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QUESTIONS ABOUT BACKGROUND
What is this website?
The History of Economic Thought (HET) website was created and written by myself (Gonçalo L. Fonseca), I started it back in 1998, in a burst of youthful energy, and have expanded and maintained it since. I constructed it in my spare time, without compensation, as a public good. The HET website was for a long time hosted on a faculty server at the New School, but has since moved to its own server.
The HET Website is a repository of information and resources on the history
of economic thought, from the ancient times until the modern day. It is designed
for students and the general public, who are interested in learning about
economics from a historical
perspective.
This is not an online textbook nor a reference encyclopedia. I prefer to think of it as a "link tank", pointing students and researchers to available online resources on economic theory. I have just organized these links in a manner which I believe is both entertaining and educational.
Who are you?
I am an economics graduate student. See my contact page. This website is not associated with the New School for Social Research, but they graciously lent us server space for many years.
Addendum (2015): I was an economics graduate student. I am now a research fellow at INET.
Who's paying you?
Nobody. I do this in my spare time and receive absolutely no $ for it.
Addendum (2015): the Institute for Economic Thinking (INET) has provided support for me to revise, revamp and expand the HET Website since 2014. I would like to acknowledge their assistance.
Is this the New School's website?
The HET website is, and has always been, my private website. However, the Department of Economics at the New School for Social Research allowed me to host the website on faculty servers for many years. As a result, unable to find the author's name, many people simply referred to it as the "New School's HET website". But neither the department nor the New School was ever involved in its construction. Every word on this site was written by me (Gonçalo L. Fonseca). I did this on my own time, without compensation, until INET graciously offered to help support me in 2013.
Is this the same site that was once at cepa.newschool.edu, etc.?
Yes. The HET website has gone through several addresses over time. Initially (1998) I hosted it on a Johns Hopkins student server, then around 2001, I moved it to the faculty server at the New School (cepa.newschool.edu), then c.2006 moved to another faculty server (homepage.newschool.edu), then the IT denizens at the New School decided to shut down faculty servers entirely, and so I moved the website (c.2008) to my own private server at hetwebsite.org. Then in 2013, somebody hacked my site and stole the url. So now I've had to move it to another private server with a new url (hetwebsite.net) in 2015. I have taken measures to ensure this newest url stays stable and final.
TopQUESTIONS ABOUT PURPOSE
Why did you do this?
Because I'm completely crazy! Seriously, it started off as a collection of links to online books to assist a New School course on the history of economic doctrines. It then just sort of evolved by itself into the monster you see before you.
Do you have a political or economic agenda?
We don't have a political agenda. We are linked to websites of both "left"-wing and "right"-wing think-tanks, magazines and newspapers. We take this as a good sign.
We do sort of have a sort of economic agenda. Pluralism has been our guiding principle. We try to take every viewpoint seriously on its own merits. Of course, we have our personal perspective and this probably seeps through in what we write. However, we try to be as judicious as possible.
Note: while we try to let as many differing economic perspectives as possible to find their way into this website, we have avoided including cranks and quack economic philosophies. We are open to suggestions, but we are also aware that there is a fine line between theory and quackery, so our decision is bound to be a bit arbitrary. Our litmus test for inclusion is simple: if the creator of a theory does not take it seriously enough to make a careful and logical argument, back it up with evidence and provide countervailing arguments, then we don't believe there is a reason for us to take it seriously either.
Do you have a bias against orthodox economics?
Some economists claim that there is only one "true" economics and that everything else is either nonsense or political ideology. Consequently, some may view "pluralism" as thinly-veiled opposition to the mainstream orthodoxy. We have little patience for this view. We believe Neoclassicism to be a very good theory and we take it very seriously. But we also see it as only one among many good theories -- perhaps primum inter pares, but there are still pares that need to be taken into account.
But isn't economics a science?
We find it rather silly that we have to argue this, but here goes. As John Maynard Keynes (1931) put it, we believe that economics is the "most agreeable branch of the moral sciences, in which theory and fact, intuitive imagination and practical judgment, are blended in a manner comfortable to the human intellect". Whether that implies economics is a "science" or a "discipline" or an "art" or a "religion" or whatever, we don't know and, frankly, we don't care.
