Steve Davies is Head of Education at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. From 1979 until 2009 he was Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Economic History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, and a programme officer at the Institute for Humane Studies in Arlington, Virginia. A historian, he graduated from St Andrews University in Scotland in 1976 and gained his PhD from the same institution in 1984. He is the author of Empiricism and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity (Edward Everett Root, 2019) and of several articles and essays on topics including the private provision of public goods and the history of crime and criminal justice.

Steven Landsburg is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester and the author of More Sex Is Safer Sex, The Armchair Economist, Fair Play, Can You Outsmart an Economist?, The Big Questions, two textbooks on economics and over thirty journal articles in mathematics, economics, and philosophy. He's been hailed by Steven Levitt, co-author with Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics, as 'better than anyone else at making economics interesting to non-economists' and praised by political satirist and journalist P. J. O'Rourke for writing 'funny, jargon-free, shocking, and true essays on our material circumstances'. He inaugurated the popular 'Everyday Economics' column in Slate magazine and has written for Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other publications.