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

Episode Date: February 8, 2016

On today’s episode, we’re taking the “dismal” out of the dismal science by interviewing Yoram Bauman, who bills himself as the world’s only stand-up economist. Join us for a Laffer curve-a-minute romp through the humor of homo economicus. Along the way, we find the upside in the economic assumption that all human beings are selfish jerks and learn what classes would be included in the University of Comedy curriculum. We also take a look at some of the funniest economics papers of all time, including a satirical work that sparked a minor squabble among economists by trying to determine who's the better singer in the band AC/DC, plus the age-old classic: Japan’s Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan. In addition, Yoram conducts the first ever stand-up routine performed over cell phone to an audience of five business journalists.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask, Alexa, play the Odd Lots podcast on Amazon Music. Welcome to another episode of Odd Lots. I'm Tracy Alloy, executive editor of Bloomberg Markets. And I'm Joe Wisenthal, managing editor of Bloomberg Markets. I want to let our listeners in on a little secret. This isn't widely known outside the Bloomberg office, but Joe abhors fun in all its forms. He hates whimsy. He hates whimsy. He hates... photos of cute animals and anything related to general merriment. That's not true. No, no.

Yeah, you're right. That's pretty much true. Yeah. I like having fun. I just don't like most people's definition of it, I guess. You have your own definition of fun. Yeah, exactly. All 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 builds himself as the world's first and only stand-up comedian economist. Wait, stand-up economist? That's a thing? Yeah, it is. I'm skeptical.

All right. So we're having Yoram Bauman 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 curve. and supply and demand and all that fun stuff. I'm even more skeptical right now. There's actually a circuit of going around making jokes in 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. I can see you need convincing. No, no, I'm starting to get intrigued. Just to give you an idea. We're going to have Yoram come on. And at the beginning, he's going to do a short.

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, Yoram Bauman. It's a pleasure to be with all of you. Today, my name is Yaron Bauman. I appear before you as the world's first and only stand-up economist. It's a niche market. And that's low expectation. When I told my father that I was going to be a stand-up economist, He said, Yerami said, you can't be a stand-up economist, and I said, why not? And he said, because there's no demand.

Boom, that was the first joke I ever told on stage. I said, don't worry, Dad, I'm a supply-side economist. I just stand up and let the jokes trickle down. I believe in the laugh or curve. Those are just my jokes to tap how much economics everybody knows, and then I kind of arrange the rest of the routine accordingly. You know, I'm happy to say that it's been a good couple years for economics comedy. A few years ago, I got to be on the PBS News Hour.

Now, I don't know how much you all know about the world of stand-up comedy, but let me just tell you the comedy, it does not get any bigger than the PBS NewsHour. It was pretty amazing. They interviewed three economists on the show. They interviewed Robert Schiller, who won the Nobel Prize, the Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize, and they interviewed me, self-aware version of Sarah Palin. And what did they ask for my moment of TV fame

when the PBS News Hour? They asked me if I'd ever bombed on stage. A couple things about it is, right? First of all, I am not afraid of failure. All right? I'm an economist. Secondly, I'm a professional comedian, right? If a joke doesn't work,

you just start to keep throwing stuff out there until you find something that's six, It's basically the same thing that the Fed and the Treasury did for the last six or seven years. And finally, I had to admit, on the PBS News Hour, and in fact, I had bombed on stage. The worst show I ever did was in October of 2008. I'm sure you remember what was happening to the global economy and the stock market in October of 2008. October of 2008, I did a show in Colorado Springs for a group of bankers. And comedy 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 fair amount of time afterwards, sort of soul-searching. They tried to figure out where had I lost the connection with this audience of bankers in Colorado Springs in October of 2008. And I finally realized that I lost them on my opening line.

My opening line was, Hey, how's it going? Maybe I'll close this set with some, you might be an economist, if jokes. So you might be an economist if you think that America's next top model should be an endogenous growth model. You might be an economist if you don't read human interest stories because they don't interest you. You might be an economist 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 that you can maximize the discounted present value of the child

tax credit. Finally, you might have your children. be an economist, have you adamantly refused to sell your children because you think they'll be worth more later. Yoram, I thought that was really funny. I'm a big fan of puns. Yeah, 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. On that note, can you tell us how you actually had this idea and how you got into this gig? A random coincidence. So while I was in graduate school at the University of Washington getting my Ph.D. in economics, I wrote a parody of the

10 principles of economics, Professor Greg Mankew. And I just kind of did that to blow off steam because that's what you do when you're in graduate school. And then one thing led to another. It got published in this science humor journal called the Annals of Improbable Research. And then they run a humor session every year at this big 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 I guess two things happened after that. One was my academic career, to be perfectly honest, it did not go quite as well as I'd hoped. And then the other thing was it turned out that people were interested in paying me to do stand-up. So this is your full-time thing. This is, so what's the circuit like? How often do you perform in a year? What are the common venues and so forth?

