Episode 14: The World’s Only Stand-Up Economist

that's pretty much true, pretty much. I like having fun, just I just don't like most people's definition of it. I guess you have your own definition. Al right. Well, on that note, I thought today, in an effort to change Joe's mind about fun and humor in general, we might embark on something a little different, something fun, but obviously it still needs to be markets related. So Joe, I'm really excited to say that we're going to have today someone who bills himself as the world's first and

only stand up comedian economist. Wait, stand up economists, Yeah it is. I'm skeptical, all right, So we're having your embowman on. He has a PhD in economics from the University of Washington. He also travels the country doing comedy gigs at universities and economic conferences, making jokes about yield curves and supply and demand and all that fun stuff. I'm even more skeptical there's actually a circuit of going around making jokes and comedy conferences and universities. I swear

there is. If you look at his website, he has a list of every show that he's done, and he's, as economists would say, very much in demand. Okay, convinced, Yeah, no, no, I'm starting to get intrigued. Just to give you an idea, We're going to have your um come on and at the beginning he's going to do a short set for us, and I've also brought in some of our Bloomberg colleagues to be our guinea pigs and his audience. All right, well,

I'm looking forward to being convinced. Ladies and gentlemen, your am Bowman. Thank you very much. It's it's a pleasure me with all of you today. My name is Roon Bowman. I appear before you as the world first and only stand up economist. Yes, it's a it's a niche market. I really only have one thing going for me as a stand up economist, and that's low expectations. When I told my father that I was going to be a stand up economist, he said, Ronny said, you can't be

a stand up economist. And I said, why not? And he said, because there's no demand a boom And I was the first joke I ever told on stage. I said, don't worry that I'm a supply side economist. I just stand up and let the jokes trickle down. I believe in laugher cur those are actually just my jokes that how much economics everybody knows? And then I kind of arranged the rest of your team accordingly. Uh you know, I'm I'm happy to say that it's been a good

couple of years for economics comedy. A few years ago I got to be on the PBS News Hour. And now, I don't know how much you all know about the world of stand up comedy, but let me just play you this. In the world of stand up comedy, it does not get any bigger than the PBS News Hour with Jim Lair. It was pretty amazing. They interviewed three economists on the show. They interviewed Robert Schiller who won the Nobel Prize. They interviewed Joseph Stiglets, who won the

Nobel Prize, and they interviewed me. I felt like kind of a self aware version of Sarah Palin And what did they ask for my moment of TV fame when the TVs News Hour they asked me if I'd ever bombed on stage? A couple of things about this, right. First of all, I am not a eight of failure, all right, I'm an economist. Secondly, on professional comedian, right,

so it choke doesn't work. You just started keep throwing stuff out there until you find something that six just basically the same thing that the fat of the Treasury didn't the last six or seven years. And finally had to admit on the PBS News Hour and in fact I had bombed on stage. The works show I ever did was in October of two thousand and eight. I'm sure you remember what was happening to the global economy in the stock market in October of two thousand eight.

October two thousand and eight, I did a show in Colorado Springs for a group of bankers. And commonly it is kind of a violent business, right like if you're doing well, then you're killing. If you're doing badly, then

you're bombing. And I totally bombed that show. And I actually did so poorly that I spent a star any time afterwards, sort of soul searchingly trying to figure out where had I lost the connection with this audience of bankers in Colorado Springs in October of two thousand and eight, And I finally realized that I lost them on my opening line, that my opening line was, Hey, how was it going? Maybe I'll close this set with some You

might be an economist if jokes so. You might be an economists if you think that In America's next top model should be a Dodginess growth model. Uh, it might be an economist. If you don't read human interest stories because they don't interest you. You might be an economists if you've ever gone to a bank or other financial institution in the hopes of getting a date. If you plan to have your children born in December instead of January so you can maximize the discount of present value

of the child tax credit. And finally, you might be an economist if be adamantly refused to sell your children because you think they'll be worth more later. Thank you, right your I thought that was really funny. I'm a big fan of puns. The first time I've ever done a podcast show by telephone to a group of five people, I'm trying to convince Joe that there can be humor in economics. Um, on that note, can you tell us how you actually had this idea and how you got

into this gig? Yeah, it was. It was basically a random coincidence. So while I was in graduate school at the University of Washington getting my PhD in economics, I wrote a parody of the Ten Principles of Economics in a popular textbook by Harvard professor Greg Mankiw And uh, just kind of did that to blow up team, because that's what you do when you're in graduate school. And

