2010-06-30
Explanation
This comic contrasts how a "Normal Person" and an "Economist" react to the same statement about valuing children'''s lives. In the top panel, a normal person at a podium earnestly declares: "You cannot put a value on the life of a child." In the bottom panel, an economist angrily shouts the same phrase but with a crucial addition: "You cannot put a value on the life of a child! You MUST include error bars of +/- 50 dollars!"
The humor comes from the deliberate misinterpretation of the phrase. When a normal person says "you cannot put a value on the life of a child," they mean it is priceless and beyond monetary quantification -- it is a moral statement. The economist, however, interprets the objection purely as a methodological one: the problem is not that you are assigning a dollar value to a child'''s life, but that you are presenting that value without proper statistical uncertainty margins. The economist is not horrified by the concept of pricing human life; he is horrified by the lack of rigor in the estimate. This is a pointed satire of how economists are trained to quantify everything, including things most people consider sacred.
The votey panel shows someone exclaiming "MONSTERS!" -- representing the horrified reaction of ordinary people to the economist'''s coldly analytical worldview, and serving as a comedic punctuation to the absurdity of treating children'''s lives as a measurement problem rather than a moral one.