2013-01-27
Explanation
This comic satirizes the tendency of economics-minded people to reduce human relationships and emotions to cold, rational optimization problems. A woman with sunglasses explains to a bearded man that they have "asymmetric knowledge of each other'''s preferences," meaning neither of them perfectly knows what the other wants. She reasons that because of this information asymmetry, it would be a "non-optimal expenditure of time and resources" for her to buy him a gift herself.
Instead, she has analyzed her past gift-buying behavior and determined the typical amount of time and money she would have spent. She then presents him with a card reading "P" dollars and "T" of her time, with "alpha" as a conversion factor -- essentially reducing a birthday gift to a mathematical formula (P = alpha * T). She cheerfully says "Happy birthday" while handing over what amounts to an economics paper rather than an actual present.
The bearded man responds that learning economics has made her respond inappropriately to other people'''s feelings, but she simply says "Thanks!" -- either interpreting his criticism as a compliment or being too deep in her economic framework to recognize criticism at all. The votey panel shows the man saying "Thanks!" while someone off-panel clarifies "Not a compliment," reinforcing that the economist character is oblivious to the social and emotional dimensions of gift-giving that make it meaningful beyond mere resource allocation. The comic pokes fun at the famous economic argument against gift-giving (the "deadweight loss of Christmas") by showing how absurd it looks when applied to actual human relationships.