I had trouble grasping basic economics in college when I had a professor who covered the subject slowly and tediously. Whose bright idea was it to try to explain it in a rapid-fire rap video pitting free-market capitalist Friedrich August von Hayek against John Maynard Keynes, whose economic theories gave us modern big government?

Clever, yes, and mildly entertaining. I certainly enjoyed the video more than the 8:30 a.m. Econ 101 I skipped almost every day after the professor told the class that he wouldn’t be lecturing about anything we couldn’t get from the textbook and that we didn’t have to attend except on test days.

But I’m no more enlightened after watching it than I was before. The video, produced by Econ Stories for George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, is at least four minutes too long to gain much traction online; the music is so loud that it distracts from the educational message; and the characters rap too fast for the intellectual message to be absorbed.

That’s 7-1/2 minutes of my life I’ll never get back. The things I do for this blog!