then one thing led to another. It got published in this chinest humor journal called the Animals of Improbable Research, and then they run a humor session every year at this thing science convention that happened to be in Seattle. So they invited me to present my paper and I had so much fun. I kind of got into stand up comedy as a hobby. And then, um, I guess two things happened after that. One was my academic career, to be perfectly honest, and didn't go quite as well

as I hoped. Uh. And then the other thing was it turned out that people were interested in paying me to do stand up comedy about economics. So ten years later, this is now my my profession. So this is your full time thing. This is so what's the circuit? Like, how often do you perform uh in a year? One? Are the common venues and so far? Yeah, so this is sort of my this is my paid job. Nobody believes me, but this is how I make a living.

I do stand up comedy about economics. I have kind of a full time, unpaid job working on on carbon taxes and a carbon tax ballot measure here in Washington State, and climate change issues and tax reform and stuff like that. Um, but it's all financed by the miracle of economics comedy. Mostly I do colleges and corporate events, and um, you know, the colleges are sort of all over and then the corporate events some of them are financial firms, but also

just trucking executives on the banks of the Arkansas River. Uh, you know, the floor to bankers associate. How many gigs do you do a year, Probably maybe fifty or sixty. So, you know, a lot of people think of economics as a really dry subject. Do you think something like that lends itself to humor. Well, like those jokes that I told you know that you might be an economist if jokes. The reason those jokes work is because you have a stereotype that you can play against. And so anytimes you

have stereotypes, you can kind of do comedy. And you know, there are these obvious stereotypes about economists being sort of hyper rational and focus on money and uh. And so when you have that, then then then there's an opportunity to do comedy. And the fact that the fact that everybody has such low expectations makes it all the easier. Like I've often found that low expect having low expectations is one of the one of the great assets in life.

That's one reason why I like being an economist, because I think there are a lot of people in the world who tend to think that that other people should be good people at heart, and then they're you know, often disappointed when when people let them down. Own where you study economics, and then you go into the world thinking that everybody is going to be kind of a self interested jerk, and it turns out that people are oftentimes much better than that, Right, so you're pleasantly surprised. Yeah,

you get the benefits of low expectations. Yeah, I've never really thought about that. That The sort of first building block of economics is the assumption that everyone is going to be selfish and cool and uh self, you know, self maximizing all the time. But then as you learn more, of course, and most economists don't really believe that, but that as you learn more, the what happens is humans surprise you to the to the upside. So that is a kind of a nice thing about the economic worldview.

I've never really thought of it that way before. Yeah, I mean, well, the way that I have a couple of cartoon economics books that I co authored with illustrated Grade de Klin, and the way we say it is that is an economists assume that people are optimizing individuals, and so that doesn't necessarily mean that they're optimizing just for themselves, right No, Um, No, economists would say that people just care about themselves and don't care about friends

or family or even people in other parts of the world or animals or whatever. But you know, there are a lot of cases where doing the economic models and start of thinking through how the analysis works makes a lot more offense when you when when you kind of simplify things and say, okay, people are are kind of basically self interested. Do you have counterparts and other academic fields? Like is there a physics comedian, a chemistry comedian, Like

have you found those other other types? Yeah? You know, for a while, we thought about putting together like a university, like a comedy university, which I still think would be an awesome idea, but it's never gone anywhere. Let's see, who do I know. There's just the fellow whose website is science comedian Brian Mallow, who's a former astronomer. He talks about how he started in the comedy instead of

astronomy because they put him on the dayshift. Uh. There's a fellow who actually gotta peach the neurobiologies means tim Lee very funny. His website I his comedy of tim Lee dot com. Uh. There's a guy, Bill Santiago who wrote a book called Pardon My Spanglish, and he does he actually does a stand up comedy in both English and Spanish. He's of I think he's from New York, but as of Puerto Rican descent, and he's he's super

funny and does a lot of comedy about language. So I think it would be totally possible to do that, to put together like a whole academic curriculum, uh, just based on comedy. So, um, when you go off to economic conferences and you do your stand up, do you ever get economists who are just having none of it, who are just completely humorless. I do occasionally get people who think that, um, you know, I'm making fun of a serious subject and maybe their socks were pulled on

too tight or something like that. But for the most part, people appreciate that that you know, it's public education, and it's it's Uh. I've taught high school as well as college, and when you teach high school, one of the things you learned is that motivate engine is incredibly important. Right that that it's not that the students don't have the book or don't have access to the materials, it's that

you know, they're lacking the uh. Sometimes they're they're they're lacking the impetus to actually read the book, and um, you know, and that's why I worked on these cartoon books. And that's why, um, that's why I do some of the comedy is is to motivate people to pick up the book and maybe economics, it's kind of interesting who are some of the funniest economists out there? Doesn't Austin Goldsber do stand up? Other Austin all of us is out there that who back meets of Chicago does stand up?

