About Us


          

Lawrence H. Officer, cofounder and Director of Research of MeasuringWorth, is Professor of Economics at University of Illinois at Chicago. His specialties are monetary history and international economics. He is the author or editor of ten books, and has published over 50 articles in journals, 65 book reviews, and numerous book chapters and website contributions.

Professor Officer has served as Interim Dean and Associate Dean in the College of Business Administration at his university, and also as consultant to national and international organizations.

He resides in Glencoe, Illinois, and enjoys classic films.

          

Samuel H. Williamson, cofounder and president of MeasuringWorth, is Professor of Economics, Emeritus, from Miami University. His specialties are economic history, pensions and the economics of Social Security. He has published over a dozen articles in journals such as The American Economic Review and The Journal of Economic History, as well as book chapters and reviews.

In 1983 he was the cofounder of The Cliometric Society and served as its executive director for sixteen years. He also created EH.Net, the economic history services website, in 1996, and was its executive director until 2003.

Professor Williamson lives in Northern Michigan and enjoys sailing.

Over the last five years the two of us have carried out research on alternative ways to compare the relative worth of things. During that time we have developed several "calculators" on the web site EH.Net.

In the summer of 2006 we started this site dedicated exclusively to exploring the question of how to measure worth.

In our recent article "Better Measures of Worth" (July/August Challenge, The Magazine of Economic Affairs), we laid out the methodology for choosing the best index based on the type of item in question. Measuring the relative worth of a large construction project and the worth of a candy bar should be approached differently.

If you have a particular question of worth for which you need help, feel free to contact us. We can do in depth analysis of specific questions.


Board of Advisors

Jeremy Atack, Vanderbilt University
Stephen Broadberry,University of Warwick
Greg Clark, University of California, Davis
Lee Craig, North Carolina State University
Price Fishback, University of Arizona
C. Knick Harley, University of Oxford
Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois
Larry Neal, University of Illinois
Richard Sutch University of California, Riverside
Dick Sylla, New York University
Robert Whaples, Wake Forest University
Jeff Williamson, Harvard University
Gavin Wright, Stanford University


Our Staff

Yuliya Yurova: System Operator and Web Master
Sam Padrul: Research Associate