>Title: Microeconomics: The Quest for Profits, the
>Use of Power, and the Social Good
>Level: Principles of Microeconomics
>Cost: ZERO -- downloadable free from the Internet
>as Adobe Acrobat files (professionally formatted
>to look pretty). Or, for the cost of shipping
>($3?), available on a CD.
>Publisher: Me
>
>Chapter Titles: The Surplus, Different Economic
>Systems, Development of Capitalism, Profits and
>the Markup, Competition, Barriers to Entry,
>Strategies to Boost Firm Profits, Social Limits to
>the Actions of Firms, The Drive for Large Size,
>Industrial Landscape of US Economy, Demand, Social
>Creation of Demand, Monopoly, Oligopoly, Highly
>Competitive Industries, Supply and Demand, The
>Employment Relationship, Wages and Work Effort,
>Technological Change, and Capitalism and the
>Social Good.
>
>It should be 200-250 pages when completed
>
>Plus, I think this will be the first "open source"
>textbook: you will be able to download Word files
>that contain all the text, tables, and figures.
>You will be able to do what you want with this
>material for your students: only use certain
>chapters, rewrite it, add to it, etc (as long as
>you don't do it to make money! You must provide
>this material to students at the cost of
>reproducing it).
>
>The text is best described as a mix of
>Bowles/Edwards and a standard micro text that
>doesn't fetishize mathematics and diagrams.
>
>Why am I doing all this work and, then, giving it
>away free? Answer: Damaged DNA.
>
>Eric Nilsson
>Department of Economics
>California State University
>San Bernardino, CA 92407
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
No. Not damaged DNA. Premature, perhaps, but perhaps not.
If you wished (although God knows why you would) to portray your
actions as a gamble by a flinty-eyed amoral profit-maximizing
academic careerist, you could say that:
--in ten years improvements in display technology and Moore's Law
will have brought the cost and convenience of portable book-readers
to a level where *no one* would prefer to read a book than read a
file on their portable book-reader.
--the end of the technological edge of paper over pixels means the
end of the money-making academic author. With initiatives like MIT's
Open Courseware guaranteeing that professors anywhere, anytime can
have MIT's course readings, problems, and assignments, soon no
professor anywhere will *dare* require that students pay for a
(probably inferior) textbook.
--hence professors will write textbooks to gain status or to scratch
an educational itch, and will be eager to distribute them online as
widely as possible in order to have intellectual influence. Paul
Samuelson supposedly said once that as far as his contribution to
human progress was concerned, he would rather write a nation's
textbooks than make its laws. Future Samuelsons will rather have
well-visited websites than either. (Or perhaps they will rather run
influential listserves?)
--and in this as in so many "new economy" areas, first movers have
powerful advantages.
The "open source" aspect of it is especially interesting. It has
proven very possible to design and maintain excellent computer
programs with a small charismatic core directing and assessing the
voluntary contributions of a floating horde of part-time
contributors. Even though the gift exchange model gets only 1/n of
each contributor's full-time effort, if you can get m >> n
contributors through the internet--and if you can organize their
contributions--you have a powerful programming team. Is there
something specific about software that makes the open-source
management problem particularly easy? Or can we look forward to the
development of similar collective freeware intellectual efforts in
other areas as well?
I don't know the answer. I think it is a very interesting question.
