Everything you heard about the economics discipline is true. We hate the environment, we hate anthropologists and physicists, we all wish we had taken proper maths courses, and we all sleep with a hardback copy of Atlas Shrugged under our pillows. Recently, I was invited into an inner sanctum of hooded scholars where, upon sacrificing a small human child and chanting from the eldritch pages of the Necroeconomicon, I was told some startling revelations about the modern economy, which I will now share with you all today:

1. Australia is in total fiscal fucking meltdown

So I read this article in The Australian that told me poor people still exist. But then I talked to this guy who said he knew some people on welfare who were, like, total dickheads. When I put the two together and did some calculations on the back of my Public Finance textbook, I found out that Australia is totally screwed, financially speaking. Did you know that the Australian government apparently spends more money than it collects in taxes? If we keep up our current levels of government spending, according to my calculations, Canberra will look like Mogadishu in no time.

2. Game theory is dumb

Best response functions, Nash equilibria, backwards induction, prisoner’s dilemmas… Game theory is really, really hard and there is no way in hell that it can be correct. For example, the guy who pretty much invented game theory was a man named John Nash. You know what he didn’t invent? His own sanity. Nash was batshit crazy and probably snuck his way into Princeton on a stolen bus pass. The man was so unhinged at one point he thought he was the Emperor of Antarctica, for Christ’s sake.

3. The CBE is vital to national security

If you look closely at the publicly available financial records of the ANU College of Business and Economics, you’ll quickly realise it is just a branch of ASIO, created exclusively for the purpose of spying on international students. That bloody Microsoft showcase area with all those computers, Xboxes, and movie posters on the ground floor of the H.W. Arndt building is actually what we in the espionage community call a ‘honey trap’. Once you trick a Singaporean student into logging into one of those computer terminals, you can snoop in on their emails, or at least find out how good they are at Dota.

4. Utility is a cardinal measure of happiness

Forget all that crap you might have heard about preference relations and choice functions. When economists talk about utility, they are referring to an actual scientific measurement established by International Economical Union (IEU) in 1968. The ‘Util’, as it is technically called, is exactly 36.5 CC’s of dopamine. This is roughly equivalent to the amount of pleasure you get from consuming a 500ml can of Diet Pepsi or about five minutes of mediocre sex.

5. Economics is at crisis point

People study economics for one purpose and one purpose only: To win arguments and make everyone else look stupid. That and also to bankrupt small, gullible South American countries. So far we are failing to achieve both of these things. These are dark and desperate times for the economic sciences. We need a scapegoat. Something like the welfare state or wheat subsidies or something. I would personally just blame the commerce and finance students. Regardless, we have to keep marching onwards and hope that the great hegemonic discourse of our time has a bright and adamant future.