However, we recognize that some people use the phrase "economics is a science" as fighting words. Heterodox economists are their usual targets. This idea is also used to chastise students or browbeat laymen who may have misgivings or remain unconvinced of the absolutism of the "Truths" that are contained in the standard undergraduate economics textbook. Of course, when these great "Truths" are proved wrong, they usually run under the cover of the even more ludicrous argument that "Well, economics is a young science"! As these web-pages should make clear, economics is not young. As Hayek reminds us, "Sir William Petty, the founder of econometrics, was after all a somewhat senior colleague of Sir Isaac Newton in the Royal Society!" (Hayek, 1974).
So, our basic position is this: we believe economics is a science like any other science -- a human construction that attempts to get a grip on the world by proposing various theories meant to unify all sorts of differing factual phenomena. This implies that we identify as the body of modern economics is nothing else but the outcome of the history of human inventiveness and discovery. Economics is an edifice built by economists, generation after generation, via mentors and protégés, conjecture and proof, criticism and correction, rivalry and cooperation, ideology and rebellion, waves of fashion and isolated flashes of brilliance. And this is how we want to present it. We believe that we can do better than merely urge you to realize this. In fact, we can demonstrate it. By exploiting that magnificent invention known as the "hyperlink", we believe that any mildly curious person browsing through this website will gain a sense of this human creativity, this rich complexity of interconnectedness of ideas, on their very own.
Now, for some reason better left for psychotherapists to plumb, some economists seem to be ashamed of admitting they have a history at all. Perhaps they believe it makes their "science" look less "scientific". But this simply does not make sense. We believe that that study of the history of the discipline is not only entertaining for the scientist, but also useful. We will not say it is necessary to know the history of economic thought to become a good economist, but you will often become a better economist by taking an occasional, even if only recreational, dip in it. It is commendable to use economics to understand the world, but it is no less important to use the world to understand economics.
So, why history of economics? The best answer we can find is that given by André Weil's to the International Congress of Mathematicians:
"The essential business of both [mathematicians and historians of mathematics] is to deal with mathematical ideas, those of the past, those of the present, and, when they can, those of the future. Both can find invaluable training and enlightenment in each other's work. Thus my original question "Why mathematical history?" finally reduces itself to the question "Why mathematics?", which fortunately I do not feel called upon to answer." (Weil, 1978: p.236).
We have constructed our website in the same spirit.
For more, see our statement "The Economic worth of historical thinking".
QUESTIONS ABOUT USAGE
Is this material copyright?
Yes. Almost all the material contained in the pages of this website is original content written by myself (Gonçalo L. Fonseca) and subject to copyright. That means the website is subject to traditional usage guidelines for copy-written material, i.e. if you copy selections, you must not pass this off as your own work. That means using "quotation marks" for borrowed phrases/paragraphs, limiting the amount of text borrowed, citing the source, etc. "Fair use" is not an excuse to mirror, reproduce or copy large parts or entire pages without permission or attribution. We would like to reiterate our warning to students about the stern consequences that are usually imposed by schools and universities if one is caught plagiarizing. So, please, use this site with discretion.
Help! There are too many bizarre characters. I can't read this website!
This website was optimized for Google Chrome. The character setting "Western ISO-8859-1" (please make sure you have this setting -- this is the usual fix).
You also need the conventional "Symbol" font to see the mathematical notation. I believe some browsers don't have this enabled, or not installed. To download the Symbol font, click here (Symbol500.ttf will download, which you can install in your font folders).
I can't read all this! Are you going to publish this as a book?
No. We have no plans to publish any of this, for four basic reasons:
Firstly, it doesn't deserve it. Much of what we have written is largely available and much-better covered in other books (see our references section, for example). Our interpretations do not depart too far from the standard accounts.
