Progressive Economics Links

Image at left is of the Panic of 1884 on Wall Street with thanks to Creative Commons.

From Dollars and Sense: Real World Economics, some progressive resources for teaching economics. Note the Field Guide to the American Economy, articles about bias in texts, and books of actual readings and cases.

From the Post-Autistic Economics Network, toxic texts and approaches that students at major colleges have been protesting for some time. Student essays are also here.

Free lectures: the History of Economic Thought and more at Stephen Keen's DebtWatch. (Keen is a Professor at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.)

High school and college-level resources are here at the Economics Network: lectures, videos, worksheets, online tutorials and more.

Do not miss the standup economist whose website has a link to his open-source introductory economics text and a link to a more in-depth additional text (free).

Annenberg has these good video courses: Economics U$A and Inside the Global Economy.

Marxian economics are widely studied in most countries around the world by many people who are not Marxists but can understand Marx's contribution to the science of economics. The Chinese know Marx as well as capitalist/other thinkers. In the US, students are often ill-informed about Marx so here are resources.  Make up your own mind.

Goldstein's Low Wage Capitalism is quite current and available here.  David Harvey's website has good resources and he is a well-regarded modern interpreter.  Harvey did an RSA Animation:



This Marxist site includes a hypermedia neo-classical economics text with only one chapter on Marxist economics (under Connections) which is quite tolerant and a Reading Capital study guide. 

The way everyone bats around terms like capitalism and socialism, you'd think it was a walk in the park to easily identify the economic systems of nation-states. I think it is a quite complicated exercise and a tribute to the poor education of many Americans that we think otherwise. Can you sort out totalitarianism from fascism from socialism from communism from capitalism?

Skip the lightweight work of Ayn Rand and dig into the work of Hannah Arendt whose Origins of Totalitarianism is online here.  Also check out Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.

I gave an overview, drawn in part from F. Braudel's work, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries, 3 vols. (1979) English translation by Siân Reynold, to some middle schoolers last year, focusing on the tools of capitalism:  Arabic numerals, checks, credit, money, banks, double-entry bookkeeping, and other innovations. This wikipedia entry gives a brief overview of the books, Braudel takes a new slant, neither neo-classical nor Marxian. 

Add a good read on corporations, their history and structure. We recently watched the documentary The Corporation. Nadar's Citizen Works has lots of resources, too.  


Teaching Economics As If People Mattered incorporates social justice issues.  real-world economics review has lots of articles and is a free subscription.



And there are innumerable blogs out there now of all stripes: I like DebtWatch, Naked Capitalism, CreditWritedowns, Zero Hedge, and occasional links & commentary but there are lots of sites out there.