This video isn’t on the Crash Course channel, but it is worth a watch if you’re are a reader of this blog. Hank and his brother John Greene started the whole Crash Course operation, so you might be interested in hearing one of the creators thoughts on the government, its size, and its efficiency.
The federal government is effective, efficient, and surprisingly small.
Ron Swanson gave his rebuttal:
No episode in review this week (I’m going on vacation for a few days), but come back every Thursday for a new post on a really fantastically polarizing episode of Crash Course Economics.
Great News! I’ve created a facebook group for this blog so you can follow us via social media and stay up to date with every post. Posts from here will be autoposted on the facebook page. Follow us at https://www.facebook.com/crashcoursecriticism and Twitter @CCCriticism, and sign up for our newsletter here.
The facebook page is currently pretty lonely, so feel free to be one of the first to like it! It looks a little rough right now, but I’m having some fresh images created to class it up.
Big things are happening here at CCC. Stay tuned for a fresh episode critique every Wednesday!
This blog has taken off faster than I imagined it would. The nods from Bob Wenzel and Tom Woods really helped, and we’re getting a consistent number of pageviews every day. It may not seem like much, but we’re bringing in 70 pageviews every day, despite being in a content slump due to Crash Course’s technical difficulties last week.
So you’re one of the lucky 70, thank you.
Let’s talk about money. I’ve created an Ad Sense account and added an advertisement to the right sidebar:
Please keep in mind I have no control over what the ad is.
And after just a day of having the ad displayed on the site, business is BOOMING:
That’s right. Over $1 in a day.
As a Crash Course Criticism promise (which is as good as gold, for what that’s worth), I plan on donating 100% of the money I make from CCC to other sites and organizations I like, especially those that do it full time and rely on donations to keep them going. So if you like the ads (or even if you don’t), click away.
Also, if any of you are interested, I plan on occasionally posting about how the site is doing, both in pageviews and revenue generation, so stay tuned for that.
Additionally, below the google ad should be an Amazon Search Box. If you’re doing any amazon shopping, try using the search box here (it will display the search results in a new window). If you buy something on Amazon originally through the search box on this site, I will receive some sort of kickback. I’m not sure how much I get back, but I’ll let you know.
Also, sign up for the newsletter. In case you don’t check the site daily, I’ll give you a monthly update with what you missed and how the site is doing.
Surprisingly, Crash Course has not released their video for episode 3 yet. I’m pretty sure they record all of the episodes in advance, so I can’t explain why they didn’t release episode 3 Wednesday evening as per usual. Perhaps the topic of episode 3, which was mentioned in the last video to be “how economic systems contribute to differences between countries,” contained some errors, and they are fixing it last minute. I’ll try to get to the bottom of this by tweeting at the co-hosts and official Crash Course Twitter handle.
I’d like to take this time to talk about Robert Wenzel’s observations of the second video.
First, Bob also recognized the mediocre example of a pizzeria, where it isn’t so obvious that people have different skill sets, to describe specialization in trade. He recommends a clearer example:
[People] might become doctors, they might become lawyers, they might become creative movie producers. If they spend five years studying it and then ten years in the field, they’ve got a lot of knowledge. That’s a lot of intellectual capital invested in that sector, so it doesn’t really make sense for them to go to another field. In general, once someone starts down a road of specialization like that, it makes a lot of sense to generally stay in that direction.
Bob also mentions a school of economic thought that rejects specialization:
Karl Marx really didn’t understand specialization. He thought that there would be a society where in the mornings, someone would be making pizza, in the afternoon working on a farm, and later in the day, working at a construction site.
The Marxian idea, in fact, would work best in a pizzeria. One employee could very easily go from preparing the vegetables to making the dough to sweeping the floor without much difficulty. It would be much more difficult to switch from farming to telecommunications consulting.
It’s not that you can quickly put people from this place to that place to the next. It is knowledge of specific localities, it’s the knowledge that someone is familiar with doing something, it’s knowledge because someone has greater intellect or skills or whatever it might be.
I’m not a Marxist, but I would have liked for Crash Course to talk about different economic schools of thought on the subject of specialization. Am I right, comrades?
Like what I wrote? Hate what I wrote? Drop some feedback in the comments.
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I’m very happy to announce that Robert Wenzel of Target Liberty and Economic Policy Journal will be contributing to the blog. We’re not sure in what capacity, but at the very least I’ll post his reaction to the upcoming Crash Course Economics videos.
The first video will be released Wednesday, and I hope to have a critique up by the weekend.
