This is great, Tim. I have shared it with colleagues at GBC and a few have shown interest in using it.

Terrific video, Tim! I am sending it to all my friends!
Chandra

Super lesson Tim! Will pass it along to my lists...particularly to my son and his friends!
Loved the lab coat!
John

bravo!

Wonderful! Will recommend using the "class is a different animal" tool in my friends' introductory sociology or political-economy classes. One slight visual problem with the experiment, though: As you pump consumer debt, the safety net squeezes the bottom, and thus the middle classes swell up, as if consumer debt temporarily causes upward mobility from the bottom to the middle :)

Maybe a more elastic net-like thingy can be used, and as credit is pumped, the bottom section would expand more than the middle, which would visualize how producing debt makes folks poorer?

Thanks Charles.
In a class you can get students to explore the limits of the metaphor by researching stats on how class structure is actually changing in specific countries due to neoliberalism.

In defense of the physics of balloons, I suppose one could argue that those now trapped in the social safety net have less access to credit that those in the "middle class" which seems to expand if one looks at consumption, although it's really only hot air. But I'm not sure I'd go to the wall on that though.

Great video, Tim! My professor at U of T shared this with our class. I posted it on my blog to continue the sharing :)

Great Video Tim. Saw you do this last June sans the labcoat and the apparatus. Much more impact with the props. Great mechanical metaphor.

All the memories of Canadian public school are coming back to haunt me. The making up of facts (most people don't in fact work for a large corporation), the simplistic theorizing, the egalitarian fundamentalism, the disregard for economic reality (there are costs involved in these social welfare programs), and naturally, the disregard for history. In what fantastic delusion are the 1970s the decade of prosperity?

How are high unemployment rates and high inflation rates demonstrative of success? The lesson of the 70s was that Keynesian economics are far too short-sighted, and will bankrupt you in the long run.

If you had taken the time to look at the story from an economic point of view, you'd see that the late 1980s through the 1990s was an enormously productive and prosperous period for people throughout the world--hundreds of millions of people in China for the first time were lifted out of poverty thanks to free-market economic reforms, the ludicrously unnecessary burden of communism was lifted off East Europe, and neo-liberalism flourished in the West. An uncommonly long era of peace, vast improvements in the standard of living worldwide, advances in civil freedom--hardly a record that can be written off by a man doing a cheap stunt involving water balloons, no matter how satisfying it may be to his indulgent leftism.

Erm, human rights in China? Anyway this was a great video and have passed around. Thanks so much,