2015-01-15
Explanation
The Joke
A social scientist at a lectern presents "The Companion Paradox" — the observation that friends are the people least likely to have new information (since you already share a social circle), yet new information can be used to increase wealth, and despite this, people associate more with friends than with non-friends. She frames this as a genuine academic mystery.
The caption at the bottom delivers the punchline: "In social science, 'paradox' is jargon for 'obvious to everyone else.'"
The Humor
The comic satirizes the tendency in social science (and academia more broadly) to take perfectly intuitive aspects of human behavior — like the fact that people prefer to spend time with friends even when it is not economically optimal — and reframe them as baffling paradoxes deserving of formal study. To anyone outside academia, the answer is self-evident: people like their friends and value companionship for reasons beyond economic utility. The humor lies in the gap between the academic framing of the "paradox" and the common-sense understanding that friendship is not primarily an information-gathering strategy.
The comic also pokes fun at the assumption embedded in rational-choice models that people should always act to maximize wealth, making any deviation from pure economic rationality seem like a puzzle to be solved.