2009-12-29
Explanation
This comic shows what appears to be a legislative hearing or debate. A man at a podium says: "Wait... you want to fund math education with a program that only makes money because poor people aren't taught statistics?" The caption below reads: "Mathematicians are no longer allowed at the state lottery funds debate."
The joke highlights a genuine paradox in how many U.S. states fund education. State lotteries are often marketed as funding schools and education programs, but lotteries are essentially a regressive tax that disproportionately affects people with lower incomes -- people who, statistically, are less likely to have received strong math education. Someone who truly understands probability and statistics would recognize that playing the lottery is a losing proposition. The comic points out the cruel irony: the funding mechanism for math education depends on people being bad at math. If the education actually succeeded, people would stop buying lottery tickets and the funding would dry up.
The votey panel extends this observation. In the first part, someone says "We need a combination of math acumen and pure evil." The next panel, labeled "Soon," shows them walking toward the "Economics Department." This is a tongue-in-cheek jab at economists, suggesting they are the perfect people to design a system like the lottery -- possessing both the mathematical sophistication to understand the exploitation and the moral flexibility to implement it anyway.