solving mysteries to judging baked goods to tracking down an emperor they've accidentally turned into a llama.

If we look closer at these pairs, we’ll often find that some of the best ones are a mix of opposites.

In fact, their success might even be because they’re so different.

We love to see a straightlaced fussbudget deal with an agent of chaos.

Or a...well now that I think about it, that one comes up a lot.

Take Holmes and Watson, or Ernie and Bert, or any character duo Tina Fey and Amy Poehler

bring to life, or even...Bulgaria and Germany!

Wait.

Ok, so maybe I let my geography nerd brain run a little wild there, but geopolitically,

Bulgaria and Germany have a long history!

In the early 2020s, they have a close relationship and pass things like cars and precious metals

back and forth with relative ease.

From a distance, they look like BFFs, but just like in many of our duos, it’s an uneven relationship.

Germany is more important to Bulgaria than Bulgaria is to Germany.

I’m Alizé Carrère, and this is Crash Course Geography.

INTRO

Over the last few episodes, we’ve talked about how power moves to form and maintain countries.

And we briefly mentioned how things like the strength of the economy is one aspect that

affects the coherence of the state.

Economics, or the study of scarcity, decision-making, and how people respond to incentives around

resources impacts everyone’s lives, whether we’re aware of it or not.

How we make a living and consume material goods is part of what shapes how we interact with the world.

So to understand what makes Bulgaria and Germany such a good pair, particularly at trading

goods back and forth, we can use the frameworks of economic geography, which is a branch of

human geography concerned with where and how people earn a living.

But, our economic activities are also tied with the power systems we live in.

So human geographers study both power and economics because understanding our relationship

with power and material wealth helps explain human patterns on the global scale -- from

how population size is related to economic opportunity, to resource use, to migration

trends, to the way our cities are laid out.

In geography looking at economics and politics together and studying how they interact is

called political economy.

Geographers trained in political economy argue that both political and economic power move

unevenly across the landscape, and that power shapes the way people work and live.

That means we study things like how trade policy impacts where goods are produced and

where they are sold, like we saw on the Silk Roads.

And as economic geographers, we’d want to understand how wealth was formed in spice-rich

places, who actually amassed that wealth and who didn’t in the region, and what political

structures, like empires or tribes, reinforced trade patterns and maintained those structures.

But there are a lot of people who study this with a lot of different definitions!

At its core, economic geography tries to describe the distribution of material wealth in the world.

And -- spoiler alert -- that wealth is usually distributed unevenly.

As geographers, we want to know why that unevenness exists and understand why people have different

economic opportunities.

Since the 1990s, Bulgaria’s economy has continued to strengthen, though in the 2020s

it’s still less wealthy than Germany and some of its other neighbors.

Like all geographers, economic geographers will think spatially about something like wealth.

We also think about economic work as being grouped into three main categories.

A truly healthy economy needs to have elements of all three economic activities, and they

often overlap and exist in the same spaces.

In the 2020s, a large chunk of Bulgaria’s economy is a primary economy based on extracting raw goods.

Their largest exports to Germany are primary goods, like raw copper ore and other precious metals.

Anything that comes from the land, like agriculture, mining, logging, or hunting are all primary activities.

And primary production is important because it’s how we get the basic materials we need

to live, like food, minerals, and cloth.

Every government system has some sort of primary production.

But, primary production tends to not generate very much wealth on its own.

Like let’s think about that classic geography example, the banana.

As we learned way back in episode 1 when we started this journey, the people who grew

those bananas didn’t make very much money.

But the companies who owned the plantations did.

A secondary economy is based on manufacturing or refining those primary goods, which adds

value to them and makes a profit for the owner.

So the plantation owners didn’t really change the bananas, but they did process and package

them and bring them to the US where they could be sold for a lot more money.

And in the 2020s, Germany has a booming industrial or secondary economy.

There’s a saying in geography: “It’s not enough to have the stuff.”

Places with resources often find their wealth is extracted away to other places that make

money by processing the raw goods to make tons of other products.

But ultimately, it’s the different routes that Germany and Bulgaria have each taken

on their economic paths that have helped create their modern day political, economic, and

even cultural landscapes.

Historically, as manufacturing became easier in North America and Europe during the late

18th and early 19th centuries, the people who owned the factories started to make a

lot of money off the labor of those doing the manufacturing work.

Around this time is when capitalism started to resemble the system you're probably familiar with today.

Capitalism is a political economic system that’s dominated by earning a profit with

private business ownership, and where both wages and production are guided by the free market.

Now a market isn’t necessarily a physical place.

It’s more like a relationship we enter into when buyers and sellers exchange goods and

services and negotiate those prices.

Like how much someone is willing to pay for Wiener schnitzel, or what the going rate is for a gadulka player.

And it’s called a “free” market, but there are allowances for economic regulation

from governments at national and international levels.

Though this form of capitalism, known as a mixed capitalist economy, wouldn't be recognized

by its most famous proponent, Adam Smith, who mostly talked about it in theory.

And there are so many other types, too.

For example, Democratic socialism still sells goods and services on the market, but creates

buffers and boundaries on how labor is treated.

The government is democratically elected, and the fiscal policies they enact are a result

of those elections.

But, instead of markets being where the cost of goods and services like healthcare or education

are determined, the state sets policies that prevent swings in costs or type of service

a person can access.

