This is really all you need to know: Mankiw’s 10 principles of economics, explained
It’s really much more interesting than the title suggests.
And for background material, here’s the AAAS presentation: Important AAAS presentation
Chicken
Chicken chicken chicken chicken chickens chicken.
chicken X chicken(chicken) = chicken
Well…chicken.
1/chicken = ln(chicken)
That was hilarious and educational, a rare combination.
Thanks.
Too funny!
I hadn’t seen the chicken one. Hilarious. The slides are great: they suggest a nested production structure. The slide in response to the last “question” is perfect.
The Bauman does Mankiw thing is cool, too. It’s funny, but contains seeds of a serious critique.
Okay, I’m no economist, that video seemed like it was 3 minutes too long. Yet as it went on, people laughed even louder. What’s the joke? (or do I have to be an economist to get it?)
I suspect that it was mostly just that he was making fun of how economics lectures seem if you sit in them. You can add in all the charts and whatnot that you want, but it all boils down to “Blah blah blah blahdeeblah blah.” He just substituted “chicken” in for “blah.”
That kind of comedy works well when it’s overdone. Monty Python would do that once in a while - just keep going when you expect them to stop. That’s when the incredible silliness of it really gets under your skin, and you’ll either think it’s just beating the same joke, or you’ll laugh yourself senseless.
In this case, the slides had enough ‘in jokes’ in them to keep surprising the audience with new depths. And the QA with the the audience ‘plant’ and the final slide was just the icing on the cake. It’s really a brilliant piece of comedic timing.
And he absolutely NAILS the essence of these powerpoint presentations, right down to his inflection and the way he repeats the title twice and keeps referring back to the master bullet list between graphics, and all that. It was familiar enough to make people who have sat through hundreds of those instantly recognize just how crazy it was.
Watch how he reacts to the chicken question in the audience - he listens for a second, the starts nodding and gesticulating like, “Yes, yes… I’ve already thought of that.” - then he pops up a final slide to illustrate. Perfect.
One of the pitfalls of presenting this to a bunch of geeks is that they will join in with the joke in a way that shows they totally don’t get it. When he shows the graph and overlays the data points, you can hear someone yell out, “Those are eggs!” Which isn’t funny at all to say. And the first question is someone who asked if the presentation was funded by Colonel Sanders, which also isn’t really funny. Too concrete. The humor is in the surrealness of it.
The binomial data distribution on the scatter plot was perfect. Just about the time I was getting a little sick of “chicken” bullet points, he comes out with that. Then follows it up with the slide that divides the two distributions.
Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!