Saturday
(0)... hears that his friend, an economist, is in Addenbrooks [in the US version of this joke, in Mount Auburn] with a badly broken leg, and goes to visit.
Physicist: What happened?
Economist: I had just stepped off the balcony, and wham! -- I fell and broke my leg.
Physicist: You stepped... off... the balcony? What on earth for?
Economist: How was I to know there would be gravity failure?
"...a badly broken leg..."
Had gravity not failed, the leg would have been well broken.
Posted by triticale at July 3, 2005 12:39 AM
?
I don't get it
?
wouldn't a gravity failure have saved the economist from falling?
Is there some play on words here?
Posted by zmollusc at July 3, 2005 07:45 AM
A play on concepts. Economists (particularly liberal Cambridge ones) talk about market failure when the economic real world doesn't work as they'd like it to, even though it is still behaving according to their own empirical laws. Physics accepts that theory must be universal and the work is to understand the conditions under which things happen.
Posted by guy herbert at July 3, 2005 08:46 AM
Ahah! That is not something i had come across, thanks.
I still prefer the '3 statisticians out hunting' joke.
(For the very few who haven't heard it, three statisticians are out hunting with guns or bows or something. On seeing a rabbit or deer or whatever, the first statistician shoots. His shot goes wide, missing the target by 3 feet to the left. The second statistician fires, his shot goes three feet to the right of the target.
"Wooohooo!!!! GOT HIM!!!", they all shout.)
Posted by zmollusc at July 3, 2005 11:32 AM
Er... no, that was the point of the joke. (Which maybe only I find funny.)
It's a joke about "market failure". Gravity did what it does. But the economist, as economists are wont to do interpreted consistency as "failure" because consistency did not produce a comforting result.
Posted by guy herbert at July 3, 2005 10:19 PM
No, because if gravity had failed, he wouldn't have fallen to the ground. A physicist of all people wouldn't attribute his having been a victim of gravity to a failure of gravity!!
Posted by Verity at July 3, 2005 11:00 PM
Verity, it wasn't the physicist that attributed that, it was the economist:-)
Posted by Alisa at July 4, 2005 10:35 AM
In a nutshell, that for me describes quite neatly the contempt of empiricist "hard" scientists for the social parasites.
TWG
Posted by The Wobbly Guy at July 4, 2005 12:49 PM
Two behavioural psychologists have just had sex. One says, "That was great for you; how was it for me?"
Posted by Squander Two at July 5, 2005 10:03 AM
