And now they owe the government $20 each in tax.
Bitcoin fixes this.
(sarcasm)
The real punchline that everyone seems to be missing is that economists are willing to eat shit for money.
Which is sure metaphorically true with the ones the media puts out there.
Isn’t this really just suggesting that the “services” part of goods and services doesn’t have real value?
In this case, each person paid for the entertainment of watching their friends eat shit. They only did the exact same thing for the exact same amount of money to make it seem like one negated the other.
In this case, each person paid for the entertainment of watching their friends eat shit.
Not to overanalyze the joke even more, but:
Eating feces is not $100 worth of entertainment by any rational standard.
No rational person would spend $100 to watch his friend eat feces.
No rational person would accept $100 to eat feces.
No rational society allows someone to either eat feces or pay others to do so, for public health reasons if nothing else.
I mean, if you went to an unhoused person and offered him $100 to eat feces, you’d get arrested. And you’d deserve it. Because even the United States isn’t quite that bad yet.
(And this is not a hypothetical. People do those kinds of things. There are unhoused people I know from Food Not Bombs who refuse food from strangers because too many of them have gotten adulterated food. And most of them have stories about people offering them money to do degrading things.)
So this $200 in GDP represents an activity that’s injurious to public health, morally bankrupt, and leaves everyone participating in it worse off.
But from the Economics 101 worldview, the economists created $200 worth of entertainment, because both of them were willing to pay $100 to see each other eat shit and that means, by definition, eating shit was worth $100 in entertainment.
Which makes the punchline an even more vicious satire of capitalism and its bullshit metrics than it originally appeared.
Have you ever eard of “fecal microbiota transplant” ? Because that’s basically eating shit.
No rational person would accept $100 to eat feces.
Well, actually, big pharma will make you pay for it, which is even better :)
Interestingly, by “eating ass”, you are actually doing ‘microbiota transplant’.
Just that nobody calls it that, except big pharma, who does it to reason that they ask a lot of money for it.
The joke doesn’t work because both transactions were welfare enhancing. In the end, both of them agree that eating shit is worth it to see the other do it. At least $200 of value was created.
This falsely assumes that economic actors necessarily have sound judgment about value. Imagine someone who has had a bad day at work going and spending $10 for the privilege of being rude to a fast food clerk. If given the option would they directly trade the humiliations they themselves endured to earn that money to be able to inflict the same? Probably not, but their workday is already over, they don’t see a way to translate the cash they have onhand into an overall better life, and this is what they feel like doing in the moment.
This falsely assumes that economic actors necessarily have sound judgment about value
Does this matter in the context of this post? I.e. are GDPs “the sum of shit people pay for” or do they get adjusted for “sound judgment of value”?
