Brink Lindsey is an American political writer, and Vice President and Director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.

[citation needed] In August 2012, Lindsey authored the first original eBook ever published by Princeton University Press, an electronic release of Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth has Made Us Smarter–and More Unequal.

[10] The release of the eBook ahead of the expanded hardcover eventually published the following year was speculated to have occurred so that the book might reach its audience before the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

[12] Lindsey has summarized the book's concept of human capital by saying, "When I say we’re getting smarter, what I really mean is we are becoming more fluent in highly abstract ways of thinking.

Abstraction is the master strategy for coping with complexity: broad categories and general rules are the mental shortcuts we use to keep information overload at bay.