Secondly, the "book" form eliminates what we believe to be the central feature of this website, namely the exploitation of the "hyperlink" as an expository tool. The hyperlink permits us to connect topics with people, people with schools of thought, schools with theories, theories with proofs, etc. by a click of a button One of the purposes in building up this website was to permit students to "roam around" freely through economics and appreciate the interconnectedness and richness of economic theory.
Thirdly, books must be finished, websites can continue to evolve forever. Our website, at present, is very "unbalanced": whole important fields are missing while some specialized topics are covered in minute detail. Also, the degree of scholarship is rather low: we have not yet combed it through for accuracy or submitted it for external review and criticism. For a book, we would have to fix the mistakes, restore "balance", smooth the narration over, ensure consistency, etc., all things that we do not really have time to do. With a website, things will just evolve on and on -- it is permanently "under review" to the world at large and topics will continue to be added and recurrently revised and overhauled.
Fourthly, books are expensive, websites are free. Most people would not bother to fork over hard-earned $ to buy a book about this stuff. We see ourselves as something akin to a museum: we keep the entry free because people would not walk in otherwise.
We have no plans to make a CD-Rom out of this either.
I have spotted an error. Will you correct it?
Please inform us! Yes, we will correct it.
Your server keeps going down! Can I mirror your website on my server?
Please do not do so. The material here is constantly changing and last thing we want to do is go chasing various corners of the world whenever we make a correction.
However, in certain circumstances, we allow teachers to temporarily mirror some of our web-pages (not the entire website!) during the semester for which they are teaching a class in order to have a back-up of all the resources/links, etc. -- just in case our server decides to take an unscheduled vacation.
I found another website identical to yours. Are you aware of this?
Usually, this is the case of a teacher temporarily backing up a few pages for his/her class's use. However, we are aware of the existence of a few sites that (without permission) have copied vast amounts of materials from us. We have, on several occasions, asked that these materials be removed (and, in some cases, they have kindly removed it).
Naturally, we do not take responsibility for the materials on these other sites. This website has no legitimate mirrors. The only url addresses which correspond to this site http://www.hetwebsite.net/het/..
Can I copy this material to Wikipedia/Why not just copy the material from Wikipedia?
I do not copy material from Wikipedia or other sources. The material here is composed originally by myself. Of course, I use a variety of sources written by others to gather my information, but I do not plagiarize, and expect the same.
No, you may not copy or transfer material to Wikipedia.
The HET website was created and has existed for many years, well before Wikipedia was launched. I guess they saw the same magic in the concept of the hyperlink to connect topics.
As to why not copy to/from Wikipedia, well, I don't want to. For several reasons.
Firstly, Wikipedia editors copied a lot of the material from the HET website to construct their articles (often without acknowledgment, *grumble*). Although some of these articles were subsequently greatly modified and expanded by knowledgeable editors, I am a little surprised to find that many were barely improved. Despite the hands of thousands of Wiki editors over the past decade, they have not necessarily done a better job than the original ten-year-old article by lonely old me.
Secondly, I have actually been an active Wikipedia editor over the years (not on economics articles though), and have caught a glimpse behind the curtain, and have been quite disappointed about how the editing is done. The drama is quite acrimonious, and expertise does not usually triumph. Although I had once thought of opening up the HET website to other contributors, Wiki-style, my experience of Wikipedia persuaded me that collaborative editing leaves much to be desired and the results are rarely better.
Thirdly, as an economist, I have an aversion to monopolies. As Wikipedia has grown over the years, it has had the side-effect that a generation of users increasingly turn to Wikipedia exclusively as their first and often one and only source of knowledge on many topics. Not only have established, competing encyclopedias fallen away, but many private or academic scholarly websites from Web 1.0 days (similar to our own) have disappeared, and very few new ones have arisen to replace them. As a result, there is an increasing lack of competition in the provision of knowledge to the public on the internet. Whereas previously a browser could find a couple dozen different web-pages about, say, Adam Smith, some by scholars, others by enthusiasts, others by critics, each offering a different perspective on the Scottish economist, the number is now much more reduced. In far too many cases, there is now only one source on the internet - the article on Wikipedia, articulating one perspective, and little else available.
