Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic satirizes how academic or technical language can be used to defuse or overcomplicate simple situations.

In the first panel, a mugger confronts someone in an alley: "Gimme yer wallet!" The victim responds: "You've made a common error. I'm an economics major."

In the second panel, the economics major launches into a lecture: "Behold: if we factor in your risk of being arrested, joint non-market opportunity costs of a wallet, your expected long-term loss from this interaction is negative. Your total expected utility from this encounter, given observable priors, is..."

In the final panel, the mugger attacks the victim while the victim is still talking, represented by a scuffle sound effect.

The joke works on several levels. First, it mocks the stereotype of economics students who believe their theoretical models apply perfectly to real-world situations. The economics major seems to think that explaining the negative expected utility of mugging will rationally persuade the mugger to stop -- as if a criminal in a dark alley is a rational agent in an economics textbook who will update their behavior based on a cost-benefit analysis.

Second, it highlights the gap between theoretical models and practical reality. While the economics major's analysis might be technically correct (crime often does have negative expected value), the mugger is not interested in a lecture. The comic suggests that academic knowledge, however valid in the classroom, is useless -- and possibly counterproductive -- when confronted with real-world violence. The victim's "common error" line, implying the mugger has made a mistake, is particularly funny because it's the victim who has made the real error: assuming rational discourse applies in a mugging.