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Economics Textbook written by Preston for all to enjoy at no cost.

Author: Preston MCAFEE and Tracy Lewis

License: Creative Commons Attribution

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In 2006, I produced Introduction to Economic Analysis, a free, open sourced, creative-commons-licensed textbook spanning introductory and intermediate microeconomics. There were few adoptions. That there were several high profile adoptions like NYU and Harvard convinced me that the lack of adoptions was not due to the material itself, or even my exposition of the material, but instead to two factors.

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This image is free game to use, alter, and commercialize as it comes from the public domain.

No author

Public domain

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In which Adriene Hill and Jacob Clifford teach you all about economics.

Authors: Adrience Hill,  Jacob Clifford, and Stan Muller.

License: Copyright
Attribution and encouraged to be used in an educational fair use environment.

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In 35 episodes, Adriene Hill and Jacob Clifford teach you economics! This course is based on introductory college level curriculum and the 2015 AP Economics…

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A treasure trove of charts and graphs to explain how economic concepts work in action.

Author: Catherine Mulbrandon

License: Creative Commons NonCommerical-NoDerivatives

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Visualizing Economics is an web site run by Catherine Mulbrandon where I share my data visualizations about the economy.

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A collection of songs teaching the basics of market competition, demand and supply, monopolies, and general economic principles.

Author: Isaiah Jackson, Ben Jackson, Robbie Mitchell, and Helen Jackson.

© ℗ 2017 Rhythm, Rhyme, Results, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Make learning economics fun! This is an album of 11 economics songs in MP3 format. Every song comes in four versions (Original, Downtempo, A Cappella, and Instrumental) with accompanying lyrics. Appropriate for grades 7-12, college and anyone interested in basic economics.

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Economics Rap Songs and Worksheets for Introductory Lessons

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Song Preview Get unlimited access to songs Subscribe now (starts at $2.99/month) Make learning economics fun! This is an album of 11 economics songs in MP3 format. Every song comes in four versions (Original, Downtempo, A Cappella, and Instrumental) with accompanying lyrics. Appropriate for grades 7-12, college and anyone interested in basic economics.

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A free full copy of a digital economic textbook with plenty of charts and graphs.

Author: Boundless.com

License: Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike

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Herbert C. Brown shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Georg Wittig "for their development of the use of boron- and phosphorus-containing compounds, respectively, into important reagents in organic synthesis." He was born in London to Ukrainian Jewish immigrant parents. The family moved to Chicago when Brown was two years old.

Henry Taube won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on the mechanisms of electron transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, he came to the United States to earn his Ph.D. at Berkeley. He went on to work at Cornell, the University of Chicago and Stanford.

Charles J. Pedersen shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Donald Cram and Jean-Marie Lehn "for their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity." Pedersen was born in Busan, Korea in 1904 to a Norwegian father and a Japanese mother. In 1922 he came to the United States to study at the University of Dayton, Ohio. He worked as a chemist at Dupont for 42 years.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome." He was born in Chidambaram, India and obtained his Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1976

Alan MacDiarmid shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the discovery and development of conductive polymers." Born in New Zealand, he came to the U.S. on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1951 and spent 45 years on the chemistry faculty of the University of Pennsylvania.

Yuan T. Lee shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Dudley Herschbach and John Polanyi "for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes." Born in Taiwan, he earned his Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley in 1965.

Aziz Sancar shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair." He was born in Turkey and received his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Michael Levitt shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems." Born in Pretoria, South Africa, he lived in Israel before moving to the U.S. to teach at Stanford.

Roald Hoffmann shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kenichi Fukui "for their theories, developed independently, concerning the course of chemical reactions." Born in an area of Poland that is now part of Ukraine, Hoffman lost most of his family in the Holocaust. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1949.

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17 U.S. Immigrants Who Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

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Herbert C. Brown shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Georg Wittig "for their development of the use of boron- and phosphorus-containing compounds, respectively, into important reagents in organic synthesis." He was born in London to Ukrainian Jewish immigrant parents. The family moved to Chicago when Brown was two years old.

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St. Louis Federal Reserve Branch's website for free educational lessons that teach Economic principles.

Author: St. Louis Branch of US Federal Reserve Bank

Copyright Attribution Non- Commercial.

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Students and teachers may discuss key economic concepts in this virtual classroom. Discussion board questions are included on specific pages within the courses. Teachers may also add their own questions to the discussion board. In some instances, teacher guidance is provided for suggested responses to the questions.

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This website uses video clips from the tv comedy The Office to teach basic economic ideas.

Authors: Chris Youderian and Dan Kuester

Videos are an exercise in educational fair use and are licensed under a No Copyright; No Rights Reserved license.

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Video Clips | The Economics of The Office

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Video clips from the television show the office that illustrate economics concepts.

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This website has sample memes to help you understand economic theories and a Meme generator for you to make one of your own.

Authors: Russell Engel,  Chuck Fisk, Ryan Murphy, and Don Pieger.

Public Domain

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How to Use Memes to Teach and Learn Economics

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Alternatives to Traditional Market Economics

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Alternatives to Traditional Market Economics

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This article can help you better understand the market economic system.