Yeah, so this is sort of 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 carbon taxes and a carbon tax ballot measure here in Washington State and climate change issues and tax reform and stuff like that. But it's all financed by the miracle of economic comedy. Mostly I do colleges and corporate events,

and then the trucking executives on the banks of the Arkansas. You know, the Florida Bankers Association. How many gigs do you do a year? Probably maybe 50 or 60. 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 anytime 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 focused on money. and then there's an opportunity to do comedy, and the fact that everybody has such low expectations makes it all the easier. Like I've often found that having low expectations is one of the great assets in life. It'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 other people should be good people at heart, and then they're often disappointed when people let them down. If you study economics, then, you go into the world thinking that everybody's 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'd 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 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, what happens is humans surprise you to the upside. So that is kind of a nice thing about the economic worldview. I'd never really thought of it that way before. Yeah, I mean, well, the way that I describe it, I have a couple of cartoon economics books, Trader Grady Klein.

And the way we say it is that economists assume that people are optimizing individuals. And so that doesn't necessarily mean that they're optimizing just for themselves, right? 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 sort of thinking through how the analysis works makes a lot more sense when you kind of simplify things and say, okay, people are kind of basically self-interested. Do you have counterparts in other academic fields? Like, is there a physics comedian, a chemistry comedian? And have you found those 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 a fellow who's what I'm saying, is a science comedian, Brian Mallow, who's a former astronomer. He talks about how he started doing comedy instead of astronomy because they put him on the day shift. There's a fellow who actually got a PhD in neurobiology,

who's named is Tim Lee. very funny. His website, I think, is comedy of Tim Lee.com. There's a guy, Bill Santiago, who wrote a book called Pardon My Spanglish. And he does, he actually does stand-up comedy in both English and Spanish. I think he's from New York, but is 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 just based on comedy. So 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, you know, I'm making fun of a serious subject. And for the most part, people appreciate that, you know, it's public education. And I've taught high school as well as college. And when you teach high school, one of the things you learn is that motivation is, incredibly important 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 lacking the impetus to actually read the book. And, um, you know, that's why I worked on these cartoon books. And that's why, um, that's why I do some of the comedy is to, is to motivate people to pick up the book. And maybe economics is kind

interesting. Who are some of the, uh, funniest economists out there? Doesn't Austin Gouldsby do stand up? Are there, uh, Austin Goulds, who else is out there that's funny? Back at the University of Chicago does stand up. They're actually one of the, so the humor session that I put on at the American Economic Association meetings, it's usually me, and then there's like four or five others, various things. The most recent one, there's a fellow who presented a paper on, you know, 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, salmon in the Sacramento, San Joaquin? 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. And the value that the salmon put on having humans in the river system. Presumably, salmon's value being in the river greatly, right?

Well, it turns out that they value their own lives quite highly yet. But their value for smoltz for juvenile salmon is actually relatively low and roughly comparable, I learned, to their valuation for juvenile. human. It was determined by showing salmon a picture of the Brady Bunch. So it was a funny papers. On that topic, Yoram, one of the reasons we stumbled upon you was because we read this listicle, I guess, that you did, called the top 11 funniest papers in the history of economics. And some of them I had heard before, but some of them I haven't. And I got to read out some of the names of these papers. The Theory of Interstellar Trade by Paul Kirkman. The effect of 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 Ingridy papers, and then every quarter for every issue they try to publish what they call a miscellany piece, which is sort of a funny piece. So many of those papers, including the Paul Krugman paper, he's a Nobel Prize winner, the Jim Heckman paper also in the Nobel Prize winner were published in economic inquiry. Japan 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.

I think people do it kind of on a lark, either something. gnaws at them, which a lot of times they just come across haphazardly something, something that triggers this idea. So Japan's Phillips curve looks like Japan, right? The background is the Phillips curve with this idea from the 50s and 60s that there's a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. You can have high inflation and low unemployment or the opposite, but the idea was that you're always on that Phillips curve line.

