When is a public service announcement a self-serving announcement?

So I rode the bus in today (the L2, possibly the most unreliable bus in the entire system. About 6 buses run down 18th Street through Adams Morgan. All but the L2 take a left onto U Street and head to points east. Only the L2 goes downtown, and that's only when it decides to show up).

At the front of the bus there was an advertisement promoting economics education with the following question (more or less): "For every $100 of food sold in a restaurant, how much does the owner get?"

The multiple choices were: $3, $5, $10, and I think $30.

The answer, according to the ad, is $5, or 5% of sales. I was intrigued by that because it's an average, and you can make averages lie like crazy depending on what you want to average in. So I checked the website listed on the ad, econ4u.com, and man was I disappointed. I expected resources and studies and, well, content. What I found was a few other quizzes and repeated appeals for funds for the group behind the site, First Jobs Institute, whose site looks almost identical to the econ4u.com site.

In fact, it's just as pathetic and useless as the econ4u.com site. Apparently, they're trying to make some sort of connection between people's first jobs and their later success. It's unintentionally hilarious. For instance, their featured profiles include Jack Schuessler, the current CEO of Wendy's, whose first job was "loading boxes." So all you box jockeys out there remember that each of you can be CEO one day. Except they hire about 100,000 box jockeys for every CEO out there.

Nothing against Jack, but seriously pretty much everyone has had a crap job as a first (or 2nd or 3rd) job. I was a waiter. My friends were generally fast food employees or chain retailer "associates." What in the hell does my first job have to do with economics education (except in the general sense that I got educated pretty quickly that I didn't want to do that the rest of my life)?

More importantly, if you're that concerned with the admittedly backward state of economics education in the United States of America, how about doing a little something on your website to counteract the woeful ignorance you see all around you? How about a link to some economic theorists like my favorite Karl Marx or every libertarian's dream date, Friedrich Hayek? Or John Maynard Keynes?

There's nothing of any educational value whatsoever on their website, yet they want my money to help them promote economic awareness? I might as well throw my money at some scheme to build personal webpages for the Amish.