I believe a monopoly on knowledge is bad for humanity. And while Wikipedia has doubtlessly a very valuable and useful place in the public sphere, it should not become the only place. Competition in knowledge is of vital importance and the provision of knowledge by other sources should be maintained and encouraged.
For these reasons, you are not permitted to copy material from the HET Website to Wikipedia.
Naturally, Wikipedia editors are free to link to pages on the HET website, just as the HET website now also provides links to Wikipedia articles. But the content itself should not be transferred either way. Let the resources remain independent, so the public has a variety of sources and perspectives to choose from.
QUESTIONS ABOUT INDIVIDUAL ECONOMISTS
How many economists do you discuss on your website?
Last time we counted, over 1,000 economists were individually profiled. It is always expanding.
Were the pages written with the consent of the economists you review?
No. We decided to exercise our freedom of speech. However, a few of the economists and/or families of economists have contacted us and asked us to correct a few mistakes here and there, provided us with some more information about them and their work, etc. They have been very nice about it and we have not had a disgruntled case yet. Of course, we exercise our discretion on what to include, but we are extremely open to input. We have no desire to denigrate or diminish anybody or anybody's work. We will listen.
What is your criterion for inclusion?
Well, an economist has to be widely-acknowledged as influential in his field for us to include him. Obviously, he does not need to be dead or have lived long ago. We have many living -- indeed, even young -- economists listed on our website.
What does "widely-acknowledged" mean? Well, that is where our subjective assessment comes in. We try be as careful as possible, but inevitably, it is an unfair process.
One of our main guidelines for inclusion has been in the writing of our surveys and essays. In the course of reviewing the material on a specific topic, if we realize that Prof. X had an important thing or two to say about it, then Prof. X will probably get his or her own little separate corner in this website.
Why didn't you include famous economist xxx?
Usually because we haven't got around to it yet, or are not sufficiently aware of his/her work and details. You are welcome to suggest somebody to include -- and we'd be doubly grateful if you would also help us write a blurb on their contributions and works.
But, once again, notice that a lot of people are not included because we have not yet written a survey of the field to which they contributed (e.g. international trade theorists and labor economists are quite underrepresented). As more areas of economics get covered in our surveys, more economists will be added.
These are all Dead White Males! Where's the Womyn?
Happily, not all economists on our website are dead, but many of them are, indeed, males of European descent.
As with other academic disciplines, women have only recently risen to the position where they can play an important role in its development. So it is inevitable that when we are considering the entire history of economics, the proportion of female economists is going to be smaller than if we take a cross-section of economists today. Yet, if you look carefully, you will notice that we do have a good amount of women on our website and more will be added as we go. Unfortunately, economics has traditionally been and continues to be a male-dominated field. Even today, the proportion of women working in economics remains well below that of other scientific disciplines.
These are all Anglo-American economists! You are evidently culturally-biased!
Probably like most students of economics in this world, we have been subjected to national biases in our education. The traditional presentation of the history of economic thought in English-speaking curricula tend to emphasize the "British line" in the evolution of economic theory (Petty, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Jevons, Marshall, Keynes, etc.). It tends to glibly assume that everyone else followed that path as well. Thankfully, intellectual historians have gradually come to recognize that economics evolved along distinctly different grooves in France, Italy, Germany, etc. Also, it has only been in recent years that they have begun to examine the economic theories of Islamic, Indian, Japanese and Chinese scholars of the past.
While we try our best to rectify some of the nationalist/cultural biases (we probably cover more non-British economics than the standard textbooks), we cannot ignore the plain fact that the British economists of yesteryear (and American ones today) have had a disproportionately large influence on the field. We will gladly incorporate as many prominent economic thinkers from other nations as we can, but Smith, Ricardo, Marshall, etc. will continue to loom large.
Finally, remember, this is not our day job! If you send us names of economists we "ought" to include but about whom we know very little, we cannot very well include them. We count on practicing historians of economics to do our legwork for us, so do not expect us to dig through their works ourselves. Please, if you want to suggest someone, try to help us out by providing us with as much information about their works, contributions, influences, etc. as you can.
