Ryan Phillip Quandt

Senior Economist, White House Council of Economic Advisers

The aim of scholarship, as I see it, is to join a communal search for truth at its most demanding: to reveal, isolate, and explain relations in the world, in work that others can replicate, test, and return to with profit. The central vein of my scholarship crosses causal inference, institutional economics, and the philosophy of agency to study how governance structures and incentives shape social outcomes, and whether they contribute to, or block, human flourishing.

I hold a PhD in Economics from Claremont Graduate University and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of South Florida. By day in south Florida, I read manuscripts by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, inventor of calculus; by night, I examined the limits of computation for the Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning Lab. It was through AMHR that the embryo of my human-AI teaming research portfolio formed. My first dissertation was on Leibniz: specifically, the relation between his Discours de métaphysique and his lengthy Examen christianae religionis. From there, the wigged polymath’s work drew me into the sciences, the arts, and markets. My next dissertation, at CGU, combines three empirical studies of how local, state, and federal policy decisions affect public safety: a benefit-cost analysis of a district attorney’s DNA database, a reexamination of the effects of right-to-carry and permitless-carry laws on crime, and an analysis of how Housing First funding affects unsheltered homelessness and crime.

Recent work examines sunset legislation and regulatory review, the mission commitment of nonprofit hospitals, and how cognitive friction in human-AI teams can improve team performance. My work has appeared in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, Argument & Computation, and Frontiers in Physics, along with volumes from Springer and Routledge.

Less professionally, I’m an aspiring birdwatcher. Should you venture into a wooded median between the interstate, you may find me, binoculars in one hand, tea in the other, but too late in the morning to spot something rare.