Thread by @jnordvig

Last week was a serious one. Today, I will try to go in the other direction.

This is partly because a FinTwit guy (see proof below) just said I have ‘humor’ & because I hope to make the next @donnelly_brent top 10 list for funny twitter people.

https://twitter.com/MichaelAArouet/status/1441499200911515652

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I may be joking about all this, maybe not (your call)

Economists being funny is all about managing expectations, and I am certainly not joking about that.

I will tell you one brief anecdote, and you will see what I mean.

Here we go...

1/ Some years ago, I went to one of those formal lunches at the Harvard Club (the one in the middle of Manhattan). Lots of mahogany, butler-like staff, and the invited group was sitting around a rectangular table in one of the private dining rooms upstairs.

2/ It was a lunch presentation by the governor of the Bank of Canada (I will not disclose who, but you can guess) for a group of investors, strategists and consultants. Very serious people overall, & the governor sitting dutifully in the middle of the room, delivering his remarks

3/ It was about the usual nerdy stuff: output gaps, Phillips curves, MCIs (and trying to guess when they would finally move the rate a bit). Stuff that can generally make even a person on double ecstasy dose fall asleep.

4/ And then something strange happened.
The Governor was asked to be more specific about the timing of a possible change in monetary policy communication: “was a change likely over the summer?” was the question.

5/ And the governor responded:
“I am Canadian. If I told you it will be over the 'summer', it would the same as simply telling you the specific month”.

6/ I am not sure it was really a joke. If you think of a baby as a joke, it would amount to the first date of the couple that would eventually conceive the child; not quite there yet…

7/ In any case, since expectations where so incredibly low, the small crowd of ‘tied’ men and a few professionally dressed women started to laugh uncontrollably, as if Robin Williams has been reborn and come in to deliver his best stand-up performance ever at the Harvard club.

8/ One of the butler folks even jumped into the room to check what was going on. He was not used to such exuberant moods at the stoic Harvard club.

And so it is with economist jokes. They can be very funny, simply because expectations are so very low. That is the lesson of the story.

I will leave it at that.

I will think about ways to make @donnelly_brent 's twitter humor list next year (the first step will be the get expectations really low initially; so I am planning to do a very serious tweet again tomorrow).

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