Do you have a picture of economist xxx?
What you see is what you get. We have borrowed most of our pictures from other websites. A list of the sources is given on our reference page. Do not ask us for permission to use them. Direct yourself to the original source.
QUESTIONS ON SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
How many schools of thought do you profile?
Roughly, we divide our economists into some 70+ "schools of thought". Naturally, there is a lot of overlap between them and more subdivisions could be imagined. These are bound to evolve over time.
Where did you get this list of Schools of Thought?
We constructed the classification schema and assigned the economists to the schools we thought they fit in best. Some schools of thought are widely recognized as such (e.g. the Austrian School). Others we have completely made up (e.g. the Paretian School).
The purpose of organizing the website in terms of Schools of Thought is not to "pigeon-hole" economists or imply that they are all birds of the same feather. Rather, it is the simplest way of tracing intellectual influences and differences between economists and setting up the background for particular debates in economics.
QUESTIONS ABOUT ESSAYS AND SURVEYS
Why are the pages anonymous and undated? I am trying to cite xx article. Who wrote it and when?
As a matter of principle, however, we prefer not to be cited. The material in these pages was written in a rather careless and jovial spirit, with the objective of being chatty and entertaining, so the degree of scholarship is rather below what we would otherwise demand of ourselves. Furthermore, the material is constantly changing and we are aware of numerous errors that we have not yet had time to correct. However, you are more than welcome to bookmark us or place our link on your website/course page, etc.
Students who have used our material and need to cite a source in a paper for a class, etc. are strongly urged to examine the linked primary materials and make their own conclusions. Remember, the entire purpose of this website was precisely to organize all the primary and secondary resources on economics we could find on the web. Use them! If you still need to cite us, for some reason, you do so at your own risk. You'll be responsible for backing it up and double-checking with other, more reliable, sources and materials. In our references page, there is a bibliography of general secondary literature we used. Many of these books should be available in your library.
But if you must: all of the commentaries on individual authors, schools of thought and the surveys and essays on economic theory were written by me --Gonçalo L. Fonseca. As the material is always changing, we haven't had the patience to track when these pages were written/updated, etc. You should always cite the date when you accessed the site. For what it's worth, the written material ranges from 1998 to the present.
Also beware! There are numerous external links in our pages whose URL address you may not notice. So be careful when citing material which comes from other websites linked from our website.
Addendum (2015): All web-pages are now signed at the bottom by the author (Gonçalo L. Fonseca).
Why don't you just use material from the New Palgrave, or some other, more authoritative text?
There's a curious little thing called "copyright"...
Can I cut and paste some of your arguments for my report/presentation, etc.?
Certainly you may -- as long as it follows traditional usage guidelines for copy-written material. In a nutshell, as long as you do not pass this off as your own work, go ahead. That means using "quotation marks" for borrowed phrases/paragraphs, limiting the amount of text borrowed, citing the source (see above), etc.
Note to teachers: On occasion, we have been informed of students who have copied portions of our website into their term papers without proper citation, etc. I am still figuring out how to get this site included into plagiarism clearing-houses to make it easier to check. But the best safeguard for plagiarism is the good old search engine. Place the phrase you think the student has copied into our search engine (or any other search engine for that matter, e.g. Google) and you are bound to hit the original source.
Why isn't there a survey on xxx?
Our essays and surveys are currently quite unbalanced due to lack of time and our own particular interests. However, there are many surveys and essays in the pipeline, so check back soon.
If this is a history of economic thought website, why are the surveys so focused on modern economic theory and so little about history itself?
We are interested in the history of economic thought only insofar as it serves a vehicle for understanding modern economic theory. So, our reference point is modern economics. Our attention has been on the "progress" of economic analysis from the past to the present, the linkages of ideas that have some recognizable form today. (I think they call this "Whiggism"). We've thought about changing the name of our site from "History of Economic Thought" website to merely the "Economic Thought" website, as that would reflect our purpose a little better, namely to present economic theory from a historical-doctrinal perspective.
Of course, knowledge of history is doubtlessly useful to understanding the economic, political and social context of the theories, but that has not been our focus. However, some people believe that the history of economic thought should not be merely the side recreation of economists, but a separate and distinct discipline that conforms to the scholarly norms and standards of intellectual historians. In their view, details about the historical economic and social context (which we skimp on) are very important. This is fair and commendable, but it is not our approach. We leave all this to be done by others that are better and more scholarly about it There are professional societies and journals dedicated to it throughout the world, and numerous, excellent, scholarly works on the topic come out every year. Research in the history of economic thought is thriving. We have endeavored to link to all and any such material that we find online.
Why do you put so much emphasis on mathematics and proofs?
Many economists would argue that mathematics is superfluous bunting. We agree. The "point" of an economic theory can be stated in a clear phrase or two -- and if it cannot be so stated, then the theory itself was probably not clearly conceived from the outset.
But while every good theory can be stated in English, briefly and succinctly, the problem is that it usually isn't. Economists (us included) are terrible at writing prose -- most of their attempts at a succinct, verbal explanation of a theory turns out to be more confusing than clarifying. So, if you can't find the right words or phrasing necessary to get your point across, you draw a picture or write down an equation.
Why the proofs? Well, aesthetics, of course! Seriously, it helps with the "appreciation" of a theorem. Knowledge can be like an archive. You know it, you file it away, but you must then ask yourself: do you really understand it? We believe that doing the proofs takes you beyond mere knowledge and into, well, connoisseurship. At any rate, there is human worth in acquiring a familiarity with logical thinking and argumentation -- and doing proofs is way of cultivating a "delicacy of taste" for it.
QUESTIONS ABOUT LINKS
Where can I find the articles/books you cite on your website?.
In a library, usually.
On a serious note, the HET website is not a depository of articles or books themselves (save for a few hard-to-find examples; see our list of texts). It merely links to where copies are available elsewhere online.
The availability of new online archives in the last few years has greatly expanded our scope. We now have links to tens of thousands of articles and books, usually accessed via the economist profile pages. Online archives we have used include Google books, Archive.org, JSTOR, Gallica, McMaster, etc.
As a matter of principle, the HET website does not link to books or articles that are behind pay-walls. Every resource we link to must be freely available to any researcher, academic and nonacademic, without charge.
So, for example, while we will link to the portions of JSTOR that are publicly-accessible (i.e. articles before 1920 or thereabouts), we will not link to JSTOR articles that require institutional licenses.
I cannot access the articles/books you link to. Help!.
As the HET website has been around for a long time, many of our original links deprecated. We launched a comprehensive revision in 2014, to verify and ensure all current links are up-to-date and active. The revision is still on-going, so we beg patience until the revision is complete.
However, it has come to our attention that some online archives currently restrict access differentially by country, due to differences in copyright law. The HET Website was constructed and is hosted in the United States of America. And the articles and books it links to should be available to browsers with an American IP address. But some browsers with a European, Asian, African ,etc. IP address may not be able to access them.
The most egregious in this regard is Googlebooks, an archive we use extensively. It treats different countries differently. While US and EU copyright law is of the same length (Life + 70), US copyright law has a "memory barrier" where the law only applies to books published after 1924, whereas the equivalent EU law has no statutory starting point. As a result, while Googlebooks gives access to US readers to any book published up until 1924, it has imposed a access barrier on readers from other countries. In particular, we have discovered that Googlebooks has imposed an arbitrary time wall of 1872 on readers browsing from EU and several other foreign countries. This does not mean that books published after 1872 are not in public domain in the EU - many of them are - just that Googlebooks has decided to impose that arbitrary rule across the board to avoid any potential "issues" (evidently Googlebooks reckoned that 1872 was a conservatively "safe" date - that no author who wrote a book in 1872 would have lived so long afterwards to still fall under the Life + 70 rule). Canadian IP users apparently have access until 1886 or so - reflecting the shorter Canadian copyright term.
This differential treatment is unfortunate, and has marred the universality of our website. We have verified accessibility for American IP users, and did not think until too late to ensure they were also available to users with foreign IPs.
A recommended course of action for those blocked by such arbitrary restrictions is to figure out a way to use an American IP, e.g. via a VPN network.
Another alternative solution is to look up the equivalent book in Archive.org, which has mirrored most of Googlebooks and is not country-restricted. If we link to it, it is necessarily accessible for free to Americans, which means it should also be available at Archive.org.
I keep coming across missing pages ("404 Not Found", etc.)! Are you going to fix this?
On some occasions, we have made links to pages that do not yet exist but will exist pretty soon. I know this can be quite irritating, but please bear with us.
Also: we now have a case-sensitive server, so occasionally a link will not work because it happens to be written differently, e.g. .../Austrian.htm will not connect to .../austrian.htm. So, play around with the capitalization if it doesn't work. We're fixing this slowly.
Where are your external links?
On every webpage about an economist or school of thought, there is a list of external links below the heading "Resources on xxx". We have placed general links (e.g. large archives of texts, other useful link tanks, hypermedia courses, glossaries, etc.), separately in our External Links page.
I have spotted a broken or erroneous link. Will you fix it?
Yes, please inform us, and we will correct it as soon as we can. Sometimes the structure of the websites we link to changes, so the hyperlink doesn't go to exactly where it says it goes. Play around with the address, and maybe you can find it again. In some instances, we keep dead links alive in the hope that it is a only a temporary glitch and the missing website will resurface.
Can I link to you? Will you reciprocate?
Most certainly you can link to us. However, we do not reciprocate links automatically. If we think your website, in whole or in part, has the kind of material that our readers will be interested in, we will probably link.
What is your linking policy?
We will link to anything and everything about an economist, school of thought, etc. that is remotely "scholarly" and that is free to all browsers.
We will link announcements of conferences, etc. that anyone submits to us and we believe might be of interest to our readers.
We will not link to commercial pay-sites and we will avoid linking to sites which require complicated registration procedures.
We will not link to sites which are accessible only to licensed institutional users (e.g. universities, libraries) but not to outside individuals.
We will not link to online bookstores, auctions or other commercial websites.
We will not link to publishers' announcements of new books, unless substantial excerpts or reviews are available to all browsers free of charge.
We most definitely will not link to "essay clearinghouse" sites that provide materials for students to plagiarize (and charge for it too!)
We most definitely will not link to "warez" or pirate archives that concentrate copywritten material illegally.
All pages have the same URL address! How do I link to a specific page?
The "frames" structure of this website means that our URL address will stay permanently in the URL box of your browser as you navigate through this site. To link to a specific page, place the cursor over the page, right-click on your mouse and open the page in a new window. The proper URL should appear in the box and you can link to that.
Addendum (2015): the frames are now removed. This should not be a problem anymore.
QUESTIONS ABOUT CONTACT
Can I write to you?
Of course you may! But don't expect a prompt reply! Often we are busy and can't get to it for a while. Although sometimes it slips out of our mind altogether, we'll try to reply to every e-mail eventually.
We will not reply to students who submit a question that is obviously from a homework assignment, examination or paper they have been assigned. We are willing to help you find materials and may answer "general" questions regarding papers and assignments, but don't expect much!
I keep writing to you, but the e-mail keeps getting bounced back!
We have had different e-mail addresses in the past which are no longer valid. The only currently working e-mail address is hetwebsite@hotmail.com. Please direct all correspondence there.
How can I get in touch with Prof. X?
We don't know. We are an amateur site and do not have personal contact with the economists listed on it. If we know that a particular economist has a personal website with contact information, we link to it and you can go through there. But this is not always the case.
How can I participate?
Write to us, for starters, and tell us what you have in mind. We are always on the look-out for new material, particularly on economists and topics which are not well-covered. Essays, bibliographies, pictures are all welcome.
Naturally, we offer no remuneration for materials submitted. Any contribution will be considered voluntary and free of charge. We will assume that any materials we receive are in the public domain (or else composed by yourself and lent to us).
All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca