Robin Hanson – Futarchy: Competent Governance Soon?!

Robin Hanson will speak at Future Day 2026 on Futarchy – what a treat! Robin is often described as a person who provides the ‘startling and fresh ways of looking at how the world works’ that we didn’t know we were missing. In 1996 he coined the term ‘The Great Filter‘, the idea of ‘Grabby Aliens‘ in 2021 – which I believe was coined in interview on SciFuture, and of course Futarchy which Robin will be speaking about.

As his colleague Bryan Caplan famously put it: “When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is ‘Eh, maybe.’ Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is ‘No way! Impossible!’ Then I think about it for years.”

Synopsis

The biggest reason that our world is messed up in so many identifiable ways is that we use pretty broken systems of governance. With a competent governance, we could instead point our systems to the solvable problems we see, and they’d actually solve them. You might think we’ve tried all possible systems, but in fact we’ve hardly tried any of them. I invented a particular promising approach that is now undergoing successful trials.

Futarchy concept

Futarchy is a form of government proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in which elected officials define measures of national wellbeing, and prediction markets are used to determine which policies will have the most positive effect.

Also see Robin’s writing Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs and Futarchy Details.

Bio

is an American economist and author. Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, a former researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, and chief scientist at Consensus Point. After receiving his Ph.D. in social science from the California Institute of Technology in 1997, Robin was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984, Robin received a masters in physics and a masters in the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago, and afterward spent nine years researching artificial intelligence, Bayesian statistics, and hypertext publishing at Lockheed, NASA, and independently.

Robin has over 70 publications, and has pioneered prediction markets since 1988, being a principal architect of the first internal corporate markets, at Xanadu in 1990, of the first web markets, the Foresight Exchange since 1994, of DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market, from 2001 to 2003, and of Daggre/Scicast, since 2010.

Adam Ford interviewed Robin Hanson on his books ‘The Elephant In The Brain‘ and ‘The Age of Em‘ pt1 & pt2.