Russ Roberts is the President of Shalem College in Jerusalem and the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Roberts hosts the weekly podcast EconTalk, hour-long conversations with interesting thinkers. Past guests include Jill Lepore, Eric Topol, Martha Nussbaum, Milton Friedman, Thomas Piketty, Angela Duckworth, Sebastian Junger, Christopher Hitchens, Bill James, Emily Oster, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Stephen Kotkin, A.J. Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato, Alan Lightman, and Michael Lewis. Over 1,000 episodes are available at no charge.
His two rap videos on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek, created with filmmaker John Papola, have had more than twelve 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, and his video series The Numbers Game looks at the challenges of measuring economic progress accurately.
His latest book is Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, which looks at the challenge of making big life decisions, whether to marry, whether to have children, what career path to follow, when there is little analytical evidence to help us. Roberts urges the lens of human flourishing and the life well-lived as organizing principles when facing these kinds of decisions.
He is also the author of Gambling With Other People’s Money, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, and three economic novels: The Price of Everything, The Invisible Heart, and The Choice, which was named one of the top ten books of 1994 by Business Week.
A three-time teacher of the year, Roberts has taught at George Mason University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Rochester, Stanford University, and UCLA. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
