Partly Cloudy, 64°
Amid the highest unemployment numbers in history and the unprecedented economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic, Brown’s economics professors have solemnly turned all their squiggly graphs upside down.
Citing economic devastation rapidly spinning out of control, the economics professors collectively adjusted their craggy graphs of growth and other economic indicators upside down so that they displayed dramatic downward trends.
“You hate to see it,” Professor Jeffrey Vleptor said gravely. “Usually we economics professors are closely examining our squiggly graphs, working intently on them, or presenting them to each other in excited discussions. But as we’ve seen unparalleled disruptions tear through the economy, destroying and upending businesses and lives, we’ve had to make adjustments. Namely adjusting the graphs by making them go down instead of up.”
“Generally what we’d want and expect is for the numbers to be going up,” Vleptor continued, briefly turning one graph right-side up again to demonstrate. “But right now all types of numbers are going down, and so we had to modify our models and hypotheses to reflect the new reality, and in the process we all flipped our graphs upside down.”
At press time, Vleptor was working tirelessly to come up with new theories for why the graphs going down was caused by not letting rich people hoard more money.
