economist-3
Explanation
The Joke
A professor (drawn as an economist) announces to his class: "All students who did A+ work will be given a B for not understanding the concept of opportunity cost." The caption below reads: "The fact that this never happens is proof that economists don't believe their own theories."
The Humor
The joke operates on two levels. First, there's the surface absurdity: an economics professor penalizing students for doing excellent work, arguing that anyone who spent enough time to earn an A+ clearly doesn't understand opportunity cost — the economic principle that time spent on one activity means time not spent on something potentially more valuable. If a student truly understood opportunity cost, they would have done just enough to pass and spent their remaining time on higher-value activities.
The second, deeper layer is in the caption. If economists genuinely believed in opportunity cost as strongly as they teach it, they would actually implement this grading policy. The fact that no economist has ever done this suggests that even economists don't fully buy their own theories when applied to their own incentive structures — or at least that they recognize the theory breaks down in practice.
Broader Context
SMBC has a long-running series of comics about economists (this is the third, given the slug "economist-3"). Weinersmith frequently targets economics for the gap between its elegant theoretical frameworks and the messy reality of human behavior. This comic is a particularly tight example: it uses the discipline's own logic to expose a contradiction within the discipline itself.