About the Library of Economics and Liberty
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
- Monthly featured articles and columns;
- Daily economics blog posts with reader comments;
- Weekly economics podcasts with reader comments;
- Authoritative editions of classics in economics, and related works in history, political theory and philosophy;
- Definitions and explanations of economics terms and ideas via the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics;
- Frequently updated guides to reading suggestions, annotated bibliographies, links to the most commonly-used economics data bases, and other educational resources organized by topic and educational level, for those looking for ideas and guidance for further readings.
- Facebook page with announcements, thought questions, and discussion groups.
- Numerous Awards for Best Blog, Best Podcast, and other online recognition and reviews.
About the Articles and Columns
Econlib publishes three new economics articles and columns each month. These essays are written exclusively for Econlib by renowned professors, researchers, and journalists. All articles and columns are retained permanently online. Many are available for timely comments and discussion in our blog, EconLog.
The Articles. The monthly Featured Article is written by a selected author and is reviewed by our editorial staff. Articles cover a range of issues illustrating economics ideas in practice. The level ranges from introductory to post-college, with each article always covering some basic economic concept and an illustration of how it applies to daily life. The Features Editor, David R. Henderson, heads up this area of the site.
The Columns. Econlib carries two monthly columns, Reflections from Europe, by Anthony de Jasay, and An Economist Looks at Europe, by Pedro Schwartz, focusing on economic issues of topical concern to Europe.
A former column, Reflections from Latin America, by Ibsen Martinez, focused on economic issues of topical concern to Latin America.
About EconLog
The Library of Economics and Liberty features the popular daily blog, EconLog. Bloggers Bryan Caplan, David Henderson, and guest bloggers--write on topical economics of interest to them, illuminating subjects from politics and finance, to recent films and cultural observations, to history and literature.
EconLog aims to educate, entice, and excite readers into thinking about economics in daily analyses. It typically appeals to an international mix of college-educated students, teachers, news media commentators, and bloggers; self-educated or post-graduate thinkers; and those interested in understanding the ever-emerging current economic situation. Readers are invited to comment.
EconLog is one of the Wall Street Journal's Top 25 Economics Blogs.
EconLog took wing in January 2003, initially inspired by Arnold Kling's earlier educational economics blog (Great Questions of Economics [GQE]). Bryan Caplan joined in January 2005, and David Henderson in October 2008. Guest bloggers, including Garett Jones and Luigi Zingales, have contributed to EconLog since the autumn of 2012.
For more information on EconLog, see:
About EconTalk
The Library of Economics and Liberty carries a weekly podcast, EconTalk, hosted by Russ Roberts. The talk show features one-on-one discussions with an eclectic mix of authors, professors, Nobel Laureates, entrepreneurs, leaders of charities and businesses, and people on the street. The emphases are on using topical books and the news to illustrate economic principles. Exploring how economics emerges in practice is a primary theme.
Listeners are able to comment online on recent podcasts. All podcasts are archived and available free of charge. Podcast Listening Guides for classroom use are offered on selected podcasts.
EconTalk was voted Best Podcast in the 2008 Weblog Awards. It took 2nd place for Best Podcast two years in a row in the 2007 Weblog Awards and 2006 Weblog Awards.
EconTalk got started in March 2006 with podcasts every two weeks, and went weekly in the summer of 2006. New podcasts are released on Monday mornings. They are available for listening on any computer, and are also available through iTunes and other intermediary services.
For more information on EconTalk, see:
About the Econlib 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), also provided by Liberty Fund, Inc., which contains many additional books.
About the Encyclopedia
The Library of Economics and Liberty carries the popular Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, edited by David R. Henderson. This highly acclaimed economics encyclopedia was first published in 1993 under the title The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. It features easy-to-read articles by over 150 top economists, including Nobel Prize winners, over 80 biographies of famous economists, and many tables and charts illustrating economics in action. With David R. Henderson's permission and encouragement, the Econlib edition of this work includes links, additions, and corrections.
The second edition of this book came out in December, 2007. It is available both in print (through Liberty Fund, Inc.) and online here at Econlib. The 1st edition continues to be available online at Econlib.
For more information, see:
- Articles by title (2nd edition)
- Biographies (2nd edition)
- Articles by title (1st edition)
About the Guides
The newcomer to Econlib can find the resources here overwhelming. There are so many books, articles, and media items available that it is hard to know where to begin.
Econlib offers several guides that can serve as roadmaps and starting points for newcomers. Examples include:
- Ten Key Ideas, introducing fundamental ideas for someone who wants to get started understanding economics but does not know where to begin.
- High School Economics Topics, organizing introductory economics materials according to the 51 NCEE economics concepts for high school classes.
- Economics Podcast Listening Guides. These printable worksheets offer questions to accompany some of the podcasts on EconTalk.
- Economics Data and Resources. Reliable data sources and links to respected government economics websites and private journals.
The guides are written and updated by various Econlib editors and Liberty Fund staff.
More guides are available on the Guides page.
About Our Facebook Page
Econlib's Facebook Page is available for all those who subscribe to Facebook. Posts include a variety of announcements and thought-provoking questions of interest to our readers. Regular Facebook Discussions cover books and other topics of interest.
A few of our awards
Econlib, EconLog, and EconTalk are the proud recipients of many prestigious awards. These awards include
- The CEE's Adam Smith biography wins first place for Shmoop's Best of the Web award in Economic Systems.
- EconLog makes top 20 in Wikio's rankings of Business Blogs. See also SmallBizTrends for brief overview of what Wikio takes into account.
- EconTalk was voted Best Podcast in the 2008 Weblog Awards. It took 2nd place for Best Podcast two years in a row in the 2007 Weblog Awards and 2006 Weblog Awards.
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 G. H. 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, Associate 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
David R. Henderson, Features Editor. David Henderson is Associate Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is also a Research Fellow with the Hoover Institution. Before coming to the Naval Postgraduate School, Henderson was the Senior Economist for Health Policy and Energy Policy with President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. Henderson has also been on the faculty of Santa Clara University and the University of Rochester's Simon School of Business. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.
He has written in a wide range of scholarly publications and has published over 200 articles and book reviews in magazines and newspapers, including, in declining order of frequency, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, the Red Herring, the Freeman, Reason, and Regulation. One of his specialties is making economics understandable to non-economists. He has written, edited, or co-authored four books, The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics (1993), The Joy of Freedom: An Economist's Odyssey (2002), Making Great Decisions in Business and Life (2006), and The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2008). He has testified before committees of the U.S. Congress and has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, the Jim Lehrer Newshour, CNN, and C-SPAN. In 1984, he won the Mencken Award for Best Investigative Journalism Article.
David Henderson blogs on EconLog. See his EconLog Author Archive for a list of his EconLog posts.
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.
Amy Willis, Econlib Liaison for Liberty Fund, is a Liberty Fund Fellow who also works in the Liberty Fund conference program. She is a graduate of the University of Vermont and holds Masters degrees from the University of Delaware and Arizona State University. She taught high school and college economics in Arizona, and served as the Executive Director of the Arizona Council on Economic Education before joining Liberty Fund in 2006.
