A Different Kind of WoW

If you pay taxes of whatever kind in America you likely contribute to my college education as I currently am a recipient of Federal and State student aid. You've been paying for me to sit at home and study for over a year now (well, not to mention the thirteen years of K-12 in various public schools in Tacoma, Charlotte and finally Puyallup) and I appreciate it, hopefully I can show it someday by using my education to humankind's benefit.

In the meantime, to thank you, and in the interest of stretching those dollars as far as possible in these financially-challenging times, I want to start posting entries about each class I take, allowing my readers the opportunity to learn with me to as much of an extent as possible. It is my intent that, should you choose, your meticulous and diligent personal study of these blog entries as a guide to the subject matter at hand will provide you with something approximating a college education without necessarily being in college at the time. If you are a student at a college or high school hopefully these study guides are a helpful supplement to your teachers' classroom instruction. Any level of focus on the material presented should result in a net gain of knowledge, it's your job to apply it usefully and benevolently.

I will typically follow a short discussion about the class in question with a somewhat organized list of resources provided by my instructor. In addition, perhaps, I may add some resources I think my instructor would have. Whenever possible I prefer to link to a free resource. When I can't find class material freely available on the Internet, I will try to provide an appropriate Amazon.com product link, otherwise I will just omit it.

WoW doesn't just refer to a MMOG anymore. For Fall Quarter of 2008 at North Seattle Community College I took a coordinated studies class combining and integrating introductory surveys of the disciplines of economics and anthropology called The World of Work: From Africa to Wall Street. The idea behind CSP is that one learns more from a class combining disciplines than the equivalent instruction in two separate courses, so please try to see each field of knowledge in terms of the other as you progress through the following material.

I know it's cliché but, in all cases but especially this one, please be careful and draw your own conclusions from the following material. Try not to read too much through the lens your biases, but also keep in mind your sense of what is right and just.

Week 1:

• CIA World Factbook (read about all African nations)
• geographia — Africa

Week 2:

• Economics for the Citizen by Walter Williams (Wikipedia)
• The Original Affluent Society by Marshall Sahlins (Wikipedia)

Week 3:

• The Library of Economics and Liberty's "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read" (Wikipedia)
• Economic Anthropology by Melville J. Herskovits (Wikipedia)

Week 4:

• In Praise of Cheap Labor by Paul Krugman (Wikipedia)
• Ohio State University Department of Anthropology's Southern African Foragers

Week 5:

• The James Liberty File Collection's Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt (Wikipedia)

Week 6:

• The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits by Milton Friedman (Wikipedia)

Week 7:

• Hoover Institution's Race, Culture, and Equality by Thomas Sowell (Wikipedia)
• Migrant Africa by Aderanti Adepoju

Week 8:

• The Corporation as a Command Economy by J. Bradford DeLong (Wikipedia)
• The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' The Coming Revolution in Africa by G. Pascal Zachary

Week 9:

• Harvard University Department of Economics' The Cost of a "Living Wage" by N. Gregory Mankiw (Wikipedia)

Week 10:

• Dynamic Capitalism by Edmund S. Phelps (Wikipedia)