Paul Seabright: The Economist Who Refused to Stay in His Lane

Paul Seabright’s career reads less like a straight line and more like an open network—precisely the kind he studies. An economist by training, a naturalist by instinct, and a social scientist by curiosity, he has spent his life following the threads that connect markets to minds, and cooperation to evolution.

Raised in the U.K. and educated at Oxford, Seabright began in the traditional world of economics, but his questions soon outgrew its boundaries. Why do strangers trust each other with their money, their labor, even their lives? Why do societies hold together when self-interest could so easily pull them apart? These weren’t problems that spreadsheets alone could solve. They were puzzles of psychology, biology, and anthropology—and Seabright was intent on learning the grammar of them all.

That search took him to the University of Toulouse, where he built a career around collaboration across disciplines. Colleagues describe him as a bridge between departments—someone equally fluent in game theory and Darwin. In lectures and essays, he moves fluidly from financial markets to ant colonies, from the mating rituals of songbirds to the complexities of global trade. His 2004 book The Company of Strangers crystallized that vision: that modern civilization, for all its technology and abstraction, rests on ancient instincts of cooperation shaped by evolution.

Seabright’s teaching mirrors that same curiosity. He pushes students to see economics not as a closed system, but as a living conversation with history, ecology, and human nature. “Understanding incentives,” he likes to say, “isn’t enough—you have to understand the stories people tell themselves about those incentives.”

Outside the classroom, he’s as eclectic as his research. A keen observer of wildlife, he often draws parallels between human behavior and the natural world—not to diminish us, but to remind us that our social intelligence is part of something older and grander. It’s a perspective that has made him a sought-after thinker in debates on trust, gender, and the evolution of cooperation.

Across his work, one theme recurs: boundaries are useful only if they can be crossed. Paul Seabright has spent his life crossing them—not to dissolve disciplines, but to show that insight happens in the spaces between them.

The 6 Degrees team extends its heartfelt thanks to Paul Seabright for sharing his insight, intellectual generosity, and lifelong commitment to curiosity across disciplines. His work reminds us that the richest ideas often emerge where fields intersect—and that understanding the human story means learning to see the world in full.