I just asked ChatGPT « Explain the second theorem of welfare economics in the style of an Emily Dickinson death poem. » [Spoiler alert: her death poems can be sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas] The response: The Second Theorem lies in wait, Its logic cold and clear, It whispers to the […]
Search: “funny business”
We found 15 results for your search.
The monetary economist whose methodological contributions will likely be read long after the heated debates about monetarism lie cold in university archives or buried in the footnotes of historians of economics, Thomas Mayer, was born January 18, 1927 in Vienna. His family was able to leave Austria in the late 1930s which gave him the […]
The 1500th artifact added to Economics in the Rear-view Mirror deserves to be a celebratory post for visitors. For this honor I have chosen a pastiche drawn by a Chicago economics graduate student in 1972. Roger Vaughan (Ph.D. 1977) was the principal, if not only, illustrator for the student-produced satirical publication P.H.A.R.T., an issue of […]
It has been a while since I have added an artifact to the MIT economics skits wing of the Funny Business Archives here at Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. Apparently the following script was a, if not the sole, late-20th century MIT faculty skit not written by Robert Solow. I can believe that. In […]
My serious blog work has regrettably kept me lately from adding more to the series of “Funny Business” posts in Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. So as a late St. Nicholas present for 2020, I give you today’s post “What are economic historians made of?” composed by the University of Minnesota economic historian, Herbert […]
This post continues our series “Funny Business” that features successful and less-than-successful attempts at humor by economists. Reading one of these historical skits demands the reader to concede that the defense, “It seemed funny at the time,” might actually be valid for fifty year old jokes. At the December 1968 Graduate Economics Association party the M.I.T. […]
The current events of the late ‘sixties are the clear inspiration for this somewhat dark, dystopian skit for the M.I.T. economics departmental Christmas party of December 1969. According to the cover page, it was written by Robert Solow with input from Frank Fisher. The skit was transcribed from the typed text [that includes […]
This post adds to our collection of artifacts filed under “Funny Business”. It is the first example of undergraduate economics humor to have found its way to Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. Somebody inserted a totally fake professor into the part of the yearbook that provided pictures and biographical sketches of distinguished faculty who […]
Spoiler alert: you are about to encounter one of the least funny economics skits in the history of the genre, so this artifact is regrettably low on entertainment value. Still the six acts have a certain seven-acts-of-man structure: Act I (the department recruits), Act II ( advising the first-year student), Act III (graduate student complaints), Act IV […]
Today’s addition to the skits written and performed by my cohort of M.I.T. economics graduate students (we joined the program in 1974-75) was performed in early 1976. It is a parody of the classic Judy Garland movie The Wizard of Oz. As coincidence would have it, the faculty’s own contribution to the skit party was […]