SURFnet en de special interest group Open Education brengen regelmatig thema-uitgaven uit over open en online onderwijs. In deze editie staat het thema ‘open textbooks’ centraal.
Current macro-economic textbooks provide a fatally misleading description of the money supply process in modern economies. Over the past 20 years Post Keynesian authors have established conclusively that despite strictly-enforced cash reserve requirements, changes in the supply of bank deposits are not determined exogenously by central bank open market operations, but are endogenously determined by changes in bank borrowers demand for credit. Nevertheless the vast majority of undergraduate macroeconomic textbooks continue to teach the highpowered-base money-multiplier paradigm that the supply of money is exogenously determined by the central bank. Few texts recognize that interest rate targeting renders the high-powered base endogenous. This paper summarizes the extent mainstream macroeconomic textbooks are locked in and sticky, and fail both in the teaching of monetary policy and in proper scientific discourse.
Studies of brain size of children classified with ADHD appear to reveal smaller brains when compared to ‘normal’ children. Yet, what does this mean? Even with the use of rigorously screened case and control groups, these studies show only small, average group differences between children with and without an ADHD classification. However, academic textbooks used in the Netherlands often portray individual children with an ADHD classification as having a different, malfunctioning brain that necessitates medical intervention. This conceptualisation of ADHD might serve professional interests, but not necessarily the interests of children.