Author: Paul Stacey

License: Creative Commons Attribution

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This past week I was in Portugal participating in the wonderfully imaginative Futureplaces. Portugal like many countries is currently imposing "austerity" measures on its citizens. Such measures are not unique to Portugal. Governments and financial leaders seem to have learned little from the recent global financial crisis. Post bailout the relentless pursuit for growth, GDP, and maximizing profit continue unabated. Imposing austerity measures on all citizens, including the poor, the elderly and those not well off when 40% of the worlds wealth is held by 1% of the worlds population seems like a recipe for rebellion.

And yet what alternatives are there to the traditional economy? Do open business models function in the same way as traditional business models or are they funadamentally different in some way?

Marjorie Kelly's book Owning Our Future does a wonderful job depicting what she calls the "generative economy" as contrasted to the traditional "extractive economy". Here's what she has to say:

"Redesigning the models of ownership that form the base of our economy isn't a mechanical, legal exercise. Ownership designs embody a worldview and a set of values. The dominant designs of our day are built around values of individualism, growth, and the pursuit of maximum financial wealth. An emerging ecological sensibility is shaping a new set of core values, such as sustainability, community, and sufficiency. This value shift creates the seedbed for new kinds of generative ownership and a profoundly new kind of economy. Instead of being rooted in the ethereal world of finance, this new economy finds fertile soil in the living earth and in human community. Some of the most compelling models embodying this new worldview are found in ownership of the commons."

Her views are congruent with many of those expressed by Yochai Benkler at the Creative Commons Global Summit in Seoul Korea a couple of weeks ago. Yochai spoke of shifts from pure self interest to social motivations including robust systems of social exchange independent of market schemes. He spoke about people acting collectively to govern utilization of resources and the ethic of reciprocity. He noted that from a traditional market economy perspective Free Open Source Software, Firefox, and Wikipedia should be impossible and yet they exist and are successful. He observed that market based economies lose local knowledge and community based decision making.

Benkler suggests there are three kinds of commons:
1. The locally based natural resource commons (described in Elinor Ostroms work)
2. The digital information commons (enabled by Creative Commons)
3. The environment as a global commons (global warming being an example)

Marjorie Kelly's work makes little reference to the digital information based commons or knowledge economy but I found her four broad categories of generative economy ownership design interesting to consider in the context of open business model designs:

1. Commons ownership and governance. Here assets are held or governed in common. The ocean, a forest, land, a park, a municipal power plant, is held or governed indivisbly by a community.

2. Stakeholder ownership. This is ownership by people with a human stake in a private enterprise - as opposed to purely financial stake. It includes cooperatives, partnerships, credit unions, mutual insurance companies, employee-owned firms, and family-owned companies. But for these models to be generative, their purpose must be life serving (by which she means an economy that joins the interests of humans and the natural world).

3. Social enterprises. These organizations have a primary social or environmental mission and use business methods to pursue it. They can be nonprofits, subsidiaries of nonprofits, or private businesses.

4. Mission-controlled corporations. These are corporations with a strong social mission that are owned in conventional ways, yet they keep governing control in mission-oriented hands.They include the large foundation controlled companies common across northern Europe. A family or a trust can also be in control.

One form of new corporate model that has emerged is the "benefit corporation". Benefit corporations have a broader purpose baked into their governing legal documents. Benefit corporations aim to benefit society and the environment in addition to their shareholders. This seems quite aligned to many Creative Commons based open businesses.

One form of the benefit corporation that seems to be gaining traction is the B Corporation. BCorps go through a private certification process that requires the company to declare a social purpose in their governing documents and to meet independent standards of social and environmental performance.

All of this provides me with considerable hope that there truly are alternatives to traditional market economics. It seems to me that open business models share a similar set of values and worldviews.

These alternatives provide a new lens through which to look at open business models. To what extent are existing open businesses using these new structures and practices? For startups wanting to be open businesses are these alternatives useful as possible structures they can adopt for their own governance and operation?

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Alternatives To Traditional Market Economics - Made with Creative Commons - Medium

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This past week I was in Portugal participating in the wonderfully imaginative Futureplaces. Portugal like many countries is currently imposing "austerity" measures on its citizens. Such measures are not unique to Portugal. Governments and financial leaders seem to have learned little from the recent global financial crisis.

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On this website you can view clips from the show Seinfeld while learning about economic concepts.

Authors: Linda Ghent, Alan Grant and George Lesica

Copyright 2010

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Seinfeld ran for nine seasons on NBC and became famous as a “show about nothing.” Basically, the show allows viewers to follow the antics of Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer as they move through their daily lives, often encountering interesting people or dealing with special circumstances.

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This is an Open Source book from Michigan Open Book Project.

Authors: Rosalyn Arsenau, Travis Balzar, Kelly Dutcher, Katie Hintz, Kim Noga, and Brian Weaver.

License: Creative Commons Non-Commerical Share Alike

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Students who meet the expectations will understand how economies function and how to apply the concepts and principles of economics to their lives as individuals and as citizens. Understanding and applying these concepts and principles should help students make sense of daily events and enable them to analyze, investigate and develop reasoned thinking about economic challenges and public policies.