Robin Hanson on Signalling

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2008

⏱️ 85 minutes

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Summary

Robin Hanson of George Mason University talks about the phenomenon of signalling--the ways people spend resources to convey information about ourselves to others. It begins with Hanson revisiting his theory from an earlier podcast that we spend too much on medicine because we need to signal our concern for friends and family. The conversation then moves onto apply Hanson's model of signalling to other areas of human behavior. This is a wide-ranging discussion covering not just medicine, but real estate transactions, the wooing of a spouse, the role of education in the job market, parenting, the economics of self-deception, and Robin's argument that we spend too much time on admirable activities.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:12.5	I'm your host Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover
0:17.3	Institution.
0:18.7	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast,
0:25.8	and find links to other information related to today's conversation.
0:29.9	Our email address is mailadicontalk.org.
0:33.6	We'd love to hear from you.
0:38.2	My guest today is Robin Hanson, my colleague here at George Mason University.
0:42.2	Robin, welcome back to Econ Talk.
0:43.8	Thanks for having me.
0:45.2	Robin, as you may know from our earlier podcast with him, is a very interesting person.
0:50.0	In theory, this podcast is going to be generally about signaling an economic concept where people
0:55.3	spend resources to convey information about themselves to others.
1:00.5	But I can imagine us getting into a wide range of topics as is inevitable with Robin.
1:06.5	I'm going to start with a leftover topic from our previous podcast on health care, which
1:11.7	is talking about doctors.
1:15.0	Doctors in today's world, we have a certain presumption that they behave the way they
1:22.4	do for various reasons, but what Robin's interested in pointing out is the incentives
1:27.2	they face are a little bit different than some other decision makers in our lives, and
1:30.7	we don't always notice that.
1:31.7	It may not lead to the best outcomes.
1:34.7	Right.
	...

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