2012-10-16
Explanation
This comic satirizes education policy and the misuse of statistics. An advisor tells the President, "Good news, Mister President. We'''ve created a new breed of Homo sapiens who are so dumb they will skew the arithmetic mean of the entire nation!" The President excitedly responds, "Ha! My educational goal is officially met!" Below this scene, a newspaper headline reads: "75% of children now above average IQ."
The joke targets politicians who set goals like "all children above average" without understanding that the average (arithmetic mean) is a relative measure -- by definition, roughly half of any population will fall below it. The comic'''s absurd "solution" is to create extremely unintelligent people who would drag the mean down so dramatically that most existing children would end up above it. This is technically valid mathematics: if you add enough extreme low outliers, you can shift the mean downward while the median stays put, making the majority "above average."
The satire cuts at the real-world tendency of politicians to set statistically impossible educational benchmarks (like the No Child Left Behind Act'''s goal of 100% proficiency) and then find creative ways to game the metrics rather than genuinely improving education.
The votey panel drives the point home with the advisor saying, "That was WAY cheaper than policy changes" -- a cynical acknowledgment that manipulating statistics is always easier and less expensive than actually fixing systemic problems in education.