About the Library of Economics and Liberty

Adam Smith

Overview The Library of Economics and Liberty is dedicated to advancing the study of economics, markets, and liberty. It offers a unique combination of resources for students, teachers, researchers, and aficionados of economic thought. The website is provided by Liberty Fund, Inc., a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. The Foundation develops, supervises, and finances its own educational activities, with the goal of fostering discussion and thought on enduring topics pertaining to the creation and maintenance of such a society. The site features Authoritative editions of classics in economics, and related works in history, political theory and philosophy; Featured columns and articles; Links to the most commonly-used economics data bases; Reading lists and annotated bibliographies organized by topic, for those looking for ideas for further readings; Links to other sites of interest.

About the Online Books The books and essays on this website represent classics of economic thought, both historical and modern. New books are being added at the rate of about two per month. The books are presented free of charge for the purpose of reading and research. The features of the web site include: A powerful search engine that culls and reports the surrounding paragraph rather than just links to the pages. Pages that are easy to print, with optimally pre-set page-widths. Properly-formatted citations with the click of a button. Texts that are carefully proofread to originals. Paragraphs that are numbered for reference and as instant locational guides even within long chapters. Tables that are legibly aligned, and replicate elements such as brace brackets. Original graphs, quotations in Greek, and artwork of historic interest are seamlessly integrated as gifs or jpgs. A Table of Contents for each book in a slide-out frame, which the user can hide or reveal. Footnotes that are linked to the files and, for those books that are annotated by an academic editor, are color-coded by authorship. Fonts and visual presentations that have been chosen with care, offering extra white space on the page to ease readers' eyes. Page number references in original text and footnotes that are converted to appropriate links for easy navigation in many books. A variety of tools, including a calculator, a notepad, and reference links to online dictionaries are easily accessible from each book's Table of Contents. More information on how to use the tools and features can be found on the Help page. See also The Online Library of Liberty (OLL), Econlib's sister site, which contains many additional books.

Who's Who The content of the Library of Economics and Liberty website is selected by an independent Advisory Board, comprised of academics with a broad range of interests, along with Liberty Fund staff members, and is assembled by the Editor. Editorial Staff Lauren F. Landsburg, Editor. Lauren Landsburg is a private computer consultant and custom programmer in Rochester, New York. She migrated to this occupation from running a business specializing in typesetting textbooks using her own software based on TeX. Before that, she taught economics at the University of Rochester and served on the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Reagan and Bush. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago, preceded by an A.M. in Chinese from Yale University. She became interested in international finance after she noticed that classical Chinese texts regularly reported money supply figures. She is a co-author of a textbook, Macroeconomics, and has published in the Journal of Applied Econometrics. Russell Roberts, Features Editor. Russell Roberts is Professor of Economics and the J. Fish and Lillian F. Smith Distinguished Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Before coming to George Mason University, Roberts was at Washington University in St. Louis where he was the founding director of the Center for Experiential Learning at the John M. Olin School of Business and a Senior Fellow at the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. Roberts has also taught at the University of Rochester, Stanford University, and UCLA. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. Roberts is a regular commentator on business and economics for National Public Radio's Morning Edition. In addition to numerous academic publications, he has written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Professor Roberts is especially interested in communicating economics to non-economists. His first novel, The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism, a jargon-free book on international trade written for the non-economist, was named one of the top ten books of 1994 by Business Week and one of the best books of 1994 by the Financial Times. An updated and revised edition was published in the spring of 2000. His new book is The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance (MIT Press, 2001). Russ Roberts is the host of EconTalk, economics podcasts available here and through iTunes. He blogs at Cafe Hayek along with Don Boudreaux. List of Econlib Columns Advisory Board Mark Bils, University of Rochester. Mark Bils is an associate professor of economics at the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Bils has taught previously at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business and as a visiting professor at MIT. He has been a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution and an Olin Fellow at the NBER. Bils serves as an associate editor both of the Journal of Monetary Economics and the web-based B.E. Journals in Macroeconomics. He received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT, following a BA degree from the Ohio State University. Bils' recent research has focused on how pricing behavior contributes to business-cycle fluctuations, the importance of schooling differences across countries, and the importance of new and better consumer products. His recent published work on these topics includes "What Inventory Behavior Tells Us About Business Cycles" (written with James A. Kahn, American Economic Review, June 2000), "Does Schooling Cause Growth?" (written with Peter J. Klenow, American Economic Review, December 2000), and "Quantifying Quality Growth" (written with Peter J. Klenow, American Economic Review, forthcoming 2001). Don Boudreaux, Donald J. Boudreaux is Chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He's held this position since August 2001. Previously, he was president of the Foundation for Economic Education (1997-2001); Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Economics at Clemson University (1992-1997); and Assistant Professor of Economics at George Mason University (1985-1989). During the Spring 1996 semester he was an Olin Visiting Fellow in Law and Economics at the Cornell Law School. His PhD in economics is from Auburn University (1986) and his law degree is from the University of Virginia (1992). He has lectured, in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Europe, on a wide variety of topics, including the nature of law, antitrust law and economics, and international trade. He is published in The Wall Street Journal, Investor's Business Daily, Regulation, Reason, Ideas on Liberty, the Washington Times, The Journal of Commerce, the Cato Journal, and several scholarly journals such as the Supreme Court Economic Review, Southern Economic Journal, Antitrust Bulletin, and the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking. Don Boudreaux blogs at Cafe Hayek along with Russ Roberts. Dwight Lee, University of Georgia. Professor Lee has been the Ramsey Professor of Economics and Private Enterprise at the University of Georgia since 1985. Before that, he taught at the University of Colorado, Virginia Tech University and George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. Professor Lee's research has covered a variety of areas including the Economics of the Environment and Natural Resources, the Economics of Political Decision Making, Public Finance, Law and Economics, and Labor Economics. He has published over 100 articles in academic journals, over 100 articles and commentaries in magazines and newspaper, and has coauthored 8 books and served as the contributing editor of two more. He has lectured at universities and conferences throughout the United States as well as in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa. He was president of the Association of Private Enterprise Education for 1994-95 and president of the Southern Economic Association from 1997-98. Liberty Fund Staff James Cote, Webmaster. James Cote is a Fellow, and Director of Information Services at the Liberty Fund. Before coming to Liberty Fund, Cote worked as a project leader at MCI and as a computer consultant for companies such as NEC, LTV Steel, the NCUA and Southwest Airlines. He graduated from Trinity University. David M. Hart, Director of the Online Library of Liberty Project, Liberty Fund. Before joining Liberty Fund in 2001, David taught modern European history at the University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia. He received a Ph.D. from King's College, Cambridge and an MA from Stanford University. His research interests include the history of classical liberal thought, film and history, and the use of IT in teaching and learning. Nyle Kardatzke, Econlib Liaison for Liberty Fund, is a Senior Fellow who also works in the Liberty Fund conference program. He is a graduate of Anderson University (Indiana), and he holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from UCLA. He taught economics at Marquette University before spending most of his career as a private school headmaster in Wisconsin, Kansas, and Indiana. He joined Liberty Fund in 2006.

Contact Us You can contact the Editor, support staff, or get technical assistance, at webmaster@econlib.org. For monthly email with a list of What's New on the website, plus alerts on upcoming materal, Register for the Econlib News. All email addresses and names provided are confidential and will not be used for any other purpose. Some of our columnists can be contacted directly via their email addresses, located at the bottoms of their articles (see the Archive for an alphabetical list of articles by author), or located in their Biographies.