2012-11-11
Explanation
This comic shows an adult (wearing glasses, likely an economist or rationalist type) answering the door to a Girl Scout selling cookies. Instead of simply buying or declining, the adult proposes a more "efficient" arrangement: rather than paying the high price for cookies she does not actually want, she offers to directly give the Girl Scout the amount the scout would have received as her cut of the payment, plus a dollar. That way the scout gets more money, no cookies are wasted, and the adult gets the sense of charitable pride that the cookies were merely a conveyance for. The Girl Scout declines, explaining she is working on a merit badge. The adult incredulously asks how they can give a merit badge for "inefficiently moving money from people to organizations." The final panel, labeled "Later...", shows a building with a sign reading "Bureaucracy" -- implying the Girl Scout went on to earn a merit badge in bureaucracy.
The comic pokes fun at the tension between economic rationality and social institutions. The adult''s proposal is perfectly logical from an efficiency standpoint: cookie sales are an inefficient fundraising mechanism where much of the money goes to cookie production and distribution rather than the organization. But the Girl Scout''s insistence on following the established process -- selling actual cookies for a merit badge -- represents how institutions often prioritize procedure over outcomes. The punchline that this earns a "Bureaucracy" merit badge ties it all together, suggesting that learning to inefficiently move resources through established channels is itself a valuable institutional skill.
The votey panel adds a final layer: the Girl Scout receives a letter saying "You will receive your Bureaucracy badge in 6 to infinity weeks" -- a joke about bureaucratic processing times being absurdly long and unpredictable, with the bureaucratic system itself embodying the very inefficiency the comic has been satirizing.