Here are two adaptations of common jokes which I'm sure you won't enjoy (at least, not as much as I do.) If you're not offended by the jokes, get a little nerdier by reading Greg Mankiw's editorial on an international carbon tax. (And if you're particularly nerdy, see if you can pick out the sentence in his article that carries the same implied theory as the first joke.)
Joke #1: Two economists are walking down the sidewalk when one spots a twenty-dollar bill and stops to bend over and pick it up. His friend wisely slaps his hand and says, "If that were a real twenty-dollar bill, someone would have already picked it up."
Joke #2: A few statisticians are in a bar prospecting their odds at dates for the weekend when Bill Gates walks in. One of the statisticians becomes very excited and exclaims, "Hooray! On average, we all just got richer!"
4 comments:
I was just saying that I wish I had some good economist and statistician jokes to wow the B-school kids... *GRIN*
I'm glad to help any way I can but I want to warn you that not all b-schoolers are nerds (that's what econ and finance majors are for) and not all may appreciate these fine jokes as well as they should...
I love the second joke. I must confess I don't actually get the first. But the article was interesting. So hopefully I won some nerd points, lost some others, and can still boast a robust nerdiness...
I'm glad you liked the second joke. The first plays on certain economic theories on free-market efficiency and the basic assumptions that economists make. In short it is probably fair to say that markets are expected to act as informed consumers even when the consumers in the market are not well informed. These two old codgers walking down the sidewalk then, being naive consumers, can still trust that the market (all passersby) has determined that it indeed is not a $20 bill since nobody else has picked it up.
Hoping that I haven't ruined the joke, I think you can see this idea clearly in this paragraph by Mankiw from the article above: Increased fuel efficiency, however, is not free. Like a tax, the cost of complying with more stringent regulation will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher car prices. But the government will not raise any revenue that it can use to cut other taxes to compensate for these higher prices. (And don’t expect savings on gas to compensate consumers in a meaningful way: Any truly cost-effective increase in fuel efficiency would already have been made.)
Post a Comment