They're actually one of some the humor sessions that I put on the American Economic Association meetings. It's usually me, and then there's like four or five others, uh, folks who just give they write papers on various things. Um. The most recent one there's a Felling who presented the paper on you know. The economists will sometimes do like what's called non market valuation to try to figure out, like how much do we value having you know, stam

in in the the Sacramento San Jachim river system. And this paper was about using those same economic techniques to figure out the value that salmon put on having salmon in the river system, uh, and the values of the sam having humans in the river system. Presumably salmon's value being in the river greatly right. Well, it terms out that they value their own lives quite highly. Yet, but their value for for Smoltz for juvenile salmon is actually

relatively low and roughly comparable. I learned to their valuation for juvenile human, which was it was determined by showing salmon a picture of the Brady Bunch. Those were the juvenile humans that they picked. U. It was a funny papers on that topic. You're One of the reasons we stumbled upon you was because we read this uh listical I guess that you did, called the top eleven funniest papers in the history of economics, and some of them I had heard before, but some of them I had haven't.

And um I got to read out of the names of these papers, the theory of Interstellar Trade by Paul Kirkman, uh, the Effective Prayer on God's Attitude toward mankind, and what is possibly my favorite is Japan's Phillips curve looks like Japan by Gregor Smith. I love that one tell us about these papers and why you think economists decide to do them. So I've edited for a number of years now the humor section of an economics journal, a real

economics journal called Economic Inquiry. Uh. So they published series papers and then every quarter or every issue they try to publish of what they call a miscellany piece, which just serve a funny piece. So many of those papers, including the Paul Cregman paper he's a Nobel prizewinner, the

Jim Heckman paper also in Prizewinner. We're published in Economic Inquiry. UM. Japan's Phillips curve looks like Japan was actually published in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and it's almost certainly the funniest paper ever published in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. UM. I think people do it kind

of on a on a on a lark um. Either something you know, naws at them, which is kind of where I ended up with this parody of the Ten Principles of economics, or a lot of times they just come across hath hazardly something something that that that triggers this idea. So Japan's Philip curve looks like Japan. Right at the background is the Philips curve. Was this idea from the fifties and sixties, and there's a trade off between inflation and unemployment, you have high inflation and low

unemployment or the opposite. But the idea was that you were always on that Phillips curve line. And so what this economist was doing he was actually looking at Philips curve data for Japan and and graph to Philips curve data for Japan between h I think it was like thousand and five, and when he looked at the graph, it just happened to look like a map of Japan.

Uh So he wrote this paper. There's actually a link on his website of the paper and the link so that the title of this paper is also the abstract and frankly most of the text which is which is pretty great. So that was what led him to write that paper. There was another paper called the Efficiency of a C d C and looked at the rock group a C D C. And uh, I don't know how they give a fan you are of a c DC, but they had two front men, two main singers, Von

Scott and Brian Johnson. And apparently there's been a debate among mel heads ever since about which of them was the better front man for a C d C. And so there was this economist, Rob Oxby in Canada who

was doing his research who was doing serious research. His research was about how background music affects people's decision making, and so some of the songs that he had his graduate students or whatever playing the background were some of these A C d C songs and they were trying to figure out whether the background music affected like when people were negotiating, how does it affect that outcome of negotiations?

And it turned out that the graduate student kind of accidentally played two different A c DC songs during some of these experiments, and that ruined the data for the actual paper, but it gave him this idea for this joke paper where you can use the results because the two A c DC songs one was a Brian Johnson fil one was a Bond scott You can use those results to figure out that Brian Johnson. In fact, if you're negotiating, you want to listen to the Brian Johnson

