Hanson on EconTalk

This week at EconTalk Robin Hanson, of George Mason University, talks with Russ Roberts about the phenomenon of signalling--the ways people spend resources to convey information about ourselves to others. They begin 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 behaviour. 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