This site is part of an ongoing and expanding attempt to make these sorts of popular culture teaching materials widely and conveniently available. We are doing this in the hopes that the materials hosted here, now and in the future, will be useful to economics educators.
The clips have been posted through <CriticalCommons.org>, a “non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for scholarship, reasearch and teaching, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators.” We are thankful for their service.
Please feel free to email the authors to provide general comments about the site or make suggestions of other clips.
A list of all economic concepts is provided on the index page. For ease, you may also search by concept or episode title. If you click on a concept, you will be provided a list of episodes that demonstrate that concept. We have also proved simple definitions and explanations of economic concepts and jargon.
Under each of the clips, you will be able to find information on the season, disc, and the approximate times for each clip on the Seinfeld series DVD. A video clip (of these specific scenes) has been compiled and is provided for use in the classroom. You can also provide feedback directly on the site about the usefulness of each clip. There is no need to log in if you do not wish to.
Linda S. Ghent is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Economics at Eastern Illinois University. She has been teaching economics for over 15 years and has been using popular culture in her classes more and more over time. In 2007, she developed a course called “Pop Culture Economics” that is taught as a Senior Seminar for non-economics majors. Many of the Seinfeld clips here are used in this course.
Linda can be contacted at: lsghent@eiu.edu
Alan Grant is an Associate Professor of Economics at Baker University. He has been watching television for almost forty-three years, and considers himself an expert on the topic. He enjoys long walks on the beach and teaching economics to college students. Many of his courses incorporate clips from Seinfeld, and also utilize other popular movies and television shows. One of his darkest moments was when he discovered that his wife doesn’t share his love for Seinfeld.
Alan can be contacted at: alan.grant@bakeru.edu
George Lesica is a Senior Software engineer in the Wheeler Lab at the University of Montana. He works mostly on building bioinformatics software for researchers. He never particularly enjoyed “Seinfeld”, but he enjoys educational resources disguised as fun websites.
George can be contacted at george.lesica@umontana.edu