Ryan Quandt, PhD, serves as Chief Economist and Director of Research at the Cicero Institute, leading a research portfolio focused on rigorous measurement of what works in public policy, especially where incentives, institutions, and implementation details matter most. He is trained as both an economist (PhD, Claremont Graduate University) and a philosopher (PhD, University of South Florida), with expertise in microeconomics and causal inference. He brings together causal policy analysis, institutional economics, and philosophy of agency to examine how governance arrangements and incentive structures affect social outcomes and human flourishing. He has published in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis and the Journal of Regulatory Economics, and contributed to interdisciplinary research on public safety and human-AI teaming in outlets including Frontiers in Physics and edited volumes with Springer and Routledge. Ryan is the author of Leibniz on God and Man in 1686 (Bloomsbury, 2023) and has presented work at major academic conferences. Outside formal scholarship, he also writes essays across economics, public policy, philosophy, theology, literature, and birding through his Substack.
“Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
