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He's not an economist, he's a futurist, and not a particularly interesting one.

For an actual economist ahead of his time, I recommend Steve Keen.



Hanson is a professor of economics at GMU http://economics.gmu.edu/people/rhanson


For folks who may not be familiar with future studies. It's a genuine academic discipline, when we say that Hanson is a futurist, it's not an insult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_studies


He may be an economist by training, he may teach in an economics department, but as described, his course would fit right in at any future studies program. The article certainly makes him sound more futurist than economist.


http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/09/on-futurism.html

When the media reports on the future, reporters pretty much only ever quote these sort of futurists, who have hijacked the future to support their side of certain current disputes. Truth be told, folks who analyze the future but don’t frame their predictions or advice in terms of standard ideological categories are largely ignored, because few folks actually care much about the future except as a place to tell morality tales about who today is naughty vs. nice.


Upvoted. Keen did get a few falsifiable predictions wrong, but his work on bank endogenous money creation, debt instability, and rate based economic modeling I think merit much more serious research in mainstream economics, along with the MMT school. Good of you to mention.




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