2013-01-14
Explanation
This comic imagines what would happen if economics and engineering departments had a joint luncheon, and the result is a cascade of interdisciplinary misunderstandings. The engineers ask naive-sounding questions about economics (like why the economy cannot be treated as a two-body problem), while the economists share basic facts that shock the engineers (like the fact that GDP is calculated from the total value of all final transactions). One engineer is so surprised by the GDP definition that he leaves abruptly.
The engineers then take matters into their own hands in the most engineer-like way possible: they go out to sea, find a tiny rock, declare it a sovereign state called "Macroeconomica," and set up a computer that rapidly exchanges dollars back and forth to inflate the transaction count. The results are "technically accurate and also useless" -- the tiny rock nation shows an astronomical GDP on paper. Meanwhile, the economists are banished to a schedule of "misgivings" instead of lunch, and interdepartmental lunches are canceled entirely.
The final twist is that all economic advisory councils are now headed by engineers, who present GDP projections with engineering-style thinking: one asks what a dotted line on the graph represents, and the engineer-economist explains it is the projection "if we get more RAM" -- confusing computational capacity with economic growth. The votey panel shows a graph labeled "Irony" depicting an inverse relationship between wealth and jokes about economics, suggesting that the people who find these jokes funniest are probably not the ones making economic policy.