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December 29, 2005

Open Source Textbooks

Kyle's comment in my earlier post on Danny Quah's article reminded me -- as a big fan of open source textbooks, it's nice to see Ariel Rubenstein's microeconomics textbook available for free online, at his website.

I agree with you Kyle, it's a great idea, and I hope we get to see more of this in the future!

Posted by vinayak at 10:51 PM | Comments (1) | Permalink
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December 26, 2005

The excess supply of knowledge.

Danny Quah, who is Professor of Economics here at the LSE (and is my supervisor), has written a really interesting piece titled `The Excess Supply of Knowledge' for Newsweek's 2006 Special's -- ``The Knowledge Revolution...''. The piece focuses around the differences (and/or lack thereof) between dissemination and invention. This is an area that has fascinated me for many years (even before Economics fascinated me), and I've written about it once before. What I like about this piece is that it puts across fairly difficult-to-comprehend ideas in a very accessible way (a characteristically Quah trait that EC102/EC413 students will swear by). What I also like about this piece is that it provides you with enough mulch to ponder the consequences of our understanding these differences in terminology... consequences that definitely need a larger audience.

I haven't seen the Newsweek version yet, but here's Danny's original version, from his website.

I don't normally find it joyful to endorse the people/stuff that I dig but I figured there'd be some definite Pareto gains by urging you guys (non-economists included) to give this short piece a read!

Here's a snippet:

As humanity becomes more educated, and ideas, tastes, and beliefs integrate more closely, the greater become the potential social benefits from deploying all the different kinds of knowledge --- those that increase our productivity, improve our health, and raise our quality of life. With modern globalisation and the Internet, we are now in the midst of arguably the largest expansion ever in the demand of and absorptive capacity for knowledge. In this situation the fewer copies of knowledge being made, the greater the loss to humanity.

Posted by vinayak at 9:46 PM | Comments (1) | Permalink
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