You see, there’s this website, Xmovies, dedicated to adults-only videos, and its users have generally been baffled by the appearance of a video called “Division of Labor (Hardcore Economics),” which is the second part of a longer series called, simply, “Economics, 3rd Edition”; it’s part of “The Great Courses” series published by The Teaching Company. In the video, which lasts 31 minutes, Professor Timothy Taylor, managing editor of The Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, does an excellent job of breaking down the ideas of William Petty, Bernard de Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, and others. Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Heilbroner are mentioned. It’s pretty dry, compared to the other videos on that site.

At no point does Taylor take off his pants, and the users of the site are, to say the least, bemused. The comments are pretty great. Here’s a (pretty hilarious) sample:
 

“The Teaching Company might not have the production values of Digital Playground or Vivid, and they might not have the chicks either, but whatever, I came twice watching this.”

“When does the porn start, I’m near the end and no action yet? :(”

“wut a nauty slut… i want to watch his marginal revenue product equilibriate, if u kno wut i mean”

“I will tell you I made a sincere effort to actually jack off to this. I stared longingly at his cute boar-ish smile, fantasized about him stuffing his big luscious gob with serving upon serving of poundcake. Do you think he tweaks his nipples after these lectures? I do. I want to. It took me 40 minutes and an extra rundown on the division of labor, but eventually I increased my firm’s production all over the place.”

 
The Kernel managed to get a comment from Prof. Taylor, which ran, “Didn’t know, and so no useful comments. But in some sense, I’m not much surprised. After all, the web is a big place, porn is a substantial chunk of it, and digital content is fairly easy to move.”

Typical economist, he kind of missed the forest for the trees, there.

My theory is that someone, possibly a bot, uploaded the video because it had that particular 8-letter “H-word” in the title, and that this is essentially a misunderstanding, not a prank.

We’re not going to link to the video, but you can find “Division of Labor (Hardcore Economics)”—if that’s what you’re into, freaky—on Xmovies. Don’t worry, it’s totally “safe for work.”

via The Kernel