2013-01-04
Explanation
The comic shows two men who appear to be 18th- or 19th-century intellectuals sitting at a table with tea, and the caption reads "Before Economics." One says, "Hey, you know how we sit around every night grousing about the way nobody agrees with us about how society works," to which the other responds, "Yep." The first then asks, "What if we mathematized that?"
The joke imagines the origin of economics as a discipline: rather than being born from rigorous scientific inquiry, it was simply the formalization of grumpy intellectuals' complaints about society into mathematical language. The humor works on multiple levels. First, it satirizes economics as a field by suggesting its foundation is essentially opinion and grievance dressed up in mathematical notation, rather than objective science. Second, it plays on the common stereotype that economists frequently disagree with each other and that their models often fail to predict real-world outcomes. The characters resemble figures from the era of Adam Smith and other early political economists, grounding the joke in a loose historical context. The word "mathematized" is itself funny, being an awkward coinage that captures the somewhat forced application of mathematical rigor to what are fundamentally social and philosophical questions.