This economics education project was notable enough to win a national book award from The Foundation for Economic Education (The Leonard E. Read Book Award), a nationwide economics education award (The Leavey Award for Excellence in Private Enterprise Education), two book-of-the-month acknowledgements (the Henry Hazlitt Foundation of Chicago and the Insituto Liberal of Porto Alegre, Brazil), two honor medals for public communication and economics education, and the endorsement of Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate in economics.

This work has also been published by two highly respected academic publications: The Keizai Seminar, an economic journal in Japan, and The Hong Kong Economic Journal. The Japanese translation team, headed by Professor Toshio Murata, former President of the Yokohama College of Commerce, collaborated with us for over five years and published the material through Nippon Hyoron Sha Co., Ltd., one of the oldest and most renowned academic publishers in Japan. Writing about The Hong Kong Economic Journal, the editor in charge of my publication, Joy Shan-Lam, stated, "The paper…has the highest credibility ranking of all media in HK and has the most educated as well as affluent readership."

Our endeavour to make "the dismal science" attractive has not only led to a book in more than two dozen languages, with an additional 15 new or revised language editions in progress, but it is now a multimedia project that encompasses games, radio, theater, television, comics, video, a screenplay, and the internet. An animated version of the epilogue of our book has been produced in 4 languages, with the Spanish edition appearing weekly on national television in Costa Rica (SINART-TV13) over the past year.

The radio theater has been broadcast weekly on the mainland over the past year. The HPU Students in Free Enterpise (SIFE) team has produced and utilized a Jeopardy-style game for the classroom. This effort placed among the top 15 semifinalists in the national SIFE special competition for Free Market Economics Education in 2003. The current SIFE project is a global essay contest. By offering cash prizes, the SIFE team hopes to draw readers to the web site that offers the book in 30 languages, many of which are on-line.

Overall, the project has won 3 awards and has resulted in invitations to speak about the project on numerous occasions around the world: i.e. Berlin, Cancun, Las Vegas, Minsk, Philadelphia, and Kragero (Norway). Two unversity articles in the Journal of Private Enterprise (1998 & 2003) have been published, and won an award, just telling the story of this pioneering approach to economics education. What started as a stream of material has turned into a flood. It is a story about how humor has opened doors and minds to economics education in a way that would otherwise be impossible.

Thus, the Farsi text has just won the approval of the Mullah's censors in Iran. The Chinese edition was published during the turnover of Hong Kong to The People's Republic of China in 1997 when publishers were nervous about the tolerance of the new regime. Now a new Chinese edition is currently being prepared in Beijing. The Bulgarian edition was serialized in SEDEM, a news weekly that, according to the translator, helped propel this weekly newspaper to second highest readership circulation in the country-a country unaccustomed to the discussion of free market ideas.

The Greek edition increased circulation of the Neos Typos newspaper by 25%, so it is now planned for serialization in the nation's second largest daily. The Somali Voice is currently serializing the story to the Somali community in Canada. And the Romany (Gypsy) edition introduced economics to the seventh largest ethnic group of Eastern Europe, a group largely dismissed by traditional education systems.

The book is also being used to introduce economics topics through English language summer camps in Lithuania and in India. It was used in theatrical productions by students at Maseno University in Kenya. The Kiswahili translation, the local language of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, was placed on the internet last year and is has just been published by IREN, the Inter Regional Economic Network. The Nigerian Pidgin edition has just been translated and is on the JG web site: http://www.jonathangullible.com/ and will be published soon. And it has been the subject for nationwide economics essay contests in Mexico and Serbia.

This has been a project of innovation and application reaching tens of thousands of students worldwide in an effort to expose them to nearly ninety free market economics concepts.

THE AUTHOR: Ken Schoolland is presently an associate professor of economics and political science at Hawaii Pacific University. Prior to that, he was the Director of the Master of Science in Japanese Busitiess Studies program at Chaminade University of Honolulu and head of the Business and Economics Program at Hawaii Loa College.

THE ILLUSTRATOR: Randall Lavarias was born and raised in Waialua, Oahu and is the second youngest of seven children. His parents are second generation Filipino Americans. His father was a cane haul driver for Waialua Sugar Company and his mother worked at the Del Monte Cannery. At the age of 4. Randall began drawing and his dad, also an artist, inspired him to become an illustrator.

THE PUBLISHER: Sam Slom, President of Small Business Hawaii (SBH), a 501(c)(6) non-profit corporation, dedicated to improving Hawaii’s business climate while promoting, educating, and effectively representing more than 2,500 independent small businesses statewide since 1976, is a private consulting economist in Honolulu, economic educator, and president/owner of SMS Consultants. He has been quoted in national publications including. Forbes, The Economist, Money, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Investors Business Daily.