And so what this economist was doing, he was actually looking at Phillips curve data for Japan and graphed to Phillips Curve Data for Japan between, I think it was like 1990 and 2005, and when he looked at the graph, it just happened to look like a map of Japan. So he wrote this paper. There's actually a link on his website to the paper, and the link says that the title of this paper is also the abstract and, frankly, most of the text, which is pretty great. So that was what led him to write that paper. There was another paper called The Efficiency of ACDC.

I looked at the rock group ACDC. They have a fan you are of ACDC, but they had two about it and Brian Johnson, and apparently there's been a debate among kind of metalheads ever since about which of them was the better front man for ACDC. He was doing serious research. His research was about how background music affects people's decision-making. He had his graduate students or whatever playing the background were some of these ACDC songs, and they were trying to figure out whether the background music affected, like when people were negotiating, how does it affect that?

outcomes of negotiations. And it turned out that the graduate student kind of accidentally played two different ACDC songs during some of these experiments, and that ruined the data for that. But it gave him this idea where you can use the results because the two ACDC songs, one was a Brian Johnson sign, one was a Bon Scott song. You can use those results to figure out that. Brian Johnson, in fact, if you're negotiating, you'll want to listen to the Brian Johnson and ACDC songs and not the Bond Scotland. Yeah, can I just read from the abstract of that ACDC paper? It says,

we use tools from experimental economics to address the age-old debate regarding who was a better singer in the band ACDC. These results may have important implications for settling drunken music debates and environmental design issues and organizations. I love that. Yeah, there was a follow-up humor piece, which was that after this, after he was in the newspapers

like in Australia, right, which is where ACDC comes from. So it actually got a ton of press. And then Steve Levitt picked it up. Levitt is the University of Chicago, and 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 ACDC. You know, he wrote, like, I hope for this guy's sake that he has tenure, and Rob Oxby to be excited to post a comment on his blog, on Steve Levitt's blog. saying, first of all, I already have 10 years. Thank you very much.

And second of all the papers. So what are you up to now? You mentioned the carbon tax thing, but outside of your stand-up, what occupies your time? Another cartoon book. So my co-author and I have two cartoon books about, I have a cartoon introduction to climate change, and we are working on a cartoon introduction to calculus. 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 rap. 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 feel like you need to put footnotes on everything and say 200 pages, what you can say in 20 pages. I'm working on a form campaign here in Washington State. It's actually a ballot measure initiative 732, which just qualified for the ballot. 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 by a point and reduce some other taxes for businesses and for low-income households. And that was actually the idea that

taught me into economics in the first place, so it was kind of this idea of environmental tax reform that we can use the tools of economics and the power of capital now in addition to my wife and my 18-month-old baby. Well, our producers are signaling that we need to cut the funds short. So one last thing before you go. Can you tell us one final economics joke, like a one-liner that we can use in our daily lives? I can tell you the oldest economics joke in the world, if you want. Yeah.

The oldest economics joke in the world is about a physicist, a chemist, an economist, 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 physicist says, well, we'll just crack it against the rock here and does some calculations. and if we use as velocity, then the can of beans will open. And the chemist says, no, no, no, that's too complicated. We'll put the canadines in the salt water, and it will corrode. And after this much time, you know, we can eat the can of beans. And the economist says, ah, 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 the only joke, the only economic joke in the world. That's the assume a can opener 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 that there's more

economic comedy out there than the than the assumed canon. All right. Yoram, thank you so much for joining us 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 or a stand-up economist, like what a country. Like, that's just so awesome. I'm just so glad to know that I just assumed that he was a professor somewhere and that this was 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. What a labor market. Exactly. I thought it was 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 sort of a, from the philosophy of comedy angle, I love this idea about how they're equivalent to him in all these different areas. Right.

And how there are certain superstructures of jokes. Like, you might be an economist if or these sort of structures of jokes that we all know that they can be applied to really niche fields. And I'm sure you could probably go really deep into economics. You might be a financial economist if and get even further in the weed. So I love the way that works out. I really want that comedy university to happen. That would be so great. Fingers crossed.

All right. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at The Stallworm. Thanks for listening to another episode of Oddlots. 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 Tori Stillwill, Aki Ito, and Dan Moss. Oddlots, hosted by Joe Wisenthall and Tracy Allaway, takes you on a not-so-random walk through hot topics and markets,

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