Everyman’s Dictionary of Economics

Everyman’s Dictionary of Economics, the third volume of The Collected Works of Arthur Seldon, translates the often obscure jargon and technical terminology of economics into direct, plain English understandable by both the academic and the layperson. The most abstruse topic becomes clear as he conveys the sense in ordinary language, without loss of meaning through oversimplification.

Everyman’s Dictionary of Economics covers a wide range of economic thought and includes every relevant term that the average person might encounter in a written or other treatment of the subject. In addition to conveying a sense of how economic thought has evolved over the centuries, the Dictionary stimulates and challenges readers in its questioning of conventional wisdom about government intervention and manipulation of economies. It too has “stood the test of time”; nearly thirty years after the second edition and forty years after the first, this book still engages readers—economists and nonprofessionals alike.

Everyman’s Dictionary of Economics, Volume 3 of The Collected Works of Arthur Seldon, is an indispensable reference for laypeople and for academics.

Arthur Seldon has been writing on classical liberal economics since the 1930s, when he was a student at the London School of Economics during Friedrich Hayek’s time there. For over thirty years, from the late 1950s, he was Editorial Director of the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, where his publishing program was one of the principal influences on governments all around the world, persuading them to liberalize their economies. His Collected Works in these seven volumes are a major contribution to classical liberal thought.

Colin Robinson was a business economist for eleven years. He was then appointed to the Chair of Economics at the University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom, where he founded the Department of Economics and is now Emeritus Professor. He is the author of 23 books and over 150 scholarly articles and has edited many other books. For many years he has been associated with the Institute of Economic Affairs and from 1992 to 2002 he was the IEA’s Editorial Director.