Didja Hear the One About the Funny Economist?

It’s Saturday night at the American Economics Association’s conference, and Peter Orazem has just taken the podium in an overcrowded ballroom at the San Francisco Hilton. Hundreds of fellow Ph.D.s in Dockers, blue dress shirts and thick glasses fill the seats and line the walls. They’ve come to hear several economists offer their unique perspectives amid one of the worst financial crises in history, and Orazem, an Iowa State University economics professor, starts off discussing a government plan to combine health care and homeland security. “Now, instead of sending you to the doctor, they send you through airport security,” he says. “On my way out here, it was established that my shoes had no plastic explosives, my bag had no sharp objects and my prostate was cancer-free.”

The Economics Humor Session is the AEA conference’s first attempt to inject a little levity into an annual confab that noneconomists might charitably describe as dry. “You can count on one hand all the funny economists in the world,” says R. Preston McAfee, a California Institute of Technology economics professor and Yahoo! research fellow who presided over the evening. But despite their rarity, some of these academics have attracted wide followings–admittedly, among those who can laugh at supply-demand curves. Yoram Bauman, a professor at the University of Washington, bills himself as the World’s First and Only Stand-Up Economist*–but insists on the asterisk to honor exceptions like Ben Stein, who played the stupefyingly boring teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Bauman does a killer parody of Greg Mankiw, chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, a YouTube video of which has been watched 500,000 times. He’s also the subject of a Facebook group called the Yoram Bauman International Appreciation Society (Pakistan chapter). “It’s made up mostly of Pakistani graduate students,” he says. (See 10 things to do in San Francisco.)

The evening of stand-up comedy is held in a room furnished for the AEA’s more traditional meetings: ugly carpeting, stiff conference-room chairs and a screen for PowerPoint presentations. Not exactly the ideal setting, but as an audience member remarks, “This is the Carnegie Hall for economists who are also comedians.” For attendees, it’s the biggest night of the conference: boisterous comic relief to end a week packed with enticingly titled seminars such as “Arbitrageur of Capital” and “Dynamics of Asset Returns and Liquidity.” “Microeconomists are wrong about specific things, and macroeconomists are wrong about things in general,” Bauman quips during his set. “Particularly having successfully predicted nine out of the last five recessions.” It’s funnier if you’re familiar with the inherent tense dichotomy between micro- and macroeconomic schools of thought. With this crowd, it kills.

Economists can be forgiven for being a little loopy these days. The scope and suddenness of the ongoing financial crisis have been a rude awakening for many. “No one expected the problems to run this wide and deep,” says a Harvard Ph.D. in attendance. “It’s chilling.” That’s why many of the more accessible jokes of the evening involve bashing U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, President Bush and just about everyone on Wall Street. “Italian Mafia are gangsters who make offers you can’t refuse, whereas financial mafia are bankers who make you loans you can’t understand,” jokes Bauman. “I’m not sure which is worse.”

Despite universal concern over the state of the global economy, few attendees agreed on what should be done to fix it. “It’s typical that if you have five economists in the room, you’ll get six different opinions,” Bauman says, after the show. Nevertheless, the prevailing view by the end of the conference is that things are unlikely to get any better without some sort of government intervention. “Even the hard-core free-market thinkers are reconsidering their stance nowadays,” he notes. That’s a sobering thought. Which could be why economists need a laugh right now.

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