About

About the Free Market Project

The Free Market Project is an independent reference on economics and on the reporting of economics. It exists to answer a narrow, practical question as well as possible: when a business or economic story appears, what would a reader need to know in order to understand it properly?

What we are

A small editorial project with a library-shaped mission. We write primers, longer explanatory reports, and a standing guide to reading business coverage. The audience we have in mind is a general reader — a student, a teacher, a journalist working outside their usual beat, or anyone who has just read a headline about inflation or employment and wants to know what sits behind it.

The subject matter comes from the domain's own history. This address has been associated with the study of economic understanding and its transmission through the media since the early 2000s, and the topic list you see in the Issues section — economy, energy, environment, labour, taxes, trade — follows that lineage. The editorial approach, however, is our own and is set out below.

What we are not

This is an educational reference, not an advocacy publication. Specifically:

• We are independent. The project is not affiliated with, funded by, or acting on behalf of any advocacy organisation, research institute, media watchdog, trade association, political party, campaign or candidate. No third party reviews or approves what is published here.
• We do not keep score. We do not rate news organisations, tally coverage for or against a position, or characterise any outlet or journalist as biased. Where we discuss coverage, we discuss the general mechanics of how such stories are produced, not the record of a particular newsroom.
• We do not name and criticise individuals. No reporters, editors, executives or public officials are singled out for criticism anywhere on this site.
• We do not solicit. There is no membership, no donation appeal, no mailing list sold or shared, and no commercial relationship with any organisation named in our source links.
• We do not give advice. Nothing here is investment, tax, legal or financial advice. It is background explanation.

Editorial rules

Five rules govern everything published here, and they are worth stating plainly because they explain why the writing reads the way it does.

1. Name the source, and link to it

Every quantitative claim is attributed to a public statistical series and, wherever possible, linked to the agency that publishes it — the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Energy Information Administration, and their equivalents elsewhere. Readers should be able to go and check, and should not need our permission to disagree with us.

2. Describe the method before the finding

A statistic is a measurement procedure before it is a number. We try to say how something was counted before saying what the count was, because most public misunderstanding of economic data is a misunderstanding of the definition rather than of the arithmetic.

3. Present the disagreement

On genuinely contested questions — the size of a policy's cost, the right discount rate, the strength of an effect — economists disagree, sometimes sharply. Where that is true, the disagreement itself is the story, and we present the competing positions and the evidence each rests on rather than adjudicating between them.

4. No political framing

Economic policy is decided politically, but it can be explained without partisan language, and we do explain it that way. Positions are described by their content, not by the coalition that holds them.

5. Explain, do not persuade

The measure of success for a page here is that a reader who finishes it can follow the next news story on the subject unaided, whatever conclusion they then reach.

On the phrase "free market"

The name is descriptive, and the ideas behind it deserve better than a slogan. Markets are a coordination mechanism: prices carry information about scarcity and desire that no planner can assemble, and competition disciplines the people who supply them. Understanding that mechanism properly is one of the most useful things a general reader can take from economics, and it is a large part of what this site teaches.

Understanding it properly also means knowing what it requires. Markets deliver good outcomes under conditions the discipline states explicitly — informed participants, real competition, and prices that carry the full social cost of an activity. Where a condition fails, the outcome degrades in predictable ways, and the study of those failures is as much a part of mainstream economics as the study of the successes. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics maintained by the Library of Economics and Liberty is a good, accessible starting point for both halves, and the Federal Reserve Education programme covers the monetary side.

Corrections and contact

We would rather be corrected than be consistent. If something here is wrong — a misdescribed series, a broken link, a definition that has since changed — please use the contact form on this page to tell us what and where, and we will fix it and note the change. We read everything sent to us, though we cannot answer research requests, do homework, or comment on individual news stories.