoover Institution before relocating to Israel, Roberts has spent two decades interviewing economists, scientists, and writers on EconTalk, one of the earliest and most influential podcasts in the genre. He writes on the limits of formal economic knowledge and the case for humility in the face of complex systems, most recently in How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life and Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, and earlier in a series of novels dramatising economic ideas, including The Invisible Heart and The Price of Everything. An observant Jew, he brings a comparably serious, ongoing engagement with literature and religious texts to his economics commentary. This is his second appearance on Conversations with Tyler, and the first framed as a guest-swapped conversation between the two hosts rather than a conventional interview.

Core positions

• Humility about what economics, and expertise generally, can know. Roberts’s recent work (Wild Problems) argues that many of life’s most consequential decisions — who to marry, whether to have children, what to value — resist the cost-benefit calculation that economics is best at, and are better approached through virtue, character, and imagination than optimisation.
• Emergent order over central design, in the classical-liberal, Hayekian tradition: sceptical of technocratic fine-tuning, drawn instead to systems and stories that let outcomes arise from decentralised human choices.
• Literature and religion as serious epistemic company for economics, not separate hobbies — his reading of Life and Fate treats the novel’s psychology of confession and coerced belief as directly relevant to how real institutions, including markets and states, actually govern human behaviour.
• A converging, not fixed, set of convictions with age. He describes his own libertarian and religious commitments as having become less absolute over time, without treating this as either capitulation or decline — a pattern he discusses explicitly against Tyler Cowen’s account of belief change as rarely a stable ‘random walk’.

In the wiki

• Russ Roberts on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate — bonus two-hander conversation with Tyler Cowen on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, covering the novel’s suppression, its treatment of fascism and Communism, the psychology of confession, and a prescient chapter on artificial intelligence
• Life and Fate — the novel discussed at length in that conversation