A CDC songs and not the Bond Scotland. Yeah. Can I just read from the abstract of that A C d C paper It says we use tools from experimental economics to address the age old debate regarding who was a better singer in the band A c d C. These results may have important implications for settling drunken music

debates and environmental design issues and organizations. I love that. Yeah, there's There was a follow up humor piece which was that after this, uh, after he released this on his website or posted the paper on his website, it was picked up. It was, it was. It wasn't the newspapers like in Australia, right, which is where a c DC comes from. So it actually got a ton of press, and then Steve Levitt picked it. I blew it as the universe of Chicago. He's one of the authors of Freakonomics,

and he wrote a blog post about it. But he didn't realize that the paper was a joke, so he wrote a blog post about it that was called this is what happens to economists and they listen to too much a c d uh. You know. He wrote, like, I hope for this guy's sake that he has tenure in rawbos to be excited to post a comment on his blog on Steve Lennart's blog saying, first of all, I already have tenures, thank you very much. And the second of all, the papers a joke, So what are

you up to now. You mentioned the carbon text thing. But outside of your stand up, what what occupies your time? I am, um working on another cartoon book. So my co author and I have two cartoon books about economics. We have a cartoon instruction to climate change and we are working on a cartoon introduction to calculums. So the cartoon books are really fun. And you know, in America especially, I think cartoon books have kind of a little bit of a bad People think that they're quote unquote just

for kids. But I've actually come to really appreciate them as a way to convey information to audiences of all ages. I mean, they're very accessible, they provide a way to do humor, and when you do a cartoon book, you don't have to, um, I feel like you need to put footnotes on everything and say two hundred pages what you can say in uh, you know, in twenty pages. Uh. And then I'm spending a lot of time working on

this carbon tax reform campaign here in Washington State. It's actually a ballot measure, Initiative seven thirty two, which just qualified for the ballot. We Are campaign gathered three hundred and sixty three thousand signatures last year and it's a

pretty neat campaign. The idea is that, you know, we have a moral responsibility to take action on climate change, and the way to do it is to have a carbon tax, use market instruments, so you have a carbon tax, and then use the revenue from the carbon tax to reduce existing taxes. So we cut the state sales tax by a point um uh and reduce some other taxes for businesses and for low income households. Then that was actually the idea that that brought me into economics in

the first place. So it's kind of this idea of environmental text re form, that we can use the tools of economics and the power of capitalism to protect the environment. It's a big thing that that that's in my life right now, in addition to my wife and my eighteen months old baby. Well, our producers are signaling that we need to cut the fun short. So one last thing before you go, can can you tell us one final economics joke, like a one liner that we can use

in our daily lives. Let's see, do I have a good joke? I mean, I can tell you the oldest economics joke in the world if you want. Yeah, the oldest economist joke in the world is about a physicist, the chemist, an economist who are stranded on a desert island and they don't have any food, and then a can of beans washes up on the shore, but they don't have a way to open the can of beans, and the physicists as well, we'll just crack it against the rock here and do some calculations and we use

this velocity and then the canna beans will open. And the chemist says, no, no, no, that's too complicated. We'll put the Canadians in the salt water and it will corrode and that it as much time. You know, we can eat two Cannabians. And the economist is not, it's just too hard. Let's just assume we have a can opener. I love that joke. I've heard that before, but I

think it's a great joke. Yes, this is this is the this is the only joker, the only economics joke that in the in the world that uh that most people think of. So that's the assuming can open or joke. And it's ironic that I told it on your podcast because a great deal of the work that I do with stand up economics is trying to convince people. O, there's more economics comedy out there than the than the assuming canto. All right, thank you so much for joining.

Thanks today, my pleasure. Thanks so much, Joe. Did I convince you that it's fun to have fun? I thought he was awesome, But you know what the big picture is to me. The fact that there's someone who makes a living being a stand up comedian first stand up economists, like what a country like this is just so awesome. I'm just so glad to know that. I just assume that he was a professor somewhere and this is a

little side thing. For some reason, it makes me really happy to know that someone can make a living being a stand up economist. I wouldn't say what a country, I would say what a labor market exactly. I thought it was a great discussion, and I'm a big fan of all these semi ridiculous economics papers, so it was fun to bring up some of those favorites. And I am also just a sort of a from a philosophy

of comedy angle. I love this idea about how they're equivalence to him in all these different areas, and how there are certain superstructures of jokes like you might be an economist if are these sort of structures of jokes that we all know that they could be applied to really niche field. And I'm sure you could probably go really deep into economics. You know, you might be a financial economist if and get even further in the weeds. So I love the way that works out. I really

want that comedy university to happen. Fingers crossed. All right, I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the Star Warm. Thanks for listening to another episode of add Bloats. We at Bloomberg are proud of our new and growing slate of original content podcasts. They include Benchmark, a jargon free dive into the stories that drive the global economy. It's hosted by Tory Stillwell,

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