Freakonomics Contest Winners: What Economists Really Have in Common With Garbage

Blog readers did not get nearly as worked up about economists and garbage as they did about prostitutes and rice, at least as measured by hate mail. I received not a single piece of hate mail from an economist (although, in fairness, none of the hate mail I got on the prostitutes post was actually from a prostitute either).
We did get some clever responses to the post. One theme revolved around economists’ inability to score dates. Perhaps blog reader E Con put it best:

Neither gets picked up at a party.

For points on the cleverness scale, I especially liked Robert Mahfoud‘s entry:

They both appear in piles on TV when the garbage men are on strike.

But Robert loses points for his lack of political correctness (it is garbage people, Robert, not garbage men), and also for the fact that I don’t think they actually put economists on TV when the sanitary engineers are on strike.
Spencer wins points for originality, by linking economists to the 1990’s rock band Garbage, but that still wasn’t enough to win it.
The winner of the Freakonomics schwag, by virtue of most excellent sucking up, is Ryan T., who opines that:

Ignoring either will inevitably lead to a very messy situation.