About a week ago my macroeconomics teacher asked us to watch The Story of Stuff and include an analysis of it in our last paper.

 

I said the video did a good job of laying out problems that business majors in the class would be facing in the years to come but that it could have included more about the effect of globalization on domestic economics.

 

Usually I would say using a 20-minute video to talk about the environment, human rights violations and economics in such an all-encompassing way would be a terrible mistake, but the author and host of the video, Annie Leonard, did a great job. But one girl in my economics class raised her hand and actually shared that because the video has a very liberal bias and that she's very conservative, the video made her want to "strangle something" and that during the video she was shaking with anger. I honestly don't think she was being sarcastic.

 

I don't understand why learning about the effects of industrialization and pollution, etc. is a threat to anyone. Did it hurt her to watch the video? Are the ideas in the video going to indirectly harm anyone? The only reason I could see a person being angry is if her parents owned the type of factory the video demonizes. As I've said, the cost of not paying attention to the environment and its human components is much greater than the cost of believing it, even if it were to turn out to be propaganda.