Allison Stanger

As a research affiliate at CASBS, Allison Stanger will be working on a book tentatively titled Who Elected Big Tech? She will also co-lead (with James Guszcza) the Theory of AI Practice Initiative. A general theme in her work is the impact of technological innovation on democracy’s sustainability and the blinders that our existing theoretical paradigms for thinking about global markets and national governance may have imposed on what we see and value. She is also interested in the role of free expression in both anti-racist liberal education and democratic accountability. Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, and an external professor and member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Yale University Press, 2019) and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2009). She is the co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexity Economics (SFI Press, 2020). Stanger’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified (at the invitation of both Democrats and Republicans) before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She received her PhD in political science from Harvard University, where she spent academic year 2019-20 as technology and human values senior fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She was a co-author of the center’s Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience and is a senior advisor to the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. Stanger was the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress and a CASBS fellow in 2020-21.