Which
Explanation
In this comic, a sinister-looking figure (perhaps God, or a game-show host of fate) tells a group of children to "choose which of your children will live and which will die." One child, Billy, dies.
A parent protests: "Wait!" But the figure explains that Billy is "a girl, so she has a higher life expectancy than males. She will have greater happiness. She's also three years younger than Billy, so she will, through compounding interest, end up with a higher number of quality-adjusted life years by spending Sally." The conclusion: "It's a no-brainer, dude."
The final panel reveals the punchline: "I'm so sorry you were raised by an economist." The parent responds: "He means well. 'Maximizing optimal' is 'means well.'"
The joke satirizes how economists (and economic thinking more broadly) reduce deeply emotional, moral questions to cold utilitarian calculations. The comic takes the most extreme possible scenario -- choosing which child lives or dies -- and shows how an economist would treat it as a straightforward optimization problem involving life expectancy, quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), and compound interest. The humor lies in the absurdity of applying rational cost-benefit analysis to something that most people would consider beyond the reach of such calculations. The final line is a meta-joke: even the concept of "meaning well" gets redefined in economic terms as "maximizing optimal.