Ryan Phillip Quandt

Senior Economist, White House Council of Economic Advisers

I hold a PhD in Economics from Claremont Graduate University and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of South Florida. The central vein of my research combines causal analysis, institutional economics, and the philosophy of agency to study how governance structures and incentive systems shape social outcomes, and whether they contribute to or block human flourishing. There are auxiliary veins as well, which the research pages show: writings on ancient Greek philosophy, Leibniz, and the philosophy of art.

Before joining the Council I was Chief Economist and Director of Research at the Cicero Institute. Recent work examines sunset legislation and regulatory review, the costs and benefits of criminal justice programs, and the conditions under which people and machines can reason together. It 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 am an aspiring birdwatcher. I loafed around the library as an aimless high schooler until I picked up a book, and what began as a naive fascination with psychology and modernist novels led to a bachelor's, a master's, then a PhD in philosophy. In graduate school I was a researcher in the Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning Lab at South Florida and, later, the Computational Justice Lab at Claremont. My first dissertation was on Leibniz, whose writings drew me into the sciences, the arts, and markets. My second, at Claremont Graduate University, presents 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.

I strive for excellence and seek others doing the same.