It's probably just that they wrote this for fun because I can't imagine anyone would fund it. Economists use a surprising amount of dry humor like that, I've no

It's probably just that they wrote this for fun because I can't imagine anyone would fund it. Economists use a surprising amount of dry humor like that, I've noticed. An old one: Remember the unfortunate econometrician, who, in one of the major functions of his system, had to use a proxy for risk and a dummy* for sex. *(a discrete dependent variable)