teach-a-man-to-fish
Explanation
The Joke
The comic takes the classic proverb "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" and progressively extends it through increasingly complex and realistic economic and social scenarios. Each panel escalates the scope: "Teach every man to fish and you will feed them all, until the fish population collapses." "Teach a small, restricted group of men how to fish really well and you will feed most people, but you will create massive inequality." "Teach every man to fish, and teach every man about common-pool resource management, and you will feed them until social trust breaks down."
The escalation continues as a student asks "Does this go on forever?" and the professor responds "Of course," explaining that he is teaching them "the principle of the second-best economy." The final panel shows the professor at a chalkboard with "Humans are garbage" written on it, and he asks the student to teach him to fish in an "ethically manageable group" -- but he notes that they'll need to know how to fish AND manage all these problems.
The Humor
The comedy lies in methodically dismantling a simple, comforting proverb by applying actual economics to it. Each escalation reveals another way that the naive "teach a man to fish" philosophy breaks down when you account for real-world complications like resource depletion, inequality, and collective action problems. The professor's conclusion that "humans are garbage" is the darkly funny endpoint of trying to solve what initially seemed like a simple problem.
The votey panel shows a graph of "Garbageness" plotted against "# humans," with garbageness increasing exponentially -- suggesting that human terribleness scales super-linearly with population size.
References
The proverb "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" is commonly attributed to various sources including Maimonides and Chinese proverbs, though its exact origin is disputed. The comic references the Tragedy of the Commons, a concept described by Garrett Hardin in 1968, where shared resources are depleted by individuals acting in self-interest. The "principle of the second best" is an actual economic theorem from 1956 by Richard Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster, which states that if one optimality condition cannot be satisfied, the next-best solution may involve violating other optimality conditions. Common-pool resource management references the work of Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her analysis of how communities can successfully manage shared resources.