booked
Explanation
This comic features a child asking her mother a series of increasingly pointed questions about adult competence. It begins innocently: "Mom, adults are in charge of the world, right?" and "That means they ought to understand the world, like economics, history..." The mother agrees.
The child then proposes a thought experiment: suppose the average world leader is 52 years old and started reading books for adults at age 18. If they read 100 books a year for 52 years, that's only about a quarter of a downtown public library. The mother notes they don't even read that many — to which the child responds that the adults in charge don't even read that much.
The punchline comes when the mother deflects: "They... they don't even read that much," and the child asks, "Would you like to see my kindergarten collection of dip-dye and petroleum?" (suggesting the child already has more specialized knowledge than many leaders).
The comic highlights a genuinely unsettling truth: the sheer volume of human knowledge is so vast that even a voracious reader can only absorb a tiny fraction of what's available in a single public library, let alone the sum total of human understanding. The people running the world are, by necessity, operating with a minuscule fraction of available knowledge. The humor comes from a child calmly walking an adult through this realization with simple arithmetic, exposing the uncomfortable gap between the authority adults hold and the knowledge base that supposedly justifies it.