The state redistributes wealth from things like taxes to ensure a minimum access to things

like health care, education, food and water resources.

Many European countries follow some variation on this idea, and a lot of experts would say

21st century Germany is one of them.

One contribution geographers have made to political economy, is noting just how variable capitalism is.

Capitalism looks different in different places because how markets work depends on how governments

facilitate them and regulate them, which tends to shift with different democratic structures.

And as a discipline that wants to understand why we see some features in one place but

not another, studying capitalism has been a key part of economic geography.

So the politics of a place can make a difference in how markets are regulated.

Most places have access to at least some natural resources, capable people to do good work,

and some way to get their goods and services to the people who want to buy them.

But which countries have access to markets is definitely uneven!

And how goods can move is a political decision.

For instance, how goods have moved through the area that we now call Bulgaria has changed

over the years.

Throughout the 20th century, Bulgaria followed Germany’s alliances and by the end of World

War II found itself behind the Iron Curtain with East Germany.

This meant it also became an ally of the Soviet Union, and less directly, a communist state

from the mid-1940s until 1990.

Communism is an idea that was proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles to address

the inequalities they saw that grew from capitalist economic practices.

Marx wrote about the masses of people doing the work eventually rising up and demanding

that wealth be distributed more fairly.

In theory, communism is a type of political economy that strives to replace private property

and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of all resources.

And much like how the capitalism that Adam Smith wrote about doesn’t look like what

capitalism has become, the communism that Marx developed doesn't look like what communism turned into either.

So yes, there actually was a revolt and civil war in Russia, but it wasn’t what Marx had in mind.

It wasn’t led by the working people, and in the end power and wealth didn’t transfer

to the laborers.

Instead, it went to the leaders of the revolution.

There was then a wave of communism that spread out from the Soviet Union in the form of dictatorships,

or political systems where one leader has the power and that power is distributed at their discretion.

So...pretty much the opposite of what Marx was writing about.

One of the places communism spread to at the end of World War II was Bulgaria.

Bulgaria became part of the Eastern Bloc and like other communist countries, had what was

called a planned economy, meaning that the government planned everything like how much

of a good needed to be produced and where it would be produced, along with the prices

for goods and wages.

They could also prioritize social goals over economic ones.

So that means they could decide how many nurses would work in a clinic just based on how many

they wanted to have work there, not necessarily because of demand.

Bulgaria’s economy during their communist days also relied heavily on primary activities.

And even with detailed government planning and control, there was still uneven access

to wealth because the decisions were being made in a central place without the will or

desires of the people, or signals of supply and demand to guide them.

But not all formerly communist states had the same types of economic activity.

East Germany, while also communist, had more secondary production.

This created a space for more economic productivity.

West Germany was even more economically productive than East Germany thanks to international

investment and support to create a highly productive capitalist economy to help form

a buffer against communism.

When both parts of Germany were unified in 1990, the strength of the western economy

helped smooth the transition for East Germany.

And so, when in 1989 the Soviet Union and its control in the region began to unravel

and the Berlin Wall came down, countries like Bulgaria stopped being communist and adopted

other political economic systems, in this case, capitalism.

In 1990, Bulgaria held democratic elections, meaning that the next leaders were voted in

by the people and went through a years long process of transitioning from a “closed”

market, controlled by the state, to an “open” market participating in free trade.

Which means goods could be bought and sold between any countries with goods to sell,

not just the countries the state pre approved.

But whether it’s capitalism, socialism, or communism, these economic practices are rarely uniform.

Wherever they’re in practice, there are other economies also in practice.

In fact, the majority of employed people in the world actually work in what's known as

the informal economy, which is the diverse kinds of jobs, businesses, and other economic

activities that aren't regulated or protected by the state or market.

And this isn’t necessarily bad or secretive.

Anything that isn’t part of the market, like the neighborhood babysitter, the community

garden co-op, or the friend that comes over to cut your hair, can be part of an informal economy.

But because informal economies aren’t regulated or taxed by governments, they can also include

activities that try to not be seen, like human trafficking or drug trade.

Tertiary economies are also woven throughout every economic type.

This is anything that counts as a service, and is the largest growing sector world wide.

It includes activities like health care, education, and government -- all jobs that have existed

everywhere for a long time.

Whether it’s Bulgaria, Germany, or somewhere else, wherever we live there’s usually a

combination of economic activities that connect us to the things we buy, the jobs we do, or the money we save.

And on a larger scale, states experience that too.

They form relationships that can be uneven -- whether that’s a friendship with a long

history, or something more painful like a colonial relationship, which we’ll discuss more next time.

Until then, as another famous duo once said, “Be excellent to each other.”

Many maps and borders represent modern geopolitical divisions that have often been decided without

the consultation, permission, or recognition of the land's original inhabitants.

Many geographical place names also don't reflect the Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples languages.

So we at Crash Course want to acknowledge these peoples’ traditional and ongoing relationship

with that land and all the physical and human geographical elements of it.

We encourage you to learn about the history of the place you call home through resources

like native-land.ca and by engaging with your local Indigenous and Aboriginal nations through

the websites and resources they provide.

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Geography which is filmed at the Team

Sandoval Pierce Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people.

If you want to help keep all Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our