I heard a great quote recently that I should have paid better attention to:
“Of all your greatest heroes, none of them would read the comment section.”
But I did anyway, just to see what Crash Course fans would say about the introduction to the upcoming series. In fact, one of the top comments reflected my sentiment in my first post:
This seems like a reasonable request. Richie is asking for polycentric approach to economics instead of defaulting to neo-liberal economics. Someone took umbrage to his comment and wrote below:
To this person, the purpose of this course is to teach “high school AP economics.” In fact, this person seems frustrated that anyone would teach anything other than this.
First, nowhere on the intro video was there mention of this course’s educational intent. As far as we know, the mission statement is “to teach economics.” The series’ creator has complete creative control over the series, and I’m not familiar with any duty that Crash Course has to prepare students for their AP exams.
But poopisnotpoop’s comment begs the question. In other words, since economics is a polarizing topic for some and “truth” is not as clear as in mathematics or physics, how do you approach telling people how economics works? Do you talk about where economic ideas come from, how popular they are, and how they’ve been tested?
Most economists are familiar with the different schools of thought, but I doubt that any of them were introduced to the subject by understanding that there is not one accepted or “true” school. Different schools have different arguments and explanations for their theories, and certain schools and theories are more popular than others.
This is not how high school economics is taught, which is why most people have faith that there is one understanding of how things work, and that the government, who has the greatest control over the levers of the economy, is making the best decisions, given what we know about the “truths” of economics.