Robert T. Deacon is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and University Fellow at Resources for the Future. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington and has also served as the Julian Simon Fellow, Property and Environment Research Center; Visiting Foreign Scholar, Institute for Social and Economic Research, Osaka University; Visiting Professor, International Center for Higher Education on Agronomics in the Mediterranean, Zaragoza, Spain; Guest Professor, University of Witten-Herdecke; Visiting Scholar, CentER, Tilburg University; and National Fellow, Hoover Institution.

Stephen DeCanio is a Professor of economics, emeritus, at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

H. E. Frech is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and a researcher and teacher at UC Santa Barbara. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and the University of Chicago, an adjunct professor at Sciences Po in Paris, an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and an economist in the U.S. Government.

Martin Bruce Johnson (1933–1999) was the founding Research Director at the Independent Institute; Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and former President of